TIGSource Forums

Cooperative Game Developed by TIGers! (That means You!)
Version NaN.0.0 - Name desperately subject to change edition

Do you have a folder full of unused pixel art, or a notebook full of game ideas or compelling story lines?

Why not get together with other like-minded folks and actually turn them into something playable?

That's right,
You can help us make this game.

Just jump right in and join the discussion.  Even just suggestions and feeback are appreciated.

________

Forum too slow or permanent for you?  Try #tigCOOP on esper.net (http://"http://esper.net/") (IRC)
irc://irc.esper.net/tigCOOP

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Unless otherwise objected to, here are the current specifics we've agreed to:

• The game play will be similar to a roguelike, but we still need to decide on all the particular mechanics we'll employ.
  
• The graphics will be 2D and "tile based".
  
• Preferable tile size for the game's base tile sets is 16x16.  Mods with alternate tile sizes are possible.
  
• There will be a game editor tool available to players of the game.
  
• The game will be easy to mod and support adding new tilesets and sharing the mods with others.
  
• Procedural generation will be employed in some aspects, but can be overridden with manually designed content.
  
• There will be more than one tileset theme / employed in the generated free-roaming over-world.
  
• There are to be different areas of the game with different time periods / tilesets:
  
  • Medieval / Ancient Magics
    Your typical warriors, wizards, goblins and what-not.
    
  • Not to distant future
    (relative to today - Imagine yourself in 20 years?)
    
  • Post Singularity
    Post (human) Apocalypse the Cyborgs and Machine races live on.
    
  • Alternate Demention
    The alternate planes of existence rolled into one: Spirit Plane, Land of the Dead, Ethereal Realm, World of the Gods, Parallel Eldritch Dimension, etc.  Can only be seen in your After Life.  see this post for details. (http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=31766.msg858794#msg858794)
    

The aim is to have a game world that lends itself to a variety of themes to maximize potential for collaboration.

Also Note: We still REALLY need a game name.

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This is a continuation of the thread that theweirdn8 started here. (http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=31530.0)  If you're reading this, theweirdn8, I don't mean to steal your thunder, just steel it -- That is, get it off to a right and proper start (since that other forum is for games that have playable content).

Name: Time warp 7: The TIGS experience.  :handthumbsupR:

"Time Warp ..."
Great, now I've got visions of Rocky Horror Picture Show stuck in my head... :P

Have we decided on the mixed time universe thing, or no?  I suppose we could change the name again later, but let's get a few more candidates out there to pick from first.

Roguelike name Ideas:

• Time Warp 7: The TIGS Experience
  
• Dark and Disorderly
  (Random dungeon reference, also the general project outlook...)
  
• Epic Failure Quest: You have no chance to survive, make your time.
  (After all, roguelikes typically have instant death.)
  
• Dungeon Dearest: For those who love making and playing in dungeons
  (no not those kind).
  
• Patchverse
  (If it's all made by patching manual made stuff atop a generated world...)
  
• The Entropy Experiment
  (This could be a reference to the major opposition to time travel (entropy can't easily be reversed to allow time travel, also Super Symmetry is all but disproved: Anti-Matter acts differently (not an exact mirror of normal matter), and evidence shows matter behaves differently if going backwards in time), and reference to map makers changing the overall entropic measure -- see: Information Theory -- That said, time travel is still a fun story element / game mechanic even if science doesn't support it.)
  
• Life's Work: It's Play Too.
  (OK, I'm done making world-editing puns)
  

This was a partial thought, I'll finish here: We should make sure the code is open source and the assets are licensed under a license that's at least CC, with derivatives allowed.  To make editing the game easiest, we need some form of in-game editor, so if the game is HTML+JS, the editor is HTML5+JS too; A Java or C, etc, engine would need an editor that's just as cross platform as the game -- I used to make Doom2 .WADs, but there's no good editor on Linux, even though the DoomBuilder is open source, it uses MS proprietary APIs and no one's ported it to work on Mac or Linux yet...  We should try to avoid that type of issue, putting the editor in the game is one way to ensure if you can play the game, you can edit it.

I second HTML5/JS. Though, tbh, my practical knowledge of this technology is zilch, what is embarrassing obviously. A good crash course is required, but I will learn it, probably in a week or so (unless its a horrible mess) :biglaff:

Alright. So, the storyline is that a wizard's apprentice has accidentally morphed all the alternate universes together. He now has to go to each of the 8 dimensions to get a dimension anchor, which he will remove to let the universe go free.

Sound good?

Sounds a little sloppy. I mean, your use of scientific terms is too careless, but the general idea sounds ok.

I would suggest to try to find interesting gameplay mechanics, for example:
1) how you can travel between the worlds? when, why, what are the difficulties?
2) how to acquire items from the parallel worlds?
3) how you learn new skills and use your inter-dimensional travel abilities?

Guys, have you read The Chronicles of Amber (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicles_of_Amber) by Roger Zelazny? That universe featured travelling between "shadow worlds":

Heh. Dimensional anchor. Scientific.  :durr:

Some ideas regarding inter-dimensional travelling:

• When travelling between the worlds, player looses all his experince (or part of it) or is allowed to take only one item (or no items as in Terminator :giggle:). So you feel extremely hampered at the beginning.
• There must be both positive and negative effects of such travel, as if unknown higher being are free to do something to you at the time of this travel.
• You can find powerful artifacts that let you oppose negative effects, but it pisses off the higher beings (~gods) :biglaff:

I have not played Planescape Torment, but they had some concept of interconnected worlds/planes. We can get ideas from there too.

I dunno... think you guys may be making this a little overcomplicated.

A simpler approach would be just take bog standard simple roguelike core rules (you can tune them, add classes, etc, later), old-worldy fantasy setting. The basis of the game is you start in a settlement with shops and what not and there's a list of randomly generated missions open. Each mission leads to a pre-designed 'dungeon' where the reward is some rare loot.

Once you've got a simple game structure like that you can then build all kinds from it and it's super easy for a bunch of people with different ideas to add their own stuff.

That's what I was thinking. There is a wizard's tower in the center of the game, and there you can heal, buy items, save... And from that tower, you can go to one of 8 different dimensions. Then it's just a roguelike in a special setting, with different monsters to fight and specialized loot. Maybe if you die, you can restart at the tower?

The whole idea of mixing different times/worlds is not overused in roguelikes, and let different people contribute relatively freely. It is not much more difficult than making a normal roguelike, but it just looks a little weird.

The game mechanics I suggested are not very costly too. My concern is just to make this "patchverse" more believable. If we can come up with a good simple set of rules for this multiverse and make a good story around it, it will be quite fun to play just because of that.

Collegial decisions are hard to make though.. :monoclepop:

Organizing cooperative project such as this is extremely hard, but I hope that this will succeed (somehow)

It's decided then.  So shall it be written, so shall it be done.  JS is easy if you know any other language at all.  Protip: The Mozilla Developer site (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/JavaScript) is your friend -- they invented JavaScript back in the Netscape Navigator days, after all.

FYI: JQuery is slow, stay away from that, It's great for websites and webapps, but we won't be using it for games.  Anything we'd need JQuery for I'll either already have it done, or can quickly code up a faster piece of code than they provide.

I'm now underway adapting my HTML/JS level editor to be more generalized for this project, so lots of tricky browser compatibility stuff is already out of the way (handling stuff like Ajax loading between IE vs FF/Chrome/Safari, handling online vs offline data loading -- Eg: XMLHttpRequest doesn't work with file:/// URLs when running without a server, so no XML data and no JSON data backend -- See, this is where it's nice that I've already solved that problem with my own data language (JSE) that's designed to work around this specific problem.   That means all the messy bits of JavaScript in the engine will be handled, and additional coders can focus on the game logic, actor events, spells, all that good fun stuff.

Speaking of non-fun stuff: I'm going to go ahead and put forth that tiles and game actors (enemies / avatars) can optionally have animations (meaning they can be animated but don't have to be).  It'll take more work to create a sprite sheet tool, but it'll be well worth it.  I'm going to make the engine general purpose enough that I can use it in a couple of other projects -- kill more birds with less stones.

________

I'll restate what I think to be the best way to implement a varied world.

Essentially, the over-map will be one big huge seamless world.  Procedural generation will create the majority of the major land forms, random enemies, rivers, etc.  Regions of different "factions" or tilesets will be dispersed in the world by the generator: from small pockets to large dominated areas, to mixtures between them.  It's all the same world, just treat everything like one big tileset -- Think of the way terrain generators create mountains, plains, water,  now, imagine the world divided up like that into different factions -- Instead of water you have the magic users, instead of mountains you have Aliens, or whatever.   We'll use two separate passes of the noise patterns, one for land form creation -- 'This is land, this is water, this is mountain, this is lava'  Then we run the pass again and say this spot is futuristic, this spot is ancient magic, etc, and so you get the different factions smoothly layed out across one big generated world.

So if there's two differing tilesets, say: medieval times and futuristic, there will be large blobs dominated by either faction dotted across the whole world -- The forest area might be populated with goblins or homeless refugees.  The plains might be populated by Giants and barbarians, or by mad-max motorcycle gangs, depending on the faction stuff.  Maybe add tire marks to tiles in the desert where it's modern day, ect.  Maybe if there was a 3rd faction, Cyborgs & Robots for instance,  then the plains would have tons of solar panels and wires would run through all the Machine race's tiles.  I think if we end up having  medieval magics as a main theme / faction / world, then I'm voting for a Cyborg & Machine race world as another faction.

If there's more settings than two that's cool with me, but however many there are needs to be decided (and roughly tested) before start patching in our own manual chunks of the world.  I think just one tileset -- medieval magic -- would get boring, so I'm voting for at least two main factions, maybe more if you folks can come up with a good story for how they're all mixed in and interrelated.  Just so long as it wasn't The Nexus crap from StarTrek Generations.

Now, that doesn't mean there can't be more different factions or tile-set / dimentions tacked on later, they just won't be a major faction that the endless world generator could handle.   Folks can still create new tilesets afterwards, but all the world-patch additions in that new tileset will have to be done manually, the generator won't be able to merge a whole new faction into the world and keep the old stuff matching correctly, them's the breaks of Perlin Noise Functions.

I'll leave it up to other folks to decide if there should be restrictions between walking between different worlds -- Eg: 100% dominated regions of an opposing faction may require alliance with that faction's leaders (see, each faction would have their own protagonists and antagonists/monsters).  Through completing a quest, or certain EXP for another one, or having a special amulet, etc.  That way the tax accountants aren't just all chilling with the Necromancers -- Those bastards, you know they would.  Imagine it!  Raise an undead minion then charge them for a Milena of back taxes on their grave property rights!  Just thinking of stuff like that would add humor / story, etc.  "What would happen If _____ met ______", It writes itself...

I kind of like the Shadow ream idea -- a different plane of existence.  Maybe we could have one faction / tileset deployed in the world that you can only see some of the time (restrictions, etc?) -- The way that would work is that near the bottom end of the "faction" gradient we'll just display one tile set if you're able to see it.  Say, a land of the dead type thing.  any patches made in that area would belong to either tileset or the other, and you wouldn't see the patch unless you were able to see that tileset.  That way you could walk over land to some place then if you go into the shadows you might have just walked right through a Giant City of the Dead.   It doesn't have to be the Dead, it could be Aliens with cloaking powers, or however you want to write it into the story.  If it was a faction in the "center" of the faction gradients, then it could connect into every other faction...

Speaking of possible multiverse concepts :screamy:

(http://i.imgur.com/X8RiIIK.png)

this is too much, probably, but quite amusing.

VortexCortex: I will read that more carefully, but I think, I like very much what you say. Adding new worlds later as auxiliary parts of the universe is a good solution: The main world stays relatively stable, while additional worlds can be more experimental and flexible. Also, your advice on JavaScript programming is very much appreciated!

merveilles.xxiivv.com/login.php

Alright. So, should we decide now the amount of different settings that we will use, or will we allow people to build their own tilesets?

How will the mods work

You'll use an in-engine editor -- It'll switch you to edit mode, where you can scroll around freely and create and test stuff.  You'll be able to place tiles / items / monsters / etc.  This will be the same tool that we use to create the game with, so mods can be every bit as full featured as the game itself.  Basically, once the engine is complete to a certain degree, the game engine will then be built and extended from within itself -- Self Hosting (like a C compiler that Compiles itself).

When we're "done" we don't have to turn off the game editor system and say the game is finished.  Instead we can leave it on for players to mod, so that if we can just get the editing system to feature completion, the project is essentially fail proof:  Even if none of the original contributors continue the project, folks could jump in, mod a few things from time to time -- Sort of like the TIG World (http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=25420.0) threads I mentioned before.  These are what the core design is modeled after.

I'll post more about the particulars in the near future.

Edit: Also, we need a name!

Throwing another one out there: Roguish

Doesn't roll of the tongue

Dimensia

Jenneisborug

The adventure of Charlie, the slightly failed wizard

An HTML5 Game

Voyage

An HTML5 Voyage

We need to change HTML5 into something cool....

Hotmeals.

A Hotmeals Voyage.

Who-yage, a quest to find your goal in life

Your goal is to find your goal, recursive twist

It's a bit premature to determine what the limits should be of all the different settings, and tile resolutions, etc, but we should try to come to come up with the base number of tilesets that the overworld generation system will have built in.

My aim is for people to be able to built their own tile sets and make manual patches of the world that use them.  It's just the base open world exploration system that needs to have a number of tilesets decided upon.  So you can manually re-configure a patch of the world, but also add new tilesets and whatnot -- However, all that takes place atop a base system that gets procedurally generated.  So, it's the main factions of the base world gen system we need to decide on.  Other minor factions that don't get randomly generated can be patched onto wherever you want, their tilesets just won't be used when the world generator creates a new region of the world.

I feel like I'm not making much sense, it's probably something that's easy to understand if you see it, but hard to explain.

___________

Post suggestions of tileset world themes and stories of how they got all mixed up, so we can decide on what to use.  I'll start.

• Medieval Times - Magic / warriors, goblins etc.
  The ancients were just minding their own business before all these crazy folks randomly appeared.
  They considered it some form of "magic accident" and just went about their business as usual.
  
  Bog standard mythic tales abound, but are now littered with ironic situational humor due to the state of, well, everything.  "Of course we knew ghosts, demons and god-like beings existed!  Everyone already knew that.  We even wrote tomes of tales about them; It's not our fault if you were too dumb to believe us.  Sheesh, kids these days."
  
  
• Present Day, or not to distant future Earth - Humans and animals from all walks of today
  Displaced time traveling humans arrived here from the future by way of a temporal accident.
  They only meant to send a message back in time to warn the humans of the mid 1900's of the impending planet killing asteroid impact, with plenty of time to build a rocket and stop the threat (instead of only visiting the moon once in 40 years, ugh).  The time travel machine did send the transmission back in time, but it over-shot by a few thousand years!  In doing so it also tore hole in reality, transporting huge swaths of the world into the distant past.
  
  Some folks now arriving are very distressed, others are free from social constraints and perusing their wildest dreams: From grand schemes of power, to spreading knowledge to unreceptive primitives, or just killing folks for fun.
  
  Obvious source of situational humor RE: present day perspectives of dealings with the fantastical settings.  See: Tax collectors teaming up with necromancers to raise the dead and charge them unpaid back taxes on their burial plots.  Or, D&D / LARP fans adjusting quite well to the world, having had much practice for such an event.  Maybe the queen of the dark elves turns out to be a woman cosplaying 24/7 -- "Shh! Don't tell anyone! I finally fit in somewhere!"
  
  
• Futuristic Cyborgs:  Humanoid Machines, Sentient Robotic spiders, little flying drones, etc.
  Long after the human race was wiped out by what was thought to be a devastating asteroid impact the Machine races evolved from the AI technology that was left behind.
  
  Some of the Machines sought out the fabled Holy "Makers" of old; humanity now being only a legend to them.  In a quest to know all information the machines re-discover time travel then set out to end speculation over the legends, "a simple matter with a simple solution, given you've got a time machine". They unwittingly fall into the same temporal trap that snared their predecessors, fittingly by investigation of the very folly that caused their predecessors demise.
  
  The Machinations finally get to meet their makers, but many are incensed by the revelation that those they once thought "holy" are mere mental midgets messing with matters far beyond their power to comprehend.  Others continue to worship these "gods of old" -- sort of like how Egyptians worshiped cats as "gods".
  
  Soon the machines discover the true story of the fall of man: The world was actually just destroyed by network news over-hype, and an easily panicking public which demanded a time machine be used against the warnings of the scientists of the day.  Some machine folk are quite angered that the reactionary illogical actions of the humans may have indirectly caused the end of the machine's world too.
  
  The original human scientist and cyborg cyentist that discovered time travel must put asside their differences and work in concert to harness the powers of Ancient Magic and the Negaverse to get everyone back home; Much to the chagrin of the sleeping watchers of the world...
  
  
• 
  'Negaverse' -- alternate dimension: Lovecraftian terrors and strange spaces, maybe even traditional aliens?
  Often confused with the land of the Dead, the original horrific inhabitants of the Universe long ago retreated here once they discovered this parallel Universe just 1/42nd of an inch away along the 5th dimension.
  
  It turns out every race with sufficiently advanced magic or technology makes their way to what has become the grand-central station of the Aether -- The birthplace of Demons, The Spirit Dimension, The place 'Things that Should Not Be' call home.
  
  Here the raw screaming energies of the Cosomos rip and tear at the very fabric of space and time.  It's a very dangerous place, but travelers venture forth for the benefit of traveling great distances in short times thanks to the odd non-euclidean geometry.  The old ones escaped here long ago, before the time of man, but some were left as watchdogs at the gates of infinity.  Those sleeping watchers dreaming their dark dreams can only be awakened if the inhabitants of Earth become powerful enough to be a threat to the other races of the stars.
  
  The arrival of the cyborgs together with the human scientists in a time of powerful wizards has roused the great old ones -- Like an errant alarm clock going off at the stroke of their mid-night millennia, and will be dealt with in the same manner: Smashed quickly with tremendous force.
  
  (Perhaps employ some elements of Colossal Cave Adventure (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure#Maze_of_twisty_little_passages) in it, with rooms that are linked in strange looping non-orthogonal ways).
  

Edit:
Feel free to mix and match these with your own if desired.  Eg, replace Lovecraft with heaven and Hell, or whatever.   Feel free to expand and change the ideas.  The goal is to come up with a setting that writers can have FUN writing in, and don't feel restricted.

Eg: My little brother said "Instead of Cyborgs you should have giant mecha, anime stuff, like Macross"


____

A Time for Adventure

Dimension 42

Worlds Collide

Merlin's Uninvited Guests

C'thulhu's Alarm Clock

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Keep tossing out name ideas.  I'm just going to name the engine something separately for now, since I plan to use it for a few other projects too anyway...

Updated the main post.

Unless otherwise objected to, this is the direction we're headed:

• The game will be 2D and tile based, coded in JavaScript and HTML5.
  
• The game play will be similar to a roguelike, but we still need to decide on all the particular mechanics we'll employ.
  
• There will be a game editor tool available to players of the game, also written in HTML5.
  
• The game will be easy to mod and support adding new tilesets and sharing the mods with others.
  
• Procedural generation will be employed in some aspects, but can be overridden with manually designed content.
  
• There will be more than one tileset theme / employed in the generated free-roaming over-world.
  

Speak your mind folks and help us steer this ship; We're going full steam ahead!

I've got much of the base engine design fleshed out, and have started coding the parts of the engine that will need to exist regardless of the exact game mechanics we'll end up with.

The discussion reminded me of Planescape a bit, as well as Sigil.  ;D
PS I think this game must be community driven for sure. So  :handthumbsupR:

Having never played Planescape (I never saw the appeal of using pre-made universes when you could write your own), any coincidence on my part is purely coincidental.   However, I'll take that as a compliment since Planescape is, by all accounts, "amazing".  :)

I can't speak for the others, but if any paper & dice RPG inspires me it's Rifts by Palladium. (http://palladiumbooks.com/) (not to be confused with the recent unrelated MMORPG by the same name).  Rifts' ruleset was made to adapt all other RPGs into its and other universes.  Indeed, it was my own baked and frozen tidally locked World of 'Deadened' that was the hub for most of my D&D and Rifts games.

Arriving through shimmering blue extra-dimensional portals, travelers from D&D, Shadowrun, White Wolf, Vampire: The Masquerade, In Nomine, Heroes Unlimited, and any other game you can think of would carry out campaigns across each the others' worlds, or in the Rifts Universe itself which is full of commercialized military, dimensional monstrosities, Powerful Psionic Warriors, Drug Fueled Juggernauts (Juicers), genetic mutant human animal hybrids, and Giant robotic battle suits, (Ah, Glitterboys, how I miss your reflective laser-proof gleam).

Unlike either Planescape or Rifts, however, the world of this game, as I imagine it (though this may not be the end result) are not separated into multiple dimensions, but rather all lumped together in ancient times, bringing parts of their own worlds with them in a general hodge podge.

That's not to say borrowing elements from other games is bad at all -- That's exactly what drew me to Rifts and later Gurps (http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/), and most recently solidified my desire to contribute to this project.

Still, I think there's plenty of room to mark the game with our distinct TIGSource flair.

Note: Please don't be put off by my lengthy posts, I really would like others to contribute too;  Though I would hate to be relegated only to coding, my story and design proposals should be taken as suggestions, and open to revision or replacement. I take no action on my own ideas unless agreed upon by at least one other. Even so: If you think something would be done better a different way, please speak up!

______________

I'm still mostly doing under-the hood stuff (like asset management systems), so I'm not ready to post pre-alpha feature test code or screenshots of our progress just yet, but I've started to document some of the more concrete details of the game engine which will power this collaborative game's unique features, so that it may be used for other games as well.

The engine itself is dubbed The Mason Engine, due to its tile based proclivities.

The engine design docs (http://vortexcortex.com/game/engine/mason/design.html) are an incomplete subset of what I've put into my personal notes, but you're welcome to follow along if you like.  Note: Engine design -- or Functional Specs, to use the industry parlance -- has only tangential relation to the actual Game Design itself.  I.e., the engine design is built to support at least what the game design calls for in as generic (reusable) way as possible, whereas the Game Design will dictate the actual mechanics, story and art (which is the purpose of this thread).

Hello guys,

I think it will be best for those interested to have skype.This way we can have an easier and quicker communication stream among people interested.

The game should either be made via C/C++, Java or Unity3D.

It should also have Linux support.

Now I'm really curious how this will evolve...  :ninja:

HTML 5 is cross-platform

HTML5 is cross-platform, but not natively.

Also, this may be just me, but I do not take too kindly to playing games in WebBrowsers.

I actively dislike playing games in web browsers myself, and will only play in browser if not given an other option.

You have to play on a browser if you have no other choices :lol:

OK, I actually anticipated this response.  That's why I planned the HTML5 engine to be general purpose enough to use in multiple games, not just this one -- so that my time won't have been wasted if it doesn't get used by this project.

The thing is, I have other uses for a HTML5 2D Tile based engine, and was attempting to kill 2 birds with one stone by using this project as a flagship.  So, I'm going to continue building the Mason Engine, for building collaborative 2D tile worlds.  Whether folks choose to use it is up to them.

The protocols are being designed with client side abstraction in mind.  That means you could build a radical new native client in any other language in the universe in addition to the HTML5 web engine, and have both native and web browser options.

I don't think a 2D Tile based roguelike-ish game requires the power to justify the risk of downloading unsigned binaries from strangers and running them on your PC natively...  Going to a website and editing and playing the game is a far lower barrier to entry, IMO.

I already have my own 3D cross platform native projects in the works, so spending my time programming this in C/C++/Java, etc, just isn't appealing to me personally.  Native 2D tile engines already exist (download Nethack and replace the game data, you're done). I'd rather put my effort into bringing new collaboration features to the community rather than using an existing engine like Unity3D which I have no source code for, and don't have the freedom to extend.  If Unity goes out of business my time spent developing for their closed platform will have been wasted, so I personally would use SFML or SDL, it's not like you need Unity's features for a tile engine;  I mean, unless we make the game a 3D adventure or something.


Don't get me wrong, It's fine with me if folks want to go the native route instead, and I'll still contribute in other ways, but I won't be able to contribute any time writing code for the project if it's a native only codebase.

Additionally, This forum serves as a public record and keeps things out in the open and recorded for all to see.  I don't think Skype should be required for anyone to contribute.  I don't run closed source software made by people I don't trust, so I won't be able to use Skype either -- IMO, that seems like an arbitrary requirement.  What about an IRC chat room or an open source VOIP solution instead?

Note: I work and sleep weird hours because most of my business is with overseas clients.  That's another reason a forum seems the best option to me -- Folks can collaborate without being awake at the same time (this is akin to the TIGWorld threads, which I personally find appealing from a collaboration perspective).

What about using Java and making it open-source

I'd advocate making any of the code open source, regardless of language used.  Mason Engine will be fully open source.  JavaScript is open source by design: Right Click -> View Source.

Java development has no benefit over using SDL/SFML with C/C++.  It's trivial to have one native source tree that compiles on all the same platforms that Java runs on.  In fact, I use a Java Stub to load my native C code for some Android development...  Testing on each platform must still be done because Java is not "write once run everywhere", it's become more like: Write once, Debug Everywhere -- This is no different to C or C++ in that regard; However, there are much better real time debugging solutions for native C/C++, IMO.

I'm not against developing in Java, I just fail to see the point.  It has all of the drawbacks of C/C++ with none of the performance.

If we make the game in HTML5 we might as well just use Game Maker or Corona.

Except that Game maker doesn't have a collaborative development API for patching and modding a continually evolving game world.  Don't make the incorrect assumption that Game Maker utilizes the full feature-set of HTML5.  One is a framework for rapid application development, the other is a proprietary vendor lock-in system that has a web export feature...

I'd rather not turn the thread into a pointless language or platform war.

The fact is that I'm not writing code that doesn't need to be written.  If you want to use game maker to create the game, go ahead.  If you want to use Java, or C, or C++, or AppleScript, that's fine.

I think we should focus on the game design itself here, we're not really even to the point of deciding what language / platform it must be created in because folks still haven't decided all of the required features, eg: Will the game have permadeath or not?

There are many more important questions to answer.  You can't just pick a toolset or language and say it's the best choice for a game that has an incomplete design.

If the design of this game is possible to implement in the HTML5 engine that I'm coding then we should probably use that engine.  As it stands I think I can implement all of the desired functionality.  If you want to champion some other platform then that's fine, get to coding, no one will object.

TL;DR: Put your code where your mouth is.

This bit I don't like.
It makes sense when you think about it from the time travelers perspective, that the terrain hasn't changed over the years, except by some erosion from the medieval to future periods maybe, but when I think that large chunks of land being displaced from their home dimensions/timelines, I don't think seamless world.

And yet, the map of the Earth remains largely unchanged since the earliest days of man.  2 million years is hardly a heartbeat on a geologic time scale.  Written history spans not even the blink of an eye in that regard.

Not that game worlds have to be realistic.  IMO, the seamlessness would be a consequence of using a procedural generation algorithm.  If we want some parts to be seamless regions larger than one screen size then we need to leverage that type of seamlessness for all regions.

Who's to say what's realistic though: If you time travel back in time 3 seconds into your same location of space relative to the solar or galactic center then you're basically dead because everything in this Universe is moving quite rapidly;  Depending on the frame of reference, an errant time machine could very well toss you out into the void of space while leaving you right where you are.

I'm sure a more jarring displacement effect would be possible by simply giving each faction tileset a different fixed offset into the world generation system.   That could be an interesting effect.  You could see some land feature then walk a few screens over and see the same land feature but with a different tileset.

The alternative is to run a separately seeded terrain generation algorithm for each tile-set.  That would mean that there will almost always be a jarring effect when you switch from one time area to another.    with the offset approach: regions closer in time could have less jarring differences; However I sort of dislike the idea of seeing a lot of the same stuff multiple times; If the offsets are kept large enough to be jarring but not too large to repeat whole nearby land-features, then it could work out quite nicely.


Regardless of the generation system it doesn't stop you from re-creating chunks of the world as you see fit -- Jarring distinctions or smoothed out.   Once the generator is running we'll certainly have to play with the parameters and come to a consensus about how exactly to make things look.

Thanks for the input!  It was more valuable than you know.

Will this game have a story or simply we make it up in our head as we play?

I guess you should be updating your opinions on how Java is

Probably make one up. If we have a proper story, then it'll be hard to mod stuff, without making it look weird.

I develop in Java on a weekly basis.  I know how it is.  It's crap.  JIT compilation means we're compiling our code to machine code each time we run the program.  What's the point?  That defeats the security benefit of a VM.  Perhaps you should update your opinion on the state of cross platform native application deployment.  Use C/C++, compile once, test once, DON'T worry about an upgrade to the VM platform breaking your code.

Anyways.. away from the platform war...  (Actually, we should have a platform war thread.)

The basic concept for our game so far is that it is a world that just has different areas with different themes, am I correct or not?

The platform war is over.  Cross platform engines with an open documented game data format won.

If anyone wants to implement the game in any language other than HTM5, go for it.   The game isn't done being designed yet so it would be hard to really complete that effort at the moment -- I'm making preparations for when that time does come by building an open source HTML5 engine, which I hope can be used for this project.

I've made provisions so that any code I write can be fully compatible with implementations of the code in Java or native C/C++.  For instance, I created my own Rand() function in JS+HTML5 that works exactly the same as GNU Rand() does in GLIBC (C/C++ library), and it will be trivial to create a Rand() function in Java that's compatible.  This function will be used to do dice-roll like stat stuff and other randomization that doesn't need to be tile-able.

The procedural world generation relies on a specific tile-able noise algorithm that's more expensive than the Rand() function I created.  I've already implemented a C (http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=5325.msg852605#msg852605) and Java version (http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=5325.msg852912#msg852912) of the perlin-like noise function; I'm in the process of optimizing it for JavaScript.  So, you see, anywhere that the games need to have compatible code I've ALREADY done the work to make sure that Native vs Java vs HTML5 wars are completely and utterly a pointless waste of all time.

I'd rather not have mentioned this, but I think it's useful to quell any further retardation of progress due to futile language wars.  I apologize for my contribution to said skirmish.  It was uncalled for and unprofessional.  I'll keep engine related discussion in a different thread when I'm ready to publish and discuss some code, and use this thread for game design discussion.

To be perfectly clear, one last time before I fall silent on this issue:  Platform wars are over.  I have no problem with folks working on Java code, or other native code, but I myself can't justify spending time on these since I need an HTML5 engine myself.  I'm making allowances for the possibility that someone may some day create a native or VM (Java/C#) version and wish to export a save games & patches from HTML5 and load it in an alternate version of the engine.  If there is demand, then after the HTML5 version is complete I'll work on porting the engine to C, but HTML5 will come first -- Unless some other coder takes the initiative to implement the game design.  In this case I would recommend that at least the data formats be published and preferably the code be open source so that I can create a HTML5 implementation too (I think it has the highest chance of being the most collaborative).


I'd like that.  If that's what you want too, then I'm happy.  I'll add that to the list:

• There will be different areas of the game with different time periods or overall settings: Eg: Futuristic vs Ancient Magical Kingdom
  (we're still deciding which settings).
  

Do you have any opinion as to which settings to use?


This issue is unresolved.  I proposed a back-story for the settings that I prefer, and I think writing could be really fun and easy.  If it's done in a non-linear way.  Being a bit weird is the point of games, IMO, otherwise it would just be real life v2.0.   Perhaps we should define what type of stories lend themselves to rogue-likes.

I think a strong narrative with linear story would be too hard to do, like you said, it would be too hard to mod without breaking the story.  However, smaller quest sized arcs that weave a common tale in non-linear ways could be used instead.

See my post in the "why write for games" thread (http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=30792.msg850847#msg850847) for my thoughts on doing just that type of writing.

The TL;DR version is that we can come up with overarching main story (or overall set of events and end-game state: preferably where you still get to explore the world), and even have main events scripted in, but allow the players to find their own paths between these events.  The plot filled parts will have to be manually created, of course; Randomized story telling would be a lot of coding work, and IMO, diminish the importance of contributions to populate the world.

It's up for discussion, so what do you folks think?  Arcs that span a few quests to reveal some story (non linear narrative), No story, just a world where you kill the same sets of randomly appearing monsters a bazillion times, or strong narrative arc (A sole story the character must progress ala JRPGs like FF series)?

I vote: Overarching generalized plot with non-linear narrative sprinkled about by us and contributors.

I vote overall goal or storyline, such as: You are looking for your princess (highly simple, but we can make an actual one later), and you have to go through a strange land which has just been morphed. As you go through the land, you will meet people who will give you quests. Perhaps one or two quests per setting, which will try and bring you closer to your princess.

Would be interesting to see a rogue-like with some sort of combat alternative for gaining experience/gear. This could be small mini-games like farming in monster hunter (irrelevant game I know). The reason this would be interesting to add is that anyone could code a short sweet mini-game which could be integrated fairly easily especially in terms of art. Anyway just a thought. Also in terms of name it should be something obscure like Penny arcade's on the rain slick precipice of darkness. I just love that title and it is ambiguous enough to be provocative but not discerning of the game's content. Anyway sorry for the rambling, also how do I get involved. I know C++ and JS js mainly from unity though. I work in blender and photoshop too so I could create some basic art assets. Thanks!

I think a central yet generic plot-line like that could work well.  Esp. if we allow the creation of side quests.


This is one of the strong reasons I want to use HTML5+JS.  Complete new game modes can be added via mods that simply load a JavaScript file in a certain section of the game.  Imagine how you would do that with C/C++ or Java alone?  You'd have to create an in-game language / API for creating mini-games, or at best, use Rhino or VP8 JS engines to provide scripting language support for mods -- suddenly the project gets a lot more complex.

Having such a mini-game in-built from the outset eliminates the need to allow folks to add custom mods to provide the feature, enabling the static C/C++ and Java implementations to support the feature w/o embedding a language like JS or Lua.

It's not a bad Idea to have some type of variation in leveling from kill = EXP, but as in D&D one could simply earn experience for anything you do, including mini-games.  That would free the player from having to do the farming game if they hate it, or grinding away fighting enemies (they could do a minigame instead).

I think this adds an order more complexity to the game balance equation, so we'd need some concrete examples of good minigames to include, IMO.  That means a full separate game design, coding, testing, for each minigame (a lot of work) so it better be an idea that many folks will enjoy if it's going to be central to the gameplay.  If it's just optional one off mini-games that exist in various areas, then if we go the HTML5+JS engine route we can do that no problem through the mod & patch system.


Beyond the Mist Shrouded Bulwark (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bulwark) of Evil.
Once Upon a Temporal Anomaly.
A Path Surprisingly Circuitous in Nature.

Meh, don't be afraid to drop some name ideas.


TOO LATE!  You're already involved now.  Your mental seeds have been collected and added to our own. :)

We're in the planning stage right now, so I'd hold off on art or code specific to the game until the design is more concrete.  You can help by posting your opinions in response to the above posts, and helping us to finalize the game design.  After that we'll figure out a collaboration space -- Github, etc. and I can optionally host the files on one of my servers too / setup FTP accounts for contributors & whatnot -- Although, If Mason Engine is up to speed by then, then we may not need any additional collaboration platform, you'd just use the engine to build the game.

I'll paste here a post from the original thread:

Still no word about permadeath (game saves that you can pause, save & continue, but not reload to undo your actions if you goof).  Should we?

Is there one character or several?  Are there character classes or are abilities chosen through gameplay; e.g., go to the magic guild and learn a spell, now you've got magic?  Or, "sorry, you're a fighter class, fighters have no use for spells." ?

Should we setup a Wiki for this project so folks can collaborate on the design easier?

So, just keep posting what you think about stuff, the more input the better.

If we want to focus on exploration, perhaps permadeath is a bad idea. It stops the player from truly exploring, as they feel that they may lose what they have. This promotes wary gameplay, and that is not what we really want. I suggest a system of checkpoints, where the player can drop a save stone. When they die, they will respawn at the save stone with only three of their items, which they will choose.

Savestones sounds like an interesting mechanic.  Would they be expendable inventory items, or have infinite supply?  Also, would the dead body and all the stuff stay in the world for you to collect the goods (leaving the world intact), or would it be a reset to a saved state?

Could you pickup previously dropped save stones?  E.g., They carry it forward drop it, then once defeating an area can buy a new one later, or retrieve the previously dropped stone?

Anyhow, I'm for any sort of compromise without removing all fear of death.  The tension of being afraid to die constantly was some of my fondest times in roguelikes, but did limit my exploration options -- Being that everything was randomized though, I didn't feel like exploring: The further room had just as much chance as the nearer or next room, to contain loot, so why explore when every path I took resulted in the same risk/reward?

I was thinking that when the player drops a save stone, they choose three items from their inventory. Then those items await them when they respawn. I don't think the items should stay with the dead body. If they get no items when they respawn, then they won't be able to defeat whatever killed them the first time.

You could also try it like this:
When player dies he will try to "fight" death back by travelling to his fading conciousness and try to fixing it? And that's where procedural generation can come in.
Make player fight for what he did and make it interesting. :durr:

I don't know what the current plan is but why worry about tilesets and 'html5' (2D Canvas/ WebGL/SVG/3D CSS transforms (mozila/webkit/chrome/ie)) graphics engine at this stage when developing a roguelike ?

I'll do some/the character design right in this quotebox

then we can create gameplay rather soon.
and later you can always add the use of tilesets for the faint of heart.

Do you realize that you're essentially repeating what we've already said?  That "platform wars are pointless" and that the "game needs to be designed first", "there are more important questions to answer". 

Or are you just trying to be arrogant, condescending, and (ironically) superior for no other reason than because no one can stop you?

Please do explain how this mocking contribution is in any way called for?

Especially when we already have this:
(http://25.media.tumblr.com/7a9682566f3c68afb661f347116fad90/tumblr_mh2mhude3E1qcptgwo1_250.png)

And these
(http://img.uninhabitant.com/simples_pimples3.png)

And others.
(http://vortexcortex.com/output/image/12x12-tile-sheet.png)


Yes, indeed, now, on with the discussion, which is about what gameplay to create.  Which, your post is lacking any mention of despite many unanswered questions having been posed, and your claimed desire to create the gameplay "soon".


I'm not sure how to implement this, do you have an example in mind of how that would play out on the screen?

Edit:
Borderlands did something like this, yes?  Only instead of going into your mind to fix things you just kept fighting for your life, and if you kill one bad guy somehow you've traded Death their life for yours.

I sort of like that idea if we can somehow tie it into the story -- Maybe The Grim Reaper himself comes out of the dimension of the dead, and starts approaching you while you're dying / bleed out timer, etc.   If you can kill one enemy then the Specter of Death takes the enemy's soul instead of your own back to the nether realms.

If we let the character keep moving while they're almost dead they can even try to run from death a bit, but he will eventually catch them, and soon, unless they kill an enemy.

Something like that we could do with just a grim reaper sprite and a timer, but it would lack the psychonauts-esque journey into your mind.

Let us begin working on the story an characters together.

whoa whoa

I got the impression that HTML5 is perceived in this thread as the end of platform wars and that by that logic it's a good solution.

I think html5 is the most fragmented piece of crap the webdeveloper of today has to work around. Maybe in  a while it'll be there you know.
check this for example http://html5test.com/results/desktop.html
And since the game ought to become a roguelike I think you can work around many (html5 related graphics) problems by using the well respected @ .

I just think your better off building a standard roguelike engine (like libtcod (foregroundcolor/backgroundcolor/ascii character)) in javascript and html(3).
And then, when you actually have a moving @ on a screen you can worry about / play together to build gamemechanics in javascript.

but whatever I must be condensing/arrogant/(ironically) superior because nobody can stop me.
I which I could unsubscribe.

oh and here are some practical ideas
http://doryen.eptalys.net/data/libtcod/doc/1.5.1/index2.html?c=false&cpp=false&cs=false&py=false&lua=false
http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=How_to_Write_a_Roguelike_in_15_Steps


bye now!

 

You thought wrong because you didn't actually read the thread.  I even mentioned creating a native C client, and that for the tricky bits of code that would have to be compatible with each other I've already got both the Java and C sources interoperating with HTML5+JS.

In short, you're being willfully ignorant.


No one cares what you think about the platform war, it is over.  Cross platform data formats and multiple clients on different platforms is fully on the table right now.  HTML5 is one of the platforms I'd like to support because I can justify writing code for the game if so.



Yes, yes, IF you HAD read the threads you'd have noticed that was my original consensus as well.  However, the current design has elements that would be difficult to perform, and 2D is trivial to code for, so modding an existing codebase would probably take more time.

I get the distinct impression you were never going to contribute anything but trollish comments here.  Post code or STFU re: platforms.


Good riddance.

Sounds like a plan.  What do you have in mind?


Also, did we decide on the settings / tilesets for the settings?  Futuristic / Medieval, or Altlantian / Alien or Living Dead / Cyborgs, etc. ?   I'm up for whatever, should probably be up to the writers anyway.

Once we know how many base themes the world will have I can plug some temporary placeholder art into the procedural world generator and we can start tweaking it to our liking. :)

I setup an IRC channel and updated the main thread with:

Forum too slow or too permanent for your liking?

Try #tigCOOP on esper.net (http://"http://esper.net/") (IRC)

irc://irc.esper.net/tigCOOP

I think we need to deduce what sort of pace the game will have. Obviously if there is a long unravelling story through multiple time spaces the pace could be slower. This could allow us to remove a restrictive class system and in place use a sort of background system where you choose how your character is built but any initial character can take any form whilst moving through the game. So say I was desperate to be a rogue I could choose the stealthy character but later on could adapt to become the ultimate knight. If the pace is faster and there is permadeath, a class system would help speed up the gameplay for sure.

Last time on #tigCOOP:


Folks, we need to at least solidify the base settings / themes.  That way folks can know what world(s) they're writing for and creating pixel art in.
These are the main base themes I'm talking about, not the strange patched on additions like an Egypt ruled by Cats:


^-- That's a great example of a theme that could be patched-in / added-on over part of the main world.  I'd like to go there someday -- If I'm not already there...

For the base worlds however we need settings that are a bit more flexible, that can contain non-cat-centric plot lines, for example. :)

I think 3 or 4 distinct base settings will be plenty of variety.

As it stands we've got on the table:

• Medieval / Ancient Magics
  Your typical warriors, wizards, goblins and what-not.
  
• Not to distant future
  (relative to today - Imagine yourself in 20 years?)
  
• Post Singularity
  Post (human) Apocalypse the Cyborgs and Machine races live on.
  
• Alternate Demention
  The alternate planes of existence rolled into one.
  This setting is special because it exists parallel to all the other planes, and can only be seen when [the writers figure that out].
  
  AKA: Land of the Dead, the Nether realms, the Ethereal Plane, ect.  Ghosts, Elder gods, cosmic intelligences are found here.
  IMO, It's basically the same as folks in the dimensional gateway that opens if you're using an original IBM model M w/ Dvorak and press [Ctr] + [Alt] + [Shift] + [Space]... Be warned, you can never ever [Return].
  

Regardless of if these worlds turn out to be islands (as was suggested) or forking outwards from a central wizard tower hub, mixed and matched via procedural world generator, etc, we need to have at least the base settings solid before further work can progress.

So, unless there's objectors to the above main world settings, then those will be the base world sets we'll go with.
Variations like a magic Realm of Fire, Atlantis, a crashed bunch of aliens from Andromeda, StarGate:Feline Force, etc. can be bolted on afterwards.


I think we're still undecided as to how death works.  I mean, I love the save-stones idea for saving the game / re-spawning.  But leading up to that re-birth there could be a couple failure modes.
E.g.: Reach Zero health and stave off the Grim Reaper by killing a nearby enemy comparable to your exp. level (he takes their soul instead).

Or, perhaps you're transported to the ethereal planes when you die -- The save stone could be a part of the Ethereal plane, and you're linked to the save stone, so when you die, you appear near your save stone in the etherial plane.
Since it could exist in unison with the other realms, it would be easy to switch back to the 'real' world... or something.  Any ideas on how that's achieved.  I think a WOW like spirit healer is too much of a time-sink, so any other options?

Everything is open to suggestion.  What do you think?


In the sprite / tile code I've got going the world has its own cell size on screen, and folks can zoom in / out.  So, we'll be able to blow up the smaller res tiles to see their sweet pixelated goodness.

Larger sprites / tiles can also be used, but down-sampling will make thinks look funky.
The upshot is that you could mix tile set sizes.  So, say the world grid is set to be 48x48 px per tile.  That means the 16x16 tiles get 3 pixels for each 1 pixel of the tile image (3x zoom).
If you load up a 12x12 tileset it gets 4 pixels for each single pixel (4x zoom) or if you're crazy and use a 6x6 tile set, then 8x zoom = 48 scaled.

The user We will be able to set the world scale.  So, they could set their view of the world to be 64x64 px per tile and all the tiles will get scaled to that size.  I use image caching code to speed up rendering, so tons of scaling ops aren't done each frame.

What's interesting is that the 12x12 tileset will work with the 16x16 tile set, or 24x24, whatever.  The tiled sections won't match up perfectly between 12 and 16 width tiles, but once you're in 12x12 or 16x16, etc. area it'll all look fine and smoothly tiled.
Also, we can select between smooth or pixel-art zoom on a per tile-set basis.  Eg: you might want to enable blurry resize when going from, 64x64 down to 48x48.

All that said, what should the "optimal" base tile size be?  I was thinking 16x16.  Any thoughts?

16x16 please

Yeah, I think that's probably a good bet.  And since you've already contributed some cool tiles, I think we should standardize on that.

For the game scale, I'm thinking 48x48 will be the on-screen size, AKA 16x16 @ 3x zoom.  The reason to use 48 instead of 64 or 32 is to include a 3 in the prime factorization.  32 = 2⁵, 64 = 2⁶ which means nothing with a 3 as a prime factor will scale evenly, like 12 or 24.

Here's an example of what that 48x48 size looks like, using a few of Desiderata's tiles:
(http://vortexcortex.com/game/engine/mason/pic/greekThemedTiles-example-lg.gif)

This ethereal temple/ruin like set has an almost classic Gameboy feel to it.  Looks like somewhere you might visit when you're dead if you ask me...

__________________________

Which brings me to an idea I had about the save stones / death thing.

I was trying to figure out the mechanism by which players could visit the parallel nether realms that co-exist with the current places on the map.  Being a 'well that's obvious' kind of guy, why not just make player death be the prime way you get to explore the nether realms?

So, here's a scenario graph for a player's brush with Death:

• You've placed your save stone at the entry way to some ruins; The ethereal stone's energies anchor your soul and bind it to the stone's resting place in both worlds.
• While exploring said ruins your life force has just fallen to Zero health units.
• The Grim Reaper now approaches from the edge of the screen.
• You avoid the Grim Reaper as he approaches, but he's faster than you, always (by some percentage).
• You find and attack an enemy that's about the same level as you are, perhaps the one that injured you.
• Your health may go negative at this point which makes it harder for you to move the further your foot is in the grave, so to speak; Death is catching up to you.
   
  • You manage to kill the creature or foe before the Grim Reaper strikes you with his scythe.
  • The Harvester of Souls rushes to the fresh corpse and whisks the poor dead soul from the scene.
  • As a parting gift for helping further Death's cause, your life is replenished up to 1 health point again; Cue the pixelated particle effects.
  • Congratulations, you're not dead!  Now, get to a healer, medic, or mechanic quick!
  -OR-
   
  • You fail to appease the Dark Specter and it reaps your soul with a large scythe.
  • The Pale Cloaked one has now escorted you to the nether realm of the current area.
  • Death screams in dismay as your soul is snapped back to the location of the save stone.
  • You now stand in the place where you set the saved stone, but are in an alternate spirit plane.
  • The once inert save stone now glimmers brightly next to you, and Death quickly leaps at you.
  • Instead of your soul the Reaper is drawn to the other brighter soul that had been trapped in the dark save stone, and takes it away deep into the lands of the dead.
  • In parting death begrudgingly upholds his bargain and your life is replenished up to 1 health point.
     
  • Congratulations, You're in the Spirit world!
     
    • If you pickup the save stone the last of its magic binding will be activated and you'll return to the realms of the living where you last dropped the stone.  It will become a worthless black rock.
    -OR-
     
    • You could instead explore the nether realm now, but apart from the protective wards of the shrines and temples of the gods the nether realm is a dangerous place.
       
    • Here the chaotic forces of the aether run rampant, and if you stay too long you may be obliterated out-right.
    • If you have any more save stones, you can drop one here, and venture forth into the land of the dead.  Picking up a save stone anywhere you've dropped it, takes you back to the realm of the living and frees the spirit within / uses up the stone.
    • If there were any un-harvested save stones dropped in your journey then you'll be recalled to the most recently dropped stone that hasn't been used up if you encounter Death again.
       

This reveals a darkness of the Save Stones -- They're not just a magical world-anchor they've also got a soul trapped inside to appease Death!  Those of good conscience may believe that spirit walkers collect lost souls and bind them in the save stones, and the grim reaping is a final peace for them.  Others who dabble in the economics of life tell rumors of the stones' crafting involving dark blood rituals and human sacrifices as a much cheaper source of souls.

Furthermore, this allows us to keep an aspect of the permanent death mechanic that's a defining mechanic of roguelikes.   If death takes you and you don't have an active save stone somewhere in the world, then it's game over -- Permadeath.

There should probably also be other less traumatic entry ways into the spirit realm, perhaps at a temple or shrine or by way of some arcane magic or a high tech hyper-dimensional-flux projection gate...

We'll have to tweak this mechanic some more once we play with it in-game, I'm sure.  For instance: Say you just hold onto a save stone until Death comes, then drop one.  You can be re-born right there in the same location you almost died at, but you'll have used up a save stone, like a credit in an arcade game of old, and still be left with one health.   Would a potion stave off death once you've been to zero health and negative beyond?  I'm thinking no.  It would bring you back to Zero, prolonging your escape from death, but would not be enough to pay the price of Death.

It'll be pretty simple to make the player's avatar white washed or make it semi-transparent, etc. if we want to ensure they know they're in the land of the dead.  We'll have to play around with the effects to see what's possible / preferable.

One sticky subject I encountered here is: Do Robots have Souls?  The short answer is: Yes, Of Course!
What is a human but a sack of meat filled mostly with water?  It's the electrochemical reaction that is ended when a life's spark has gone out.  Everything in our game's worlds has both a physical and ethereal form.  The body of a man or machine is of no consequence.  In a machine life is a purely electrical phenomenon, ah but what are chemicals but matter?  Is silicon not a chemical?  The sentient Robotic Races are no different to Humans when regarded by the Grim Reaper.  They are both electrochemical reactions made of the same basic matter and energy that permeates the aether -- the stuff souls are made of (the exact composition of a soul is left as an exercise to the reader).

Any thoughts / Suggestions?

______


Finally: I'm just about ready to begin testing the collaborative asset storage / retrieval system.  It'll be just text initially while I get the graphics code underway, but I figure we can use it like a 2D wiki to further organize the writing and design.

Lacks contrast

Thanks for the feedback quarry! I realise it is extremely low contrast but I though the slightly green-tinged marble of the spirit world would be ambiguous and low contrast. Please feel free to tweak it! Would be really great to see your take on it.

I see that it should give a spiritual vibe but maybe dividing walls from floors could do great (like 1 px darker border)

Also you wouldn't want me to have a take on that, I really suck at creating anything art related!

And another

Yeah in the tileset there are two walls one is low contrast to make it appear that the area is raised and a high contrast darker bottomed wall to make the room seem sunken. Sorry if i didn't make it obvious but obviously you need the context of multiple rooms to see it also my first ever tileset. Ever.

But yeah vortex that idea sounds perfect! And maybe the way the temples allow you to enter the spirit world is by either (for evil cultist temples) making a blood sacrifice or (for holy sanctuaries) performing some sort of prayer which drains mana whereas as blood sacrifice drains health.

I'm working on getting the UI up to speed so it can talk to all the back-end work I've done.

To help me out I've added a console that can be used to control everything in the game.

(http://vortexcortex.com/output/image/coop-game-console.gif)

Why, you could even create whole new games within the console alone...

(http://vortexcortex.com/output/image/coop-game-console-tetromino.gif)

...If only you could fit something like a tetromino game in a single line (http://paste.ubuntu.com/5588635/) of JavaScript code.  :P

This isn't the full game screen is it? It looks mighty small if it is. But anyway it's good to see this is all still churning onwards.  :handthumbsupR:

VortexCortex: nice work!

I think that's not the game Caiys?

Poe is right Caiys that is just a quick room deadlycure made with my tileset and vortexcortex used it as an example for tile sizes more than anything. The UI is looking amazing though Vortex! Certainly has all the customisation we could want.

Shit.

I like your tiles Desierata, they remind me of GBC games a lot.

Sorry caiys. Thanks Poe it's my first attempt at a tileset and my first pixel art in a while. I'm thinking the gbc colours could be used for the spirit world. After playing Anodyne I guess I associate the bland colour theme with a  sort of soul world, could be an interesting palette to use. Especially if the player visits it frequently. Will probably invoke a sort of nostalgia which would make sense if you have lived through multiple lives. The soul world wouldn't be something you remember clearly more something you have a strange attachement to. Anyway i'm rambling.

Ah, so it's the 80's then...

The gods will have large billowing hair and androgynous forms beneath their leathered, zippered and leopard-printed exteriors.

For sure yeah, anyway I'm just hypothesising about what I see it being the game is a Coop so we all need to make the decision!

Remind me, cause I've forgotten. Are we randomly generating areas, or will they be placed down? I prefer random generation, cause you know. Procedural generation. The words alone sound sexy to my ears.  :-*

We're doing a hybrid of both procedural generation and 'placed down' areas.  The current plan is to use procedural generation for the over-world. Over-world will be the same for every game (same seed each play).  This enables free roaming exploration.   There will be procedurally generated dungeons (and towers?) too, but these will be randomized each play.  The placement of the dungeons in the overworld will be the same each play, but the insides of the dungeons will be different.  If you return to a dungeon in the same play-through it'll be the same as you left it though (to encourage exploration of other areas).  Return to that same dungeon entrance on a new play-through it'll be different.

With both the over-world and the dungeons folks can decide to change the current region they're looking at by editing that part of the map, even add their own new tile-sets to the game.  That edited area becomes user created and is no longer procedurally generated.  You could decide to create some crazy stuff as the 13th floor of a dungeon -- to place quest items or boss battles, for example -- but leave all the floors surrounding that part randomized.

While you edit part of the world your edits exist only on your computer.  This is so you can design and refine the part you're working on and test it to ensure it works.  Once you're satisfied you can create a patch delta that contains your edits to the world.  These user created patches can then be shared with each other as mods, or uploaded and patched into the main game so that everyone can experience them.

That means the world will probably be mostly procedurally generated, but over time it can get more user patched stuff in it.  I'm hoping the randomized dungeons will keep the unchanging user patched parts from being too stale;  If players get bored of the static patched parts of the world they can just strike out into the endless randomly generated frontier.

That's the plan anyway; Things may change as stuff gets built but this is the goal I'm shooting for.  I think is has the potential to please the most folks.

_________

We still need to decide if the items and their effects should be randomized each play.  In some roguelikes you can find items like "a red flower bud" which turns out to heal you if you eat it, but next time you start the game over those red flowers could be poisonous, or make you go berserk and attack everything you see...

I don't know. I've always hated the concept of randomized items. It seems too much to me like the dev is punishing the player for trying out things.

By the way, how difficult would it to make the world multiplayer? Not saying that we should, just wondering.

Yeah, the randomized items can be quite frustrating.  This is usually mitigated by having harmful potions and such not be extremely deadly.  That way you know to drink a new potion to see what it does when you have full health, in a safe environment.  Once you discover its effects though it's not so bad.  What can be bad is when you try to come back to a saved game after a while and remember what all that crap does.  If we adopt a random item system we should list the known effects in a menu somewhere.   I could go either way on randomized items.


I've actually made allowances for that sort of thing in the engine design, asset formats, and fetch / sync protocol.  Multiplayer would require that players synchronize their random seeds, which is very simple.  Multiplayer would also need some way of synchronizing the world changes between players, say, streaming the world deltas between players as some kind of 'patches', heh.

So, that's why the patch system works that way: It's a general purpose solution to create saved games, world mods, offline collaborative building, or to synchronize world data between players in real-time (for multiplayer).  I don't have plans to add multiplayer support to the 1st version of the game, but I'm considering local multi-player (ala Minecraft) as a feature for some future version, and making good scalable design decisions (like sharded asset storage) in case the game wants to be an MMO with collaborative world building someday.

Note that I'm not insane.  Massively multiplayer games are difficult by their nature.  I'm not attempting to create an MMO engine at the outset, that would be crazy; I'm only trying not to limit the possibilities needlessly.

To my noobish ears, you sound like a good coder.

If you drink a potion when you are in a safe area, then what is the point? You've already drunk the potion. If it heals, you are already safe. If it hurts, you are hurt. You can't really use it again.

The point is to identify potion type, not just a single item, if the potion was a healing potion, you now know all potions of that type. The problem of the identification relates to game lenght, if the game is quite long, eventually all types are identified and that "sub game" disappears. Only sane possibility i see, is that identifications are randomed for each dungeon, not the whole game.

Roguelike radio episode 30 is all about identification systems and might be worth checking out.

Let players use potions in multiple ways, like in nethack, where you can throw potions. That potion of acid could be quite useful. Also this would allow safer identification by throwing unknown potions on enemies and then observe the effects. Risk is buffing a monster, but that's definitely better than risking insta-death.

It's not that each individual potion would be random.  For example, once you discovered that eating a 'red flower' item causes Berserk status effect, then you know that for the current game all red flowers cause berserk.   With randomized items if you start out a fresh new game then it could be red flowers now heal you instead, and a 'green bubbly potion' could then cause berserk.

IMO, the point is just to keep alive that sense of exploration.  If you woke up tomorrow in wonder land, you wouldn't know what stuff to eat to make yourself big or small until you tried it (or tried it on someone else).  Roguelikes with randomized item effects foster a sense of being unsure and cautious about your potentially dangerous surroundings; As you become familiar with the strange new world you can be more sure of yourself.  Also it keeps folks from looking up what everything does on a Wiki...


I agree that the "sub game" of identifying things goes away the longer you play, but that's not always a bad thing.  The player could have grown out of that identification stage of the game, and can now reduce cognitive load of identifying things to focus on higher minded stuff like combining spell and item effects, etc.

Randomized items per dungeon is an interesting idea, I'm in no way against it.  However, it introduces a few problems that would have to be worked out:  If you take some healing potions out of one dungeon and into another dungeon, do they still heal?  If they do, but newly acquired potions have a different effect, then you might wind up with two 'red flower' items in your inventory that both do different things.  Alternatively, the items in your existing inventory could be changed into the newly randomized types of items, but then what's the point of identifying items since your inventory becomes your "rosetta stone": I had 16 green potions that healed me, and 3 blue poisons, now I have 16 black salves, and 3 red flasks...  You could prevent the player from taking items with them in / out of dungeons but that doesn't seem like the thing to do if you're looking for "sane" possibilities (that won't drive players crazy).


Thanks! I'm checking it out. Here's the aforementioned episode link if any are interested:
http://www.roguelikeradio.com/2012/04/episode-30-identification-systems.html



Excellent point.   I had just assumed folks would use items on things other than themselves, but that's another point to decide on.  Previously some sort of 'longer range' attacks were mentioned as well...

A quick way to make the identification system useful is by making every potion do something advantageous, so harmful poisons could be thrown for splash damage!

I think all that is solvable quite easily. Items such as potions have description AND origin. When a player gets a new item, he knows it's origin, right? This was from that dungeon and that was from the temple. It makes even more sense with multiple different settings. Why wouldn't the player character be able to differentiate a bottle from not-too-distant future from another bottle from magical past. This way items took from earlier dungeons can be taken to others, with no effect on the identification subgame.

Just dropping a note here to say that I've done some more work on the graphics systems for this game, but I'll be out of commission for about a week: I'm participating in the 7 day Roguelike Challenge (http://7drl.roguetemple.com/)

This kind of hit me by surprise, and totally unprepared (esp. scheduling wise).  I initially didn't plan to participate since I have to work that week, but I just kept thinking about cool stuff I could do (too many stuffs, in fact).  So, I'm going to give the challenge my best shot, even if I'm not able to give it the full attention it deserves.

I randomly selected HTML5 as the platform for the 7DRL, so I plan to use the challenge as a chance to get the audio and graphics systems of this project into a working state.

Shortly after the challenge is over I'll have a bunch more progress to post here as well. :)

If any are interested in my 7 day roguelike entry you can track my progress here (http://vortexcortex.com/game/invaderRL/rolling-updates.html).

Alright. Good luck!

Good luck vortex!

The hybrid procedural idea you guys are going for reminds me of Caves of Qud,
and it was one of my favorites for a long time, so I'm definitely all smiles hearing that.

And goodluck Vortex, I've always wanted to follow along as people made their 7drl, but it's
so hard to track down devlogs.

Thanks for all the well wishing folks!  I'm starting the 7DRL now, so see you in 168 hours. :)


Ah, well, if you want to follow all of the 7DRL devblogs at once there's a site for that. (http://7drl.org)  The site's kind of kinda slow, so be patient; 7DRL has about 300 participants now -- over 3 times as many as last year, I'm told.

Edit:
(http://vortexcortex.com/game/invaderRL/img/7drl-2013-02.png)

"ASCII" Paint?  :P

I didn't complete the 7DRL challenge (http://vortexcortex.com/game/invadeRL/rolling-updates.html)...  I plan to shelve that game for now and get back to it later.

In the process of working on InvadeRL I did create a bunch of engine tech that we can use for this colaborative game.

Seven 20 hour long days of coding (on both my work and game stuff) has left me in need of some serious recuperation.  So, I haven't yet cleaned up the code, or begin polishing and porting features back into the Mason Engine just yet.  I did take a bit of time and prepare to do so, though.

After I stripped out all the (vehicular) gameplay (it's not applicable in this game) I'm left with only the tile engine, the title screens, and an initial "cut-scene".

You can see the tile engine in action (http://vortexcortex.com/game/invadeRL/coop-port.html) here.  Note: the content creation stuff is finicky, and not fit for prime time.  I also only tested on Firefox and Chrome, but will test more browsers later.

At first glance it's not immediately apparent how this ASCII game is helpful to us in any way.  However, the thing to note is that each of those "characters" is actually a two-layer graphical tile!

Imagine that every glyph is really a 9x16 pixel tile, then you'll see.  Yep, the animated smoke is actually just changing the tiles that are displayed.  The stars and the the menu texts and smoke are all separate layers of tiles, and can even have different tile-rendering modes.

For example: The animated menu selection cursors are "text-sprites" -- Imagine them as a layer of tiles that can be composited, or "patched" atop the base tile set.  The tiles can even change over time as if they were frames of a sprite.

This means you could design part of this coop game's world to have various "stages".  A City could have: Normal, Destroyed, under repair states, and the engine can select between them.  I even worked on optimizing the tile renderer so that the tiles can change many times per second. So, If you want, you can even animate the tiles changing in real time -- That's how I made the smoke and bugs and lighting effects in the InvadeRL intro -- It's 100% Tile-Based!  Also press 'B' to see the lighting visualization debug render mode.

Edit: Oh, I noticed I broke the zoom scale feature that detects your browser window size.  Just use the scroll wheel to adjust zoom in this case.

Just an update to let you know we're still kicking.

(http://vortexcortex.com/output/image/fun-with-tiles.gif)

I got music and sound effects working, as well as rudimentary tile placement in the online version. It's not quite ready for public consumption yet, but I'm making steady progress on the code.

I'm experimenting with using marching squares to automatically stitch tiles together to speed up manual tile placement.

These metallic hole tiles are WIP, and actually not for this project -- Just using them here to see if the diagonal stitching is working.  Also the upper left corner configuration indicates we may want at least two different layers of tiles:  A base layer for the ground stuff, and another to place walls on (so we don't have to make a million base tiles each time we want one partial tile atop a background tile).

We may not end up using any diagonals for this project, but my engine will support it.

It sounds like it is coming along well Vortex! Great to hear some more. Sorry i have been so inactive lately but I had exams which won't be over for another month or two. Looking forward to getting my teeth sunk into something after then though! Well done for keeping it going.

Now working on the streaming tile renderer and multi-level coordinate system.
(http://vortexcortex.com/output/image/infiniscroller.png)

This shot shows the debug "engine coordinates" output of each 16x16 block of tiles.  Each different color 16x16 area is a section of cached tiles.  If a section of tiles has been rendered recently it's not re-drawn or recomputed: The cache is used as the screen scrolls seemlessly.  The effect is that loading time for user created patches is diminished to be unnoticeable (pre-fetching), and rendering speed is increased.

Also, tiles wrap at the edge of the world and we can scroll at sub-tile resolution, ie, don't have to scroll a full tile at a time.

The caching and coordinate systems affect gameplay indirectly: The limits of the tile coordinates, and bandwidth costs will determine how big we can make the game world.

Some more experimenting must be done, but currently I plan on supporting a game world with up to enough tiles to cover the surface of the Earth, to scale.  Eg: If each tile is 1m (~3ft) in width and height, then we'll need to support about 40 million x 40 million tiles to contain a to-scale tile based version of Earth.  A copy of Earth in tile form wouldn't be very procedural -- well, I could use OpenCV to search among the 4 billion over-world seeds to find a close match to Earth, I suppose, but that would defeat the purpose, eh?.

I'm not sure what max world size would be best from a gameplay perspective.  We may need to do a much smaller planet instead.  Scrolling 40 mil tiles at 20 screens every minute (3sec per 40 tile wide (640px) screen) would take 3.8 years to go all the way around the planet once (that's 7.2kph or 4.5 mph), and you'd need to do that over a million times to see the whole planet -- Or, it would take over a million people playing non stop for 3.8 years to explore the whole thing.  Though the engine could theoretically support a much larger world, this seems a large enough, so that'll be the upper limit I'd say.


Next I'll begin merging the tile placement code with the infiniscroller code. That means we should have something to play with soon -- After that we'll be fleshing out the details of the procedural tile placement systems.

Great! Would be brilliant to achieve full world mapping 5 years down the line as a global goal. Haha. But i think it makes more sense to have some sort of region system with the ability to progressively move between regions instantly? Like teleportation or just a vehicle system. Or just mounts? Some way of moving through the vast landscape. Unless we had an overworld like FFI