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Hi all. Decided I'd finally sit down and write out what I'm working on. Atm the game is called Ranger because I'm not a creative person, its essentially a roguelike with a twist. Half-assed design I wrote in notepad follows:

You play as a ranger defending a forest from monsters. The monsters invade and slowly kill the forest. You kill them with arrows.

Gameplay consists primarily of top-down turn-based roguelike action, with a focus on ranged combat and potions.

Main twist is that your character doesn't get much stronger with experience, the key to growth is instead access to better arrows and potions, both of which are gathered from your grove, at the center of the forest.

Better arrows could simply do more damage, but could also include various status affecting arrows, like flame or freeze arrows. Potions would include both the simple heal-you type and the thrown grenade type, which can cause ground effects like slippery or burning ground.

You gain access to better gear by planting different seeds in the grove, which grow into trees which provide you with gear. Seeds are gained by succeeding in encounters (ie fighting off orcs cutting down trees, or completing a dungeon). The growth of trees can be improved by using dead enemies as fertilizer.

I have some thoughts about planting trees next to each other to cross-pollinate as a method for getting fancier seeds, but I haven't really thought that through very far.

Basically the game is two-part:

1. Kill monsters in dungeons/fields.
2. Look after plants.

I'm working in XNA, and using Oryx's lofi set (duh). This is my first not-intended-to-be-total-shite game, so hopefully it won't end in tears.

Here's the link for the game, it will require the XNA 3 runtime from Microsoft, so go ahead and grab that too.

http://drop.io/lh87jjl/asset/ranger-zip (http://drop.io/lh87jjl/asset/ranger-zip)

*fix'd topic icon

latest picture actually showing game:
(http://i50.tinypic.com/2v9yfdz.png)

latest picture of exciting menus:
(http://i45.tinypic.com/zajbb.png)

updates:

1. made shot arrows tie back to inventory items, added inventory, made map for grove, added player death
2. added animated tiles
3. can pick up items now
4. added world map, can transition between world map and grove map (and by extension hopefully other maps), fixed player behaviour on world map (should not be able to shoot/interact w/ stuff)
5. added fonts, transparency, fixed nastiness with default tiles
6. replaced ui sidepanel font w/ oryx font, started work on inventory screen
7. finished inventory work for now, inventory functional for arrows, can switch between arrows while playing using number keys
8. adding planting spots, part of planting screen, lots of refactoring to reduce coding pain
9. trees grow in planting spots, half of planting screens now done, large amount of backend stuff for both seeds and fruit done
10. done lots of stuff, 1st release out

List of known issues:

* No scrolling in inventory when carrying more items than can fit onto screen.
* Item names on side panel can overrun the edge of the screen
* Tree names on the planting status screen can run into the tree image
* No saving/loading
* Arrow effects don't do anything
* Slow/Stop on monsters does nothing

There are probably heaps more of these as the game isn't really finished, I just rushed it out to meet the deadline. Hopefully I'll pick it up again in a while and start polishing it into something more playable.

A WILD SCREENSHOT APPEARS!
(http://i48.tinypic.com/256gtq0.png)

Note that the crummy text on the side won't stay there, also I'll probably get around to putting alpha in so characters don't get drawn on black backgrounds.

Figured I'd give a status update; I've written a bunch of the code for handling items, to the point where you have a limited arrow supply which ties back to a specific type of arrow in your inventory, instead of the shoot button magically creating them out of nowhere. Additionally, I made a map for the grove (still need to set up animated terrain tiles, but otherwise that's sorted).

Also I made it so enemies can hurt and kill the player, triggering a game over screen.

I was just looking at this before you bumped. I have to say, it really captured me. At first I was like "another Oryx game!?" But then I was like, "hey, that's kinda good."

Lol, keep at it, it's sure to be awesome.

I love the farming/husbandry mechanic - looking forward!

yes, great concept. Hope you get time to do the tree breeding stuff!

I do love the concept, kind of a mix between Necromancer (C64) and Horde (...and a rougelike).

I'm looking forward to what comes out of this. Good luck!

Thanks for all the support, I was bit worried that this would sink into obscurity due to the giant pile of roguelikes being done (which is totally awesome).

I've added animated terrain, and that's all, because I'm sleepy. Also screenshot:
(http://i49.tinypic.com/1183dwy.png)

This is pretty much how the grove will look (although no skeletons). There'll also be dirt patches scattered around the ruins in the middle for planting trees.

Oh and that river is animated now, I just cbf making a gif of it. Maybe tomorrow I'll load in one of the delicious sprite fonts made for this compo, or get to work on transitioning to an overland map, or maybe pop-up event dialogy stuff. I think I'll try developing stuff in the order players will see it, so maybe some kind of intro dialog thing. Also I should probably overhaul the menus, since they're all sample XNA stuff and thus don't really fit in very well.

Anyway, I will make more stuff at some point in the near future, then I will post about it. Maybe I'll even get around to posting playable stuff.

Yours has enough of a twist I don't think you have a problem of obscurity. Unless it turns out to weird. In which case you can replace obscurity with notoriety.

I like the idea of developing in player order. As a player you will have a better understanding of what is needed coming from that perspective. Also, you ensure that the first X minutes of play will be amazing, X being how many minutes you get around to implementing. For instance, if you manage to only create 10 minutes of play, and people stop after 8 minutes, they will think your game is totally amazing, because you front-loaded everything :)

Got more stuff done. Major excitement is that I can now generate some arrows on the ground, have the player pick them up, then start shooting them. Also it doesn't crash when I fire off maps that are the maximum size possible (stupid off by one errors). I think I wrote some framework stuff for transitioning between maps, but I've forgotten it so I'll probably have to write it again tomorrow.

Hopefully more will get done tomorrow, what with not having to go to work.

Got transitions between the world map and the grove map working, which by extension should mean that transitions to and from the world map should generally work, I just don't really have anything but those two going atm.

Also fixed stuff so you can't shoot/use things on the world map.

I've started putting together an inventory screen, however it doesn't make much sense to do this until I get fonts sorted out, so I'll probably be doing that later tonight or tomorrow some time.

Got transparency working. Turned out I had switched it off early to test something, and just forgot to turn it back on. Also fixed a nasty issue with default tiles (ie the ones that are drawn when there isnt anything there, esp. for edge of map), which caused horrible performance issues (using exceptions for control flow inside drawing code is a really, really bad idea, yet for some reason I thought it would be cool).

Also, fonts are now working, as can be seen below:
(http://i48.tinypic.com/2i6f2gg.png)

*note that this does not mean that this game will feature lions in any way, shape or form.

Sorry for the long time since last update, I blame books and television.

I've removed the last remnants of the old font, so now all text is done with Oryx's fixed-width font. I've also started work on the inventory screen. Hopefully it will be fairly solid by the time I post my next update. At the moment you can just switch between different tabs in your inventory.

Excited to play this! Seems to have the makings of a nice, focused little game.

Well, that didn't go as planned.

Don't really have a good excuse, just started watching tv and didn't really stop.

I got a fair bit of inventory stuff done last night, and finished off the current inventory stuff tonight. It only deals with arrows thus far because I've only fleshed out arrows enough to deserve an inventory, but adding in other stuff should be fairly trivial once I decide on their data structure.

I've also added in switching between arrow types while playing because doing the inventory stuff wouldn't make much sense without that.

(http://i45.tinypic.com/27yn6ue.png)

*arg forgot to disable interpolation when scaling pic, now its all fuzzy

Good twist!  I look forward to trying it out.

Ok, finally started on the planting stuff, since thats what everyone seems interested in. At the moment its fairly bare, as I'm just setting things up, but you can get some idea of what the planting menu will look like from the screens below (also added a current screenshot of the grove to show the newly added planting spots).

(http://i45.tinypic.com/311un39.png)

In this you can see the planting spots (they're the deserty tiles, I may make them look more dirt-like by tinting the image). You should also note the numbers down the right-hand side of the screen. These show what you have equipped (I really should have picked up those arrows to show this). You can use them both to switch between arrow types, and to use fruits (which will function as both potions and grenades, depending on whether you use them on yourself or an enemy).

(http://i49.tinypic.com/m8hilh.png)

This is the status screen of the planting menu. Similar config to inventory menu, move through screens with left/right, navigate individual screens with up/down. The status screen will eventually display more than just name and age (and also will hopefully not be just showing you that its slightly aged dirt, which I just realised I should probably fix, as age should only apply to plants). Also, 8x8 pixel images look totally sweet when scaled up to 192x192.

I was thinking with plants I could do a Shin Megami Tensei/Dragon Warrior Monsters style fusion system, whereby you can plant two seeds in one spot to merge their powers. Also when you tell a plant to produce a seed, after producing the seed it stops growing in power, but still produces arrows/fruits.

Cool ideas!

Hmm, thought it was going to be tree-hugging, not dirt-hugging ;)

Growing bombs and arrow-plants in your back yard? That sounds like a winning formula right there.

(http://i49.tinypic.com/sou2hj.png)

Better now?   :gentleman:

WOAH NICE! MAJOR IMPROVEMENT!

Very minor update, wrote some stuff for allowing various fruits, esp. to do with naming them, and having various status effects on them.

Expect many "chilled bananas of alacrity".

Just like ma used to make... :)

Well, it's been a while since my last update, but I have actually been doing some stuff (not as much as I'd like, but that's Christmas for you).

Trees now grow (and get older, w/ different images) in planting spots, however I still haven't gotten the menu for planting stuff finished off, so atm it just forces the plant into the spot when the map is built. Fruits are largely done, although their effects still need to actually do things.

Here you can see the picking stuff from trees menu (it still needs to show you how many picks you have available, but this should be pretty close to final):

(http://i45.tinypic.com/zajbb.png)

Also here you can see a tree just after it has been planted:

(http://i50.tinypic.com/2v9yfdz.png)

Apologies for the interpolation mangling some of the text in these screens, I can't be bothered to use GIMP to do them properly anymore, and I can't figure out how to stop Paint from garbling it.

Well, this has been fun and I've finally got a sort-of-working build, so I'm gonna mark this as finished and you all can give it a try. It may be a little broken, as I got distracted for a couple of weeks and then rushed a whole bunch of stuff into the last two days, and I've cut a whole bunch of stuff out. Anyway, it's kind of playable and you can at least see some of what I was going for.

I also ended up not doing this totally alone as a friend helped me out for these last couple of days (mostly writing the dungeon generation code).

Anyway, here's the link:
http://drop.io/lh87jjl/asset/ranger-zip (http://drop.io/lh87jjl/asset/ranger-zip)

Have fun and please reply w/ feedback.

I happened to kill a goblin on the exit stairs and after picking up his loot, the tile he was on turned into floor.  I was trapped forever.  :monoclepop:

Oh my!

I know exactly why that happens and it's probably going to be a pain in the arse to fix. So will fix it later.

Thanks for the heads up.

Greetings sir, I like your game's concept, it's really interesting and I played it for a while.  And I dominated.   :handanykey::biglaff::handjoystick:

After a while I noticed a few things.

1. It is possible to "run out of things to do" (You can clear out all the dungeons, then what fun is the game?)  To "fix" that, perhaps make dungeon(s) that go on forever, they don't even have to remember the previous floors that you've already explored.  A "Hole of Heros" sort of deal.

2. The monster assortments are.. lacking.. I've only experienced the green humanoids with clubs (and their armored forms), green humanoids without clubs (and their armored forms) and a red-robed wizard that drops seeds.  Perhaps make enemies that move twice as fast?  Maybe immune to certain effects, or even arrows!  Perhaps a "look" command so you can see your foes in the distance instead of letting them get within arm's reach before checkin' them out. ;)

3. I was only able to find seeds for spicy orange trees, so.. I don't know if I'm just unlucky or something or if there aren't any other seeds to drop.

4. Is freeing supposed to do anything?  It didn't do anything for me.  It just made a huge white block (presumably ice) over the enemies, they don't seem to stop or even slow down.  I don't know if this is a bug or what.

If you've heard of them, I'm a LPer ("Let's Player") and I'm looking for a few games to play in the meantime while I'm not playing Paper Mario TTYD.  If this game was improved a bit, I'd definately play it.  If you don't want me to make videos on the game (which would be posted on youtube) and link to your game's download (so the players can play along, perhaps) then you can say so in this topic.

Anyways, thanks for reading! ~BB

This one doesn't work for me. It just crashes immediately. I'm on WindowsXP with a crappy gfx card, and I've got all the latest xna stuff installed. :shrug2: