Bay 12 Games Forum

This is actually slightly based off an idea I had for a PC game...

Basically, there are a few characters, and they can do practically anything. The overall goal(and part of this that came from the game idea) is to start a successfull guild/clan/whatever, basically a group of people that often do things for paying customers(sort of like a ffta/ffta2 clan, but the focus being on overall accomplishment rather than building a game around the hero).

Players can join any time there is an applicant, and the overall goal is to do whatever you feel like. However, I intend, though player actions could change it, for the goal to be generally along the lines of establishing a presence and self-improvement. That includes things ike gaining popularity, or researching magic, or anything else you or I can think of.

It will start off slow, but later on a turn may be an in-game week or something, to prevent it from getting too boring if it starts to take too long for simple things.

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You are one of five friends who recently decided to go out into the world and actually accomplish something. After months of travel towards the capital of the known world, you unanimously stop, merely 38% of the way there. It is just taking too long, and you couldn't really accomplish anything there anyway, at least not without a reputation to build on.

So, you construct a very small building, and set out to make a presence for yourselves. There is a small village a day to the east by foot, and mountains two days to the south. You are in a lightly wooded forest.

What is your name?

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In-character knowledge:
Magic exists, and anyone can use it, but it takes decades of training and you must show great talent for one of the main academies to let you in. Nonetheless, some people try to learn it on their own. This often fails, sometimes catastrophically, but occasionally succeeds. Sometimes, one such person may even discover, by accident, a previously unexplored branch of magic, and other times two or more have joined together and started their own guild, though they can't do very much compared to a properly educated mage.
Another occupation often only found in officiial students, although sometimes atempted by trial and error is alchemy. In fact, almost every major skill-based trade has organized into a guild of some sort or other, and few have the time to educate students wiith less potential. All of them have imitatators who couldn't get in but tried to learn on their own. Often, one could become practiced enough to be allowed in for true education.

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Your characters have no particular skill in anything(except walking, I guess?) although you can give them an intrest in anything (no actual bonus, but it indicates a possible goal)

Your character needs a name, even if it's your forum name. NPCs will just assume it's something normal, so don't bother trying to come up with something if you don't feel like it.

If you really wanted to, you could go off and play this like DF adventure mode, or turn it into a RTS, but to start, it's the described situation.

Well, I had an idea for a game while I was reading the last two hundred or so posts of Monster Defence (A few pages at 50 posts per page, but as not everybody calls 50 posts a page...).

It would be a similar game, but in theme only.

My idea for the backstory is something along the lines of the universe running out of energy slowly, but a few teams of scientists tried to find ways to counter it. An early effort found a way to store people in quantum crystal matrixes, to be restored later, and it was used so that civilization may be revived later, once the energy issues had been solved, or not have to watch the universe die. Many hundreds of years later or so, one team (The players) had managed to discover a design based on a singularity composed of some purely artificial matter that slowly produces energy at no cost (perpetual energy), though slowly, and the production of that matter requires massive quantities of energy. Hundreds of years later (No such thing as death by old age, having been eliminated long ago), they finally have enough to create a reactor with net energy gain and no running cost. However, during that time, another team had tried to make a way for people to no longer require an external source of energy to survive. It worked well enough that they all used it, but after a few years, it was starting to cause in imbalance in their brains, making them practically zombies. Somehow, they manage to get involved, probably accidentally, in a project to make temporal clones and then decouple the timeline, basically duplicating the object. Some generic reason should prevent it from being usable, or maybe just less useful than the protagonist's. And it should somehow be unhealthy to use on almost anything, but the zombies are relatively unharmed.

The game would take place on an isometric map centered around the prototype reactor, and the game should take place in two playstyles, one where time passes slowly, turn-based, during combat, and another, non-combat, where time passes much faster.

The point of the game would be survival while protecting the reactor. Maybe even building a second, though that would be a very long term goal.

The backstory ensures a potentially unlimited source of zombies, and a method of inserting players mid-game.

Some other technology might be some sort of resource processors that can strip useful materials from rubble, zombies, and anything else, but either inefficiently or slowly.

There is guarenteed to be a large loss of technological competency, that can be recovered somehow. Maybe an early, unexpected, attack corrupted the knowledge database, and by that date the scientists had a robotic manufacturer produce anything they needed. That manufacturer would probably make a good secondary critical structure, that the game would be lost without. MAybe not, though. I'm thinking that both critical structures should be repairable with spare parts and knowledge, neither of those available initially, but easily accuired at the cost of time that could have gone into other developments.

The overall goal of the game would be to present open-ended strategic gameplay merged with a more tactical resource management mode. That way, maybe some players will like one part, others would like the other, so some characters may not even fight, and others might only fight (Others would do both, I guess).


This will not be an RTD, especially since I already have an RTD, and I will get around to updating it *eventually*.

Edit: Forgot to add, for now this is just discussing it, and considering the idea before I actually start it.

Does anyone still play?

(I started a new thread for it since the old one is best described as a megathread, exactly what will *not* draw new readers)

I have a slowly growing selection of computer programs, but don't really know how to start making something that sounds even 10% decent.

I am not requesting people to be creative for me, but some advice on where to start would be immensely helpful.

I, in the intrest of trying to kill everyone in the world, downloaded a fresh copy of 40d16, and generated a 17x17 world, with max 2 years of history.

I started an adventurer, and soon went off to the elves to start the slaughter.

I don't know what caused it, but none of the keys work anymore, and clicking the close button doesn't close. Not even the help button works, and it is supposed to work everywhere except the help-spam screen, if I remember last time I looked at it.

Edit: forgot to mention: The post-death "realtime" part was working fine, by the elf archer druid standing over my corpse, the only issue was that no input, keyboard or mouse, was getting any response from DF.

Edit again: Happened twice more. Both of these with the same character, since I had retired after a kill to check the legends.

Okay, there is how this works:

You must post legal C code, in such a way that if I were to stick it all in one file, with appropriate function prototypes so that order doesn't matter, the only errors it gets is linker errors for undefined functions. What that means, is use legal C syntax, and throw in descriptively-named functions wherever you don't feel like writing the details.

In theory, what we will end up with, once all of the placeholder functions are written, is the most unexpected mass of feature-creep that is still barely able to compile.

Example: I define
int main(int argc,char *argv[])
{
    doStartup(argc,argv);
    while(keepRunning())
    {
        loopCode();
    }
    doEndStuff();
}Then someone else starts adding to it, with
void loopCode()
{
    log_text("Ohai\n");
    calculate_physics(&player);
    create_enemies();
    do_input_stuff();
    draw_it_all();
}
Then as paeople go along, the end result is a crazy collection of diffrent styles, intentions and other stuff that makes countless memeory leaks, the occasional core dump, and a great example of what NOT to do.

Finally, with common consent, earlier code may be edited for any reason.

Okay, lets start.

We must decide between win32, console, or other, as it will greatly impact the potential features.

Only limit is that it must be commnly available C, and as a bare minimum, compiled on windows with MinGW and less than 10 MB of external library downloads(If everybody agrees, any of these limits may be negated, or new ones added).

I was sort of inspired by all of the success around here that I decided to make my own game as well. It will be heavily inspired by Metroid, especially the two GBA ones.

Here is the current font, once I add numbers, it should be good enough for now. Anyone can use it, in any way, except to claim it as their own.


Other than that, I have some fairly decent image manipulation functions, that gives enough that it can be used for a tile based game.

Idea: Fractional modifiers of the form n/6, where a d6 is rolled and if it is less than or equal to n, you get a +1, otherwise a +0. So an advanced but not perfected skill would be +1+(4/6) rather than using integer jumps of +1 then a long time later +2, or purely statistical advantages to fill the gap.

Next, onto the actual game.

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Teleporter malfunction:
-Memory regeneration module damaged.
-Damage unrepairable.
Disregarding Error: Priority transit.
...
...
Transfer complete.
...
Warning: Unable to materialize load:
-Too large.
-Commencing temporal dispersal planning
--Success. Will release each cargo as the previous has exited the regeneration chamber.
...
...
...
~~~~~~~
(You are one of the people being delivered. Due to rematerialization issues, you have no memory of why you are here, or any more than the most basic skills. However, some abilities may restore with time. Abilities in this sense means skills like computer programming. The teleporter's rematerializer is unable to bring in more than one player per turn, though the waiting list is potentially infinite. I just throw an error in when I feel too many people are playing, and the teleporter automatically will shut down, but it has saved the matter patterns in protected storage, so that nothing short of a nuke will damage the patterns. A fusion nuke. With a bit of godnium thrown in to boost the power. OOC explaination: The teleporter will shut down when I feel like it, but nobody on the waiting list will be lost because of it)

Edit: Should post signup info: NOTHING, except a will to play! You can make up your name and reveal it once you play.