Update: I wrote up a big
Kickstarter update last week, and totally forget to cross-post something here. You can read the KS udpate if you're interested, but to cut a long story short, all the physical rewards from the KS have now been sent out.
This week I've been working on a few disparate things:
- I've applied for an arts grant from Film Victoria. If successful, the funding will go towards Moonman development and allow me to expand the team -- hopefully bringing back the completion date as a result.
- I've been working on the design of the backgrounds a little (see below).
- I've been organising the resources/block lists for the other 3 areas. This involves putting everything into a big excel spreadsheet and arranging the elements in the resource flowcharts I've been using. (see belower)
I've also been drafting and thinking about a few different concepts, like overworld maps and distribution of difficulty. I've probably created too many mockups for the overworld map, but I went ahead and did more. The first one is not really a serious contender, but it turned out as an interesting piece of pixel art nonetheless..
The second one is more in line with the feel of moonman. This was mocked up super quick, but has a more appropriate feel to it.
World Generation and Difficulty: A Potential ModelIn terms of difficulty distribution, I'm now at a point where I have to make certain decisions about the structure of the full game. I've always thought that the forest is an early area, and is relatively easy: the enemies are weak or sleeping, the terrain is fairly crumbly and easy to get through, there are no poison death pits of lava, and so on. In the same line of reasoning, the volcanic area was always going to be hard. However, the structure of the game was never intended to be linear and so there isn't necessarily a simple ordering of areas, like Forest -> Mountain -> Volcanio.
With this in mind, I've come up with a few basic ideas:
- regions will have a natural difficulty
- regions will have a difficulty range
- moonman starts in an easy region
- neighbouring regions shouldn't jump in difficulty by too much
The world generator would then use these ranges and constraints to build a complete world. As an example, imagine four regions with difficulty levels in the following ranges.
Difficult
Easy <----------------------------------------> Hard
1 2 3 4 5
[--Town---]
[--------Forest-------]
[--------------Mountain-------------]
[---Volcano--]
Creating a world, the generator might make the following areas:
Town 1
Forest 2
Forest 3
Mountain 2
Mountain 5
Volcano 4
Then .. when it comes to connecting them together and laying them out on a map, it will know that Moonman shouldn't start in the Volcano level, and would also cluster the lower difficult areas together .. allowing the player a chance to level up with enough resources and items. It may generate the following map:
T1 - F2 - M2 - M5
| |
F3 - V4
It would then pick the friendliest region and spawn Moonman there, in this case the Town or Forest 2. From the forest, you can search for and find the path to Mountain 2. You may then find a path to Mountain 5, but upon arriving there you'll realise that you don't have strong enough equipment to get through.
Areas of different levels would be distinguished by different names, creatures, and even the toughness of the blocks. E.g., "The Friendliest Forest" may be a Level 1 forest with no enemies and basic resources. "The Doomed Forest" may be a Level 3 forest, with lots of angry creatures on the surface, thick rock that requires a strong hammer to get through, and the occasional poisonous scary pit of lava.
This is just a concept at the moment, but it seems like it could work well, offering a strategy/planning element alongside an easily adjustable difficulty setting: more difficult games could just use more higher-level regions and less friendly regions. What do you think?
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