welcome one welcome all. Most of all, welcome ME! to this blog that i will be maintaining! Hopefully.
I've been working on a video's game recently. And the way things are going, i might need a cool & stylish place to show stuff off once i, um, have stuff to show off. This is the place. But i'm not the kind of person who'll show you scraps and lint, you see. Anyone can make a character move around on a screen! So let's wait together until my hands conjure up something substantial to show.
Okay, it's not like i'm planning to update this thing every day, or even every week, but i've kind of been itching to put some thoughts in a relevant place. Also, i've browsed some webbed sites here and it's always so sad where the only thing on the website is "ooh i'm going to add things! later!". I get why it happens, but i don't want my site to be like that >.>
Soooo i wanna talk videogame inspirations for a sec. The main reason i am making a game is because there's a bunch of specific things i love about games, but not enough games that use, let alone combine them. SOMEONE has to fix this!
One of these things is an approach to making sandboxy games -- a very specific and very curious strategy of adding lots of funny and redundant items and item interactions. It's very hard to explain it properly, because it's kind of a thing that just emerges on its own sometimes, i guess when a bored developer decides "i'm coding stuff for this game anyway, i can add funny things while i'm at it". But i'm talking about the cases when it becomes a part of the game's identity. The biggest example is Space Station 13 -- it revels in giving the players lots of silly and stupid items, as well as having LOTS of interactions that are not technically needed. But, to be fair, all the interactions and tiny funny features in the game make sense -- and they actually add to the gameplay without sacrificing the themes. Why WOULDN't you be able to use a screwdriver on a laser gun to pluck out its battery and replace it with a better one? Why WOULDN'T you be able to slip a small item into the dough when baking a cake?
This is why i wonder why it's not a thing that everyone does in sandbox games -- it definitely adds some substance to the experience. I guess it requires complex enough game systems to implement these funny things, which are only found in some games. And maybe more importantly, adding tons of funny useless things and interactions requires a sort of reckless approach that is not often present when people try to make a game that actually works. So this is something i've only seen in relatively niche games made by people who want to prioritize making a game fun and cool -- SS13, yes, but voices of the void is another example, and also, to an extent, traditional roguelikes have this sort of sandboxiness to them: Caves of Qud and Elona are the ones that come to mind. Generally, if the game gives you the ability to chuck any item you're holding at your enemy, it's probably got at least a bit of that kind of delicious interactivity to it.
Phew. Did i articulate that in a way that doesn't hurt to understand? Whatever, it's my blog anyway. And yes, i've coded in an item throwing system for my game >:3
Very happy of how it's shaping up, even if it'll take a while before i'll have something substantial to show.
About time i started to keep an actual log! I suppose it is time i gave at least a basic explanation on the game i'm trying to etch into existence.
I want to make a roguelite with heavy sandbox elements. You go into a dungeon, vastly outnumbered, but equipped with a loadout of magic spells and tools of your choosing -- a bunch of aces up your sleeve, in case the good ol' fists won't be enough. I am calling it specifically roguelite, an not roguelike, because i want to make the assortment of possible loadout items and spells expand as you play the game more. The world is tile-based, and therefore very destructible if you have the means. The dungeons themselves are comprised of a single floor -- no real progression or boss fights, instead your goal is to explore the whole floor without dying to all the traps and foes it's packed with. There's actually a specific mechanic planned that is meant to tie it all together and give the dungeon run meaning besides just sandboxy fun, but i think it's too early to talk about it -- i don't want to brag too much about things that i didn't achieve yet.
The game as a whole is very inspired by the roguelikes of old -- the game Rogue and the like. The ones that were tile-based, turn-based, sporting RPG elements like a proper inventory. Except i'm also a fan of the modern roguelike, and dynamics-wise i'm hoping to achieve something closer to Enter the Gungeon. Not bullet hell or anything, though! Just, the general feel of the motion to implement instead of turn-based shenanigans.
The videogame that is closest to my concept and already exists would probably be Streets of Rogue -- it's wonderfully sandboxy and generally offers the same stealthy-or-rash experience i'm trying to weave. However, i'm going for a heavily magical dungeon feel, and generally i'm in no way planning to copy notes from that cool game's book. It does offer some insight into what a similar work might look like when it's complete, and serves as a wonderful reference point on what i do and do not want to achieve. Just decided to give it a shoutout, because at some point when coming up with the idea for my game i was like "Wait, a tile-based roguelike with destructibility exists already! I have like 50 hours in it!".
Okay, now onto the devlog itself. These last few days i've been actively working on the inventory system, and all the basic but deceptively simple features like preventing item duplication and dragging items around GUIs are done. It's been around a month, maybe a month and a half since i started developing this game, and so far you can walk around, pick items up and fiddle with your inventory, chuck or drop items and bonk into tile-based walls. Fun! !
Next on the agenda is making an items system worthy of a real videogame. I'll need to write lots of groundwork code that handles having a newly initialized item define a bunch of stuff just from an ID it gets on inintialization: it'll need to get all of its parameters, plus load up a collision mesh and a sprite, plus rummage in the resources folder and pull out a few pieces of code to attach to itself based what kind of item it is. For example, a potion needs all the functionality related to being made out of a fragile amorphous solid(known as the "glas") and holding cool magical liquids inside. A steel sword does NOT need the functions and variables exclusive to a potion, and will instead load up extra code with information on fancy attack animations, as well as extra sprites and collision meshes of these attacks. Thankfulsly, Godot handles all the heavy lifting with its useful node system. All i need to do is... heavy thinking. Sigh. Still, this is going way better than i expected! I've never videod a game before.
Did you like my spiderlizardcricket eating a burger in the previous post? She is so talented. She will not be in the game, sorry. But in another game, another time? Thirty years from now on, perhaps? wonderful things await. And in case you're a bit tired of all the green, here's a picture with a new and exciting color in it. Just don't get too excited, okay?
