This looks really good! Following! (better late than never)
Cheers and welcome
Update:Last week we started to finalise the list of all the creatures that may be in the game. To this list we've removed some old creatures and added new ones. It's sad to let the old ones go, but I'm excited about all the new variations we'll have, such as Maverick, a laser shooting horse from the void.
Here are some of the new creatures that will appear in the final game: Bullfrog (small brown frog), Crystal Hound, Red Komodo, Rhino (a variation of Brute), Sewer Grot, Bloat, Tesseract, Leech.
Most of this are just variations of existing creatures. For example The Tesseract is an emerald-coloured snow menace, that shoots a healing ray instead of an ice ray. Variations can also include new parts/sprites, so the Red Komodo may have a spined collar, for example. Like with the armour variations, this allows us to add more creature types with less work. Here are some old concepts of snail variations, showing how this recolouring and redrawing might work:
For the volcano level we've started to redesign and simplify the demons. Ig and pig have been redesigned and have another friend. Here's pigg running around.
With most of this stuff Alex will do a bunch of different concepts and then we discuss which one will work best. Here are some concepts for the Forge Wanderer. We decided to go with a variation of the first one, which is simpler and has more clear shapes.
After a discussion with Alex I started to think more about how the game will all fit together, and I've come up with a basic model. It revolves around the idea of 'setups' and 'situations'. A situation is an event, conflict, obstacle, reward, or interaction you may encounter, and a setup is a precondition that would help with that. For example:
A tomb in Mesa contains a treasure, but is filled with a horde of cursed hounds. Luckily, the player found a seam of silver ore in the forest and so has a silver helmet, which resists cursing.
The situation there is "cursed creatures" and the setup is "silver in forest". By creating many of these situations and setups, arranged in a big network, I think we'll be able to give the game some structure. Situations could also be positive, for example: a locked chest is a situation that requires a key as a setup. Difficulty of the game could be adjusted by associating difficulty levels with situations and setups. A 'gold ore' setup could be made to be more difficult by hiding the gold ore in a rare place, or surrounding the ore with aggressive foes. The cursed creatures situation could be made more or less difficulty by reducing the number of cursed creatures.
Until now I've been thinking about the game as a whole, trying to imagine how all the resources and items interact with each other in one complete game. But by breaking it down into these small pairs of setup/situation, I can finally start to comprehend how a single game will play out. Sometime soon, within the next two months I'll start to put this into action.
We are aiming to get the first linux alpha out by the end of this week. @BananaboySam has been working diligently and the main thing we need to figure out is how to effectively package the game so it works across multiple distributions.
Community
