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Author Topic: Mongrelmen - ascii RTS/town builder in development  (Read 18551 times)

pat

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Mongrelmen - ascii RTS/town builder in development
« on: January 08, 2015, 08:40:00 pm »

Hi Bay12, for the last few months I've been working on a game inspired by Goblin Camp, which you might recall was inspired by Dwarf Fortress with an emphasis on a streamlined UI. I figured this would be the best community to post about a project like this and the most likely place to find people who might be interested in the game.

It's a roguelike-inspired real-time strategy/town builder game. The focus of the game is complex AI and their interactions between various factions, hostile or otherwise. You control a tribe of mongrelmen who start in the wilderness around a totem from where they spawn. Throughout the map initially is various threats like humans, kobolds and wolves, but soon more dangerous enemies begin to arrive and pose a real threat to the safety of your group. Orcs in particular act very aggressively but there's much more lethal monsters out there.

Resource gathering is fairly simplistic at this stage - I've deliberately abstracted out the concept of stockpiles and different types of resources. Currently there's only food, wood and bone as potential objects to collect but that will be expand over time. Instead of that aspect of the game, I've tried to work on interesting and varied AI - currently different creatures react differently to various scenarios and they all exhibit different behaviour. Kobolds for instance will avoid combat unless they see they have overwhelming numbers. Mongrelmen are braver but not by much. Orcs don't care about what odds they face and will always seek out a fight. All creatures show different behaviours when they aren't in combat and they go about their business on the map if left undisturbed. Liches go around raising unattended corpses. Shamans throw fireballs and heal allies. Most humans pathetically cower from everything. Carnivores feast on their fallen enemies (or former friends). Peaceful herbivores graze harmlessly. There's even a few unique enemies which I've started working on, and the initial group I've included are lifted from Dungeon Crawl in the form of Duvessa, Dowan, Grum and Sigmund!

There are elements of city building already in the game - you can construct a walled fort around your totem after collecting enough wood and dig pits to slow down enemies (and mongrelmen) who are trying to invade your base. At the moment you can also build huts but they don't have an in-game function yet. There's a lot more along these lines to come and I think the way it's going to progress is to introduce the concept of religion into the game - mongrelmen will be able to build certain structures devoted to different gods which have subtle (or maybe quite dramatic) effects on gameplay. An example I'm thinking of is that if you kill enough kobolds (say 20 or so) then a branch of buildings are unlocked which you can build to worship whichever god I come up with that hates kobolds. That's probably the next stage of development, along with refining player control of combat situations with the introduction of unique leader mongrelmen who you can control a bit more.

The concept is best shown by way of screenshots and gifs, so here's a whole bunch. Some of these are a little bit older and show the way that development has progressed.

Screenshots:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Gifs:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

You can download the current build of the game here:

https://patjw.itch.io/mongrelmen

The game is coded in python with help from libtcod, and player input is almost entirely by mouse with the use of a few hot-keys. Space bar to pause. Hold right-click to move the map around and left-click to select and interact with units. If you are allocating collection jobs then you can hold down left-click and move the mouse to bulk select tasks.

Let me know what you guys think!
« Last Edit: August 16, 2018, 06:05:31 am by pat »
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dorf

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Re: Mongrelmen - ascii RTS/town builder in development
« Reply #1 on: January 09, 2015, 03:37:52 am »

Welcome and thank you for bringing this to our attention. I, for one, find this game relevant to my interests!

What else is/will be roguelike-inspired, apart from graphics?
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pat

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Re: Mongrelmen - ascii RTS/town builder in development
« Reply #2 on: January 09, 2015, 04:13:19 am »

In a practical sense, it's built on top of a roguelike engine. I started with the bare bones of a simple roguelike and stripped out the player avatar and gave everything an AI working on ticks of time as opposed to waiting for player input. My original plan was to actually have a single player character imperfectly controlled in a haphazard manner by way of mouse in a realtime game.

Obviously it's not turn based and doesn't feature permadeath, but the way it's built is if you can imagine a roguelike game on autopilot - all of the actions and interactions between units is exactly the same as a roguelike game but for it being realtime. There's also procedural generation of unit placement and generation along with a basic random map which will be developed further soon.

Beyond those features, I suppose it's thematically similar to a roguelike with respect to content. It's definitely not a roguelike game though and it's getting further and further away from one.

Antsan

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Re: Mongrelmen - ascii RTS/town builder in development
« Reply #3 on: January 09, 2015, 06:18:39 pm »

PTW, too late to try and make some kind of useful comment.
Looks interesting!
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dorf

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Re: Mongrelmen - ascii RTS/town builder in development
« Reply #4 on: January 10, 2015, 04:24:18 am »

I gave it a go! Most of what I'll say you probably know already. Think of this post as an indication that I like the game.

It feels like it's on auto-pilot and that anything I do/build, won't really affect the outcome.
I found placing the walls tedious because I had to left-click for each wall. So, selecting a larger area would be nice.
In one of the playthroughs the game slowed down noticeably. I imagine that weren't supposed to happen? Unfortunately I don't know why it happened.
When I was looking around for more resources, I caught myself using the mouse scroll button to zoom out.

Can't wait to try out the next releases! I like what you've done so far.
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pat

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Re: Mongrelmen - ascii RTS/town builder in development
« Reply #5 on: January 10, 2015, 06:51:07 am »

Cool, thanks for the feedback. That issue of autopilot is something I'm aware of and that's part of the current development arc. I'm going to give the player more control of the military units so you can choose your battles a bit better and also allow you to recall all workers to the totem so they aren't caught in the open. It should also improve when I expand on the buildings available to the player and add a sense of progression to the game.

The slowdown was probably a horrible bug to do with path finding. That's still a fairly experimental part of the game. Scrolling out probably isn't an option with libtcod - I'm locked into a cell based display which is fairly inflexible. I'm definitely going to allow bulk build controls. I can't see why I shouldn't just allow the player to place long lines or even squares of building jobs by dragging the mouse if they want.

Thanks so much for giving it a go.

pat

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Re: Mongrelmen - ascii RTS/town builder in development
« Reply #6 on: January 10, 2015, 09:14:24 am »

And I just finished bulk build orders and job cancelling. You can now designate straight lines or boxes of whatever jobs you like. It makes building walls and a pit for a moat trivial. With a few clicks you can have a fort under construction as long as you cancel a couple of jobs to leave doorways if you so desire.

It'll be included in the next dev build I release which will probably be tomorrow.

pat

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Re: Mongrelmen - ascii RTS/town builder in development
« Reply #7 on: January 10, 2015, 08:25:36 pm »

I don't think I've made enough progress this week to warrant a new dev build being put out, but here's a gif of the most recent addition to the game - parties of human adventurers:



As you can see, mongrel workers don't fare so well against organised and tough foes like that. I think that party consisted of a wizard, fighter, paladin and cleric but they vary randomly. And just ignore the huge amount of combat messages at the bottom - I turned the spawn rate up by a magnitude of 100 for the screenshot so that's the reason for that.
« Last Edit: January 10, 2015, 08:31:39 pm by pat »
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dorf

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Re: Mongrelmen - ascii RTS/town builder in development
« Reply #8 on: January 11, 2015, 02:12:19 pm »

Is wizard a cat?
It seems most of the time he's either loitering or sleeping!
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Toaster

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Re: Mongrelmen - ascii RTS/town builder in development
« Reply #9 on: January 11, 2015, 02:15:22 pm »

PTW!
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HMR stands for Hazardous Materials Requisition, not Horrible Massive Ruination, though I can understand how one could get confused.
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Tardigrade

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Re: Mongrelmen - ascii RTS/town builder in development
« Reply #10 on: January 11, 2015, 02:19:33 pm »

This looks excellent - real life is probably going to prevent any serious playtesting for while but I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this. Well done!
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pat

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Re: Mongrelmen - ascii RTS/town builder in development
« Reply #11 on: January 16, 2015, 05:17:35 am »

Is wizard a cat?
It seems most of the time he's either loitering or sleeping!

yeah the sleeping mode is probably a bit of a misnomer, every creature shuffles through a few AI's and I just picked a word to describe resting and it doesn't really fit all that well to be honest. Creatures fall asleep during combat and in the middle of tasks, etc but I've left it in because it's a bit funny to me. Loitering is a bit clumsy as well but stays for the same reason.

I've been working on a few issues such as the expansion of the bestiary so that we get a few more monsters appearing randomly. Probably the most interesting is the drow which is a dangerous ranged combat fighter who appears solo.

A big practical change was just finished in relation to the complaint of the game being on "autopilot". I've made it so you can hit the rally hotkey and whichever unit you have selected becomes user controlled and will follow the mouse click. All other friendly units will flock to that one so you can lead charges, rally defences or just walk around with a bit more order. You can even rally your mongrelmen around your inanimate totem to defend it.

Here's an example where "Griss the Idiot" has been chosen as team leader and has rallied the mongrelmen to fight the nearby kobold burrow.



Oh yeah, and in relation to the totem I made it destructible so that you actually need to defend it instead of it spawning new friendly units forever if your tribe was wiped out.

pat

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Re: Mongrelmen - ascii RTS/town builder in development
« Reply #12 on: January 17, 2015, 12:48:24 am »

I just managed to finish the initial step working towards putting religion into the game. The plan is to allow the player to build an altar as a way to worship one of the pantheon of gods, who will then make demands of the player and give certain rewards. Currently, I'm going with Trog (who will give you berserker warriors), Vecna (who will ally you with the undead), Gruumsh (who will ally you with orcs, which is very valuable considering how dangerous they are), and Meriadar (who will be a lot more subtle). Altar construction is in the game and so is the initial god selection. I need to keep working to bring in some of the effects and that's coming up next.

If you're interested, here's the latest dev build: https://www.dropbox.com/s/fkb17lhsm210agy/mongrelmen170115.zip?dl=0

Magnumcannon

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Re: Mongrelmen - ascii RTS/town builder in development
« Reply #13 on: January 17, 2015, 11:03:49 am »

PTW.
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