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[Willfor]

CURRENT RELEASE: 0.1.0 (.NET) (March 18th) / -Unreleased- (Mono)

PAST RELEASES: -none-

Current Vlog: March 23rd, version 0.1.1
Older Vlogs:
* March 12th, version 0.0.5

Spoiler: Original post (click to show/hide)

Yes, this is a roguelike topic.

Introductory video here. Inspiration link is here. The game is programmed in C#, and uses the .NET 2.0 Framework at the moment. I may up it to 3.5 in the future.

What's shown in the video is what I have so far. I kind of want to focus on making the bounty hunters that come after you if you don't bring in the money. After that, I am going to start to work on some difficult aspects. Notably, making it harder to get money so there's so element of risk to the game. Also, making the threats in the wild that you'll have to engage or escape if you want to keep on surviving.

Then I want to start working on characters who will join your quest to survive.

I'll probably release the first version when I have a single character who can reliably join you.

[Willfor]

Be careful not to be late with your freshly gained gold.

Spoiler: image (click to show/hide)

The keeper of the fort loses patience at lunch time on the last day. The bounty goes out, and whether you can pay or not no longer matters.

Spoiler: image (click to show/hide)

The hunters will find you either by the trail you leave, or by dumb luck in the case that your trail has gone completely cold.

Spoiler: another image! (click to show/hide)

But nothing will happen because I've yet to make the combat system, or the system that lets you surrender to them to be taken back alive. Being taken back alive might not give you any better a fate, depending on just how pissed off the commander is at the time.

[squeakyReaper]

Yes.  I absolutely loved Jagged Tooth dungeon, so seeing more from you is nice; even though they're completely unrelated.  I have to ask a silly question however...  can I get a transcript of your video?  Your voice is far too silent for me to hear, and I wasn't even able to get a whisper.  I didn't even realize you were talking until I heard a murmur out the corner of my hearing range.  It's likely my speakers, heh.

[Willfor]

Hello, this is Willfor from the Bay12 forums, and I'll be taking you on a runthrough of my new game, East Marches. I have a link to the basic inspiration of it, and there will be more than one character, but your main character is someone who has been sentanced to life away from the empire he grew up in due to some unfortunate circumstances.

So you'll be going to treasure sites, to support your enjoyment of living at the only safe place in the world -- I am the 'P' (circles 'P' on screen with mouse) -- And there are time stamps -- You have to get 5 gold pieces, or five gold's worth, by noon of the second day of the 31st week, and you're on the 30th. It will be more difficult to get stuff later, but since this is a test, not really right now.

As you can see, time passes as you try to move. Time passes faster on the big map, slower on the smaller map, and gold is remarkably easy to get at the moment. Also I need to fix a bug in here, but for the most part my gold is fairly good. Anyway, now that I have a good amount of gold I will leave the site, it disappears because it's pretty much used up.

Then we go -- oh, as you can see, the day turns to night. And libtcod -- I don't know how you would actually say that in whatever (refering to my inability to say it correctly in real life) -- but, uh, it's a very good console, I love being able to use a full range of color.

Let's go to the site. This is me -- this is the person I want to talk to -- click on the person I want to talk to, and give him the gold. He doesn't really like you. I don't know if you picked up on that.

And that's pretty much everything I have in the game at the moment. It's not pretty, it's not complete in any way shape or form, but I figure this beats making a giant post about it. So it will be a small post and this video.

I should have gone with a silent video plus little text notes on the screen. I am not the best speaker in the world. It's usually why I prefer writing as a communication medium.

If I try video blogging again I'll do the sound separate from the video so I can fix the EQ settings and bring the sound into better quality.

[squeakyReaper]

Seems like I forced a contradiction, making you post something large.  Heh.  I guess it would be larger without the video, as we have a visual representation.

So!  It would seem the game is all about living under the thumb of a money grubber.  Lovely.  I skimmed the West Marches post, and the jist that I got from it is:  Impromptu adventure, few and random goals, dangerous land with only a few frontier settlements.  Sounds right?  Is your goal to take this, and throw in an additional danger in that you must pay off debts constantly?  Nature wants you dead, society wants you dead, government wants you dead...  and you're not quite sure which of the three is more dangerous.  Sounds thrilling!

[Willfor]

Pretty much. It's a two tier slavery of a sort. Criminals are assigned to Eastfort as a way to pay back society because it was the site of a giant conflagration of magical warfare, and no one wants to go through the ravaged landscape to recover the important things. They owe a weekly payment to the commander of the fort, and missing payments can result in anything from missing limbs to hanging. It's best not to miss payments.

Criminals who were not sent to Eastfort for murder or rape can buy their way into the second tier for a year's worth of weekly payments. The second tier only owes the fort once a month, and instead of death you're faced with legal sanctions if you can't pay. Survive for two years in the second tier, and you're free to leave any time you want to.

There are crazy people who volunteer for second tier service. There are people who "volunteered" for second tier service, and would rather take a chance at surviving the wilds than being tortured to death for desertion.

It's a fun place!

People who survive the experience tend to be rich enough to reintegrate with society.

[Thendash]

Is it possible to grow strong enough to kill the commander and become free that way?

[Willfor]

Killing any individual person is probably going to be easy enough. While the commander has had a good amount of time to purchase some of the better magical items that have come from the fort's involvement, a good surprise would probably take him out. You might have problems leaving the fort alive afterward though.

I suppose that's part of the challenge.

Still don't have combat up and running, and that's likely going to take longer than getting the hunting AI up and running.

[squeakyReaper]

Hmm, the above poster brings out an interesting question.  Is the goal of the game to escape the Eastfort you're put in?  I can see a few spin-offs of the goal.  First of all is to get enough money, surviving long enough, to escape.  This is progressively difficult, as you have to go further and further away from your settlements each time to get new gear and sellables.

Second is killing your captain.  This is feigning loyalty long enough and getting the gear to do so.  Very very dangerous, and could result in horrible disaster...  but a Spartacus style revolt could be possible.  Rise up criminals, and take your birthright!  Just...  less honorable, since you are in essence a terrible criminal.

Third is...  becoming a soldier.  You said there's magical warfare.  What if you could join a squad, and be part of that?  It's not retrieval of retired magical artifacts, but it is serving your country in a sense.  Disposable soldiers thrown at the enemy.

Fourth thing I can think of is once you've served your two years, you've "proven" yourself to a degree that they MAKE you a soldier, as said above.  Or you become a professional "fetcher".  Perhaps willingly, with promise of more money.  Perhaps because you have only known this life for so long.  Perhaps the court angles your case so that you're not really being let out...  they happened to "Discover" a crime that you "Committed", making you stay longer.

Note that these are end game style things.  Perhaps they could be an epilogue?  When the game is over, after your two years, the game assesses your priorities and how you went about them, and it says whether you succeed or fail at these.  Or perhaps it does affect the story, and you can play them out.  I dunno, you're the boss!

[Willfor]

This is a bit of the appeal of working on something like this. I've setup the game's meta-structure as a set of plot lines. For instance, the only reason the game itself gives you a week to get the money is because it's tracking your progress in that plotline, and when it sees you violate it, it takes actions of its own.

Once I have the basics in, I can start work on the different circumstances. The goal is to have it so that the choices you make in friendships, and how you try to escape -- or not escape -- determines how the game turns out. The main goal is to stay alive, and beyond that, I hope to have a good deal of "victory conditions." The game won't really end until you either die, or leave the playing field to go back west.

One other thing that I haven't really focused on is the characters who will either be helping or hindering you. They're going to have their own plotlines, and they are going to be as much the centre of their own universes as you are in yours. It's going to mean a lot of work for me, but I plan to have them be additional things you can get involved with that can make your experience either easier or harder.

[Enzo]

I should have gone with a silent video plus little text notes on the screen. I am not the best speaker in the world. It's usually why I prefer writing as a communication medium.

Lies! Your voice is beautiful, like an angels soothing lullaby. Mic volume was pretty low, though.

Also this looks promising, I'll be keeping tabs on it.

[Willfor]

Code: [Select]

public Knowledge getKnowledgeFromGoogle(string theX, string fromY)
{
    return Google(String.Format("{0} for {1}", theX, fromY));
}

public Knowledge whatWillforSpentFiveHoursTryingToLearnToday()
{
    return getKnowledgeFromGoogle("C# events", "dummies");
}I think I've finally wrapped my head around the concepts I need to know to make everything in the program (regarding combat) work how I want it to. The only thing left is implementation.

Also, I made speed improvements to the game. It may seem a little funny to do this before people complain about it, but if you saw during the video how slowly time moved? Now it doesn't run through as many turns to go the same amount of time when you're on the overworld map, and thusly moving is faster.

My current ~plan~ is to get some sort of functional combat in a primitive form, make randomly moving wolf packs that can follow trails (mostly copy/pasting bounty hunter code since they can already do this), do a little bit of cleaning up, and then release a tech demo. Probably* three days from now I'll have a release. It's not three days of coding, but there are circumstances that will prevent me from my usual amount of free time.

*I should probably use "soon" instead of a firm date, but giving myself a deadline to have something to show will help me work towards an actual goal instead of randomly puttering around in the code adding whatever strikes my fancy. Might be longer than three days, but I am working toward that for the moment. Also, the first version is unlikely to work on anyone else's computer, which will be fun to try to figure out. And I mean fun in only the most Dwarf Fortress way.

[Thendash]

I will volunteer to help test. I also need to learn C#, it looks a lot like Java but seems like a better language to make games with.

[Max White]

Off topic: Dead epic voice Willfor!

Ok, now to finish watching the clip.

[Willfor]

Still planning to release sometime in the next few hours. My code and I are currently in the midst of a disagreement of whether or not it should work like I want it to. It's taken the position that functioning correctly would be an inadequate state of affairs, and I am attempting to dropkick it into submission. As of this post, I have to completely rewrite a portion of my combat framework because I made a very dumb mistake that will involve going through the entire method chain to fix it.

As an aside, I've figured out how to build in Mono. Once I find out if the regular version actually works on any other computer than mine, I should be able to offer a Mono version for those of you who don't run Windows. You zany people, you. The only problem being that I am even less certain the Mono version will work than the .NET, so the holding of breath should not be your first tactical option.

To do:

- Fix major combat framework error.
- Make a placeholder combat option
- Copy/paste enough code to have functional wolves
- Release 0.1.0