Awesome, I love you guys <3
You might want to generate the caves as the player digs them rather than generating a huge area which of the player can only occupy 1% of at a time.
You'll probably need to create some form of chunking of the map.
Maybe make a big grid that contains smaller grids and as the player digs deeper you could just keep the current occupied grid and 8 neighbours in memory.
One grid unit could be lets say 64x64 tiles.
Whenever the player digs near enough to a new (undiscovered) grid it'll be generated. Most of the time it'll just be ground. Sometimes a small cave or air bubbles in that. Sometimes you'll generate a bigger cavern that spans more than one grid. Or sometimes something special, maybe a big fat monster that shoots lasers and devours the ground nearby to feed the ever building need for energy for the laser. Whatever you can think of
With flash you could even save the map easily by just punching the map data into a bytearray (if it's not already) and compressing it and storing it in the sharedobject. You might need a helper class for this that stores the x and y position of the grid and the mapdata itself.
If you need to google this, try
serialization as3 class for the search.
Jolly good work so far though
That sounds complicated. I'm not sure that infinite maps would be necessary, but they sure would be neat! But that sounds like one of the things I might do post-release, right now I'm just working on a bare-bones playable release. Updates after that will have a lot more cool stuff, like infinite maps.
Well, I'm also using a fairly barebones-for-then, 4 year old netbook, too. I'll have to try the power-up inclusive version to see if that changes playtime, because that's about the only balance tweak I can see being a thing so far - why generate an entire 800-tile-deep cave if you barely have time to squeak directly through 250 tiles of it?
Having the powerups, especially the bombs and extra batteries, will likely change that a bit, however. If it's at the scale I'm guestimating, you may be able to get away with generating something closer to 500 x 500 tiles (essentially producing ~1/3 of your current level's area), for a fitting gameplay experience that loads in 20 seconds or so. Especially considering the curse offsets.
In the end I'll be making it possible to choose map size. It will probably be something like 200*200 (generates in seconds), 400*400 (a little longer), and 800*800 (huge, but takes about a minute). I'm working on improving the method for generating it, as I'm sure there's a way to make it more efficient.
As for the proportion of energy to size, I've implemented a new algorithm that makes the caves much bigger and more linked, more gigantic cave systems that can go all the way from the top of the map to the bottom without digging. It's pretty great, I like it. Also, of course, there will be methods to get energy. As well as the chests, I'm thinking of adding an ore that is rarer than gold and gives you energy when you mine it.
Salutations!
I really like this game so far. Absolutely oozing with character. And yeah, I had a large amount of time given for building it too.
Ahahaha I have no idea why it's oozing with character
I just made graphics that I hoped wouldn't cause people to gouge their eyes out, I'm no artist
But thanks!
Good day!
The chests don't give a good indication of what they had when you open them.
Yeah, they aren't done yet. By the time they're done they'll have a little sprite pop out of them to show what you have, as well as a different sound for each treasure.
This is pretty neat and frenetic, but my eyes hurt because the game's screenspace was the size of my fist and on a white background. Is there any way we could play this on double or triple size? Or that it could be put on a proper webpage?
It's basic so far but you have a few basic goals and a lose condition, which is mroe then a lot of early-build games can say. I wish there was more to do/find, maybe objects to find/study or/and enemies to fight. Looking forward to see where you're going with this game!
Sorry about the background, I'm just using dropbox and I don't think I have very much control over that. I could make it twice the size, or host it on swfcabin which has a background that's easier on the eyes. I don't really have a 'proper' webpage to put it on.
I'll probably add in more to do in a later version. Aside from the gold, chests, mushrooms, etc, I'll probably have fossils you need to mine out precisely, ruins that contain treasure aplenty, and maybe a few aesthetic creatures. I'm trying to avoid adding enemies though- the only threat will be your constantly draining power supply.
Thanks for all the great feedback guys!
P.S. Here's a peek at the new caves:
Instead of
Much more cavelike if I do say so myself