Hello there fellow bay12ers.
I am Killjoy, I am pretty new on these forums, but nevertheless I want to share my latest personal programming sideproject with you all! This thread will be the development/update thread. I plan to add development posts where I show the process of developing specific game features.
I honestly have no great plan for how I want to go about doing this, nor do I have any plan about what I want the end product to look like. Perhaps I will figure something out along the way. For now I just want to have a game about trading in a extremely hostile and random world.
Please note that English is not my native language, so no need to berate me for making mistakes.
The premiseThe game is pretty simple at its core.
You play a merchant, stuck in a procedurally generated fantasy world. Your goal is to trade, establish trade routes and create industry.
Simple huh?
TechnologyThe game will be written in Java, as the development will double as some Java development experience.
I am by no means a Java expert.. My foundation is c/c++, and at work I work with python.
Update logDay_1: Below
Day_2:
post Day_3:
post Day_4:
post Day_5:
post Day_6:
post Day_7:
post Day_8:
post Day_9:
post Day_1Let us start by making a window. It is not much, but it is a start.
An empty window is pretty boring, and hardly anything gamelike. Perhaps I should start by making a terrain. I decided on a pretty retro style, by iterating through each point on the terrain drawing a pixel directly above the terrain point. This way I can just use the terrain offset to create a cheap and retro looking graphics style.
Okay, if you think this looks like a square, then you are right. I have not added any height variation yet, but lets try tot add some random perlin noise to the 'terrain'.
Personally I think this looks extremely boring, this is technically three dimensional, so lets add some rotation.
Great, now I can spin the whole thing around. This will help exploring the terrain later. I think it's time to stresstest the whole thing, so I increased the mapsize to 1024x1024
Okay, the terrain lacks detail. You cannot even see it is three dimensional, as it just looks like a green blob. The terrain should change color depending on what height it has for now, I should just try with some simple color scheme.
It still looks a bit bland. So perhaps adding water will give that much needed definition to the terrain.
Water did make it much more interesting to look at, I found a pretty cool cove. But the terrain itself still lacks detail. I thought long and hard about this, and decided I should try using something called normal mapping. The details are not really important, but basically, things facing the "sun" should be more illuminated than things not facing the sun. Perhaps that will give me the much needed detail.
Okay, that did the trick! The terrain looks pretty cool now. I doubt I will want to work on it more. Now that I have a simple game world, I should throw some random cities(okay, just points, with names) around the map and see how it looks.
This looks pretty neat. The city Nyvy has taken the cool bay/cove like feature I found earlier, and it looks like the city of Rumsa is guarding the bay and city of Xulrullug. All the city names are basically generated from a short list of consonants and vowels, in the future I might want to add some more sophisticated name generation.
Anyway, that is all I managed to make today. Anyway, feel free to leave a post, I would like some suggestions to how the gameplay itself will play out.
My next task will be to actually add some city rendering, and perhaps add calculate some trade routes between cities!
