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javascript game prototypes
okay, project reportback. for the first time in uhhhhh a while.
so i started working on microgame projects this month. or like, this last week, really. the first one was a redux of that old twine farming sim(?) game of mine, 'farm game', but this time with actual sprites and interface and stuff. i posted it on itch.io. i kind of debated expanding it some and adding in some of the village/exploration stuff from the unfinished sequel twine game, but i decided that if i do that it at least won't be right now.
(incidentally it is kind of wild to see just what gets posted on itch.io? i guess i've gotten fairly used to 'the new hive' getting a stable 200-400 hits a day, for years, without me ever really updating it. it's a fairly big project, it's perpetually in the first page-or-two of various nsfw/gay/text-game/free tags, it's not super popular but it's regularly getting hits and plays. meanwhile, posting this farm thing on itch made me realize that oh yeah nearly everything that gets posted to itch is tiny microprojects or test games that get maybe ~100 views in 'recent' before sinking like a rock and never being seen again. kind of grim, actually.)
after that i pulled out another game idea and didn't get anywhere near as far with it. what i did is over here, and isn't really a 'playable game'. i mostly just threw together an isometric renderer and drew some sprite stuff, with a very short foray into dungeon generation and mob actions. (there's no attacking; you can just move around, and i didn't finish the mob move ai, so they just continually pathfind to be near to the pc and occasionally overlap each other.) i reread some old unangband blog posts about monster ai, but i didn't really fully implement that. mostly it got me thinking about the mechanical distinctions between a 'roguelike' and a 'tactics' game, since they share an enormous similarity, and it mostly comes down to 'multiple move actions', 'more of a focus on character skills and complex ranged attacks', and of course, 'monsters give xp'.
originally the gamedev challenge thing was supposed to be two-week game prototypes, which i never was any good at, but now three years in i'm kind of considering actually trying to make a game prototype every two weeks, instead of some sliver of library code. we'll see!
(okay actually i kind of want to talk more about the second project, the tactics/roguelike one. if you look at the game source there's actually a whole bunch of comments about ideas, b/c it wasn't _really_ a tactics game or a roguelike game or anything like that. really i had read several ff7 fanfics, 'rock bottom' and 'the fifth act', which are both like... ff7 back-in-time fix-it stories with major appearances from crisis core characters. but also both of them include sequences that are just like, oh yeah monsters are an issue here. either you have missions to kill monsters that are nesting near/in cities, or you have to hunt them to sell their parts for money, whatever.
so i was thinking of a game that's a tactics-style game that's just as much about monster butchery as it is about killing the monsters. gotta dissect the corpses and harvest the valuable parts, gotta cart those around to sell to somebody, gotta help supply the apothecary so they can keep making potions. so i was envisioning some kinda game where your player character was pretty overpowered, but basically every kind of attack harms some resource -- use fire or lightning spells to kill a monster and whoops that pelt is useless now. crush a monster and hope you don't need its bones for anything because they're ruined. frozen to death? that wrecks all the organs. and so on and so forth for the various kinds of resources and damage types, where everything damages something, and so each battle is less about wanting to avoid death (although that would also be a concern) and more about avoiding wrecking the rare materials a monster corpse provides.
i was also kinda thinking of a skill system somewhere between ff7-style materia links and the ffx sphere grid, where you have some kinda web of nodes and links, and you slot your skills into there, and depending on what's adjacent you get various synergies -- just [fire] gets you a simple short-range fireball, but place it next to [chain] to get chain-fire, or [power] to get a bigger aoe blast, or [arc] to get a cone of fire, or [sweep] to get a broad melee fire-hit that also does slashing damage, etc. and there would be butchery skills too that would harmonize with attacks or modifiers in different ways, and so forth and so on.)
ultimately that's a bit of a big idea for one week, but the good thing about these two-week projects is w/e, i don't have to really think about wasted potential because uhhh it was a two-week project anyway. and anyway, for the next idea i have i'm probably gonna reuse this isometric grid math, just slightly tweaked.
so i started working on microgame projects this month. or like, this last week, really. the first one was a redux of that old twine farming sim(?) game of mine, 'farm game', but this time with actual sprites and interface and stuff. i posted it on itch.io. i kind of debated expanding it some and adding in some of the village/exploration stuff from the unfinished sequel twine game, but i decided that if i do that it at least won't be right now.
(incidentally it is kind of wild to see just what gets posted on itch.io? i guess i've gotten fairly used to 'the new hive' getting a stable 200-400 hits a day, for years, without me ever really updating it. it's a fairly big project, it's perpetually in the first page-or-two of various nsfw/gay/text-game/free tags, it's not super popular but it's regularly getting hits and plays. meanwhile, posting this farm thing on itch made me realize that oh yeah nearly everything that gets posted to itch is tiny microprojects or test games that get maybe ~100 views in 'recent' before sinking like a rock and never being seen again. kind of grim, actually.)
after that i pulled out another game idea and didn't get anywhere near as far with it. what i did is over here, and isn't really a 'playable game'. i mostly just threw together an isometric renderer and drew some sprite stuff, with a very short foray into dungeon generation and mob actions. (there's no attacking; you can just move around, and i didn't finish the mob move ai, so they just continually pathfind to be near to the pc and occasionally overlap each other.) i reread some old unangband blog posts about monster ai, but i didn't really fully implement that. mostly it got me thinking about the mechanical distinctions between a 'roguelike' and a 'tactics' game, since they share an enormous similarity, and it mostly comes down to 'multiple move actions', 'more of a focus on character skills and complex ranged attacks', and of course, 'monsters give xp'.
originally the gamedev challenge thing was supposed to be two-week game prototypes, which i never was any good at, but now three years in i'm kind of considering actually trying to make a game prototype every two weeks, instead of some sliver of library code. we'll see!
(okay actually i kind of want to talk more about the second project, the tactics/roguelike one. if you look at the game source there's actually a whole bunch of comments about ideas, b/c it wasn't _really_ a tactics game or a roguelike game or anything like that. really i had read several ff7 fanfics, 'rock bottom' and 'the fifth act', which are both like... ff7 back-in-time fix-it stories with major appearances from crisis core characters. but also both of them include sequences that are just like, oh yeah monsters are an issue here. either you have missions to kill monsters that are nesting near/in cities, or you have to hunt them to sell their parts for money, whatever.
so i was thinking of a game that's a tactics-style game that's just as much about monster butchery as it is about killing the monsters. gotta dissect the corpses and harvest the valuable parts, gotta cart those around to sell to somebody, gotta help supply the apothecary so they can keep making potions. so i was envisioning some kinda game where your player character was pretty overpowered, but basically every kind of attack harms some resource -- use fire or lightning spells to kill a monster and whoops that pelt is useless now. crush a monster and hope you don't need its bones for anything because they're ruined. frozen to death? that wrecks all the organs. and so on and so forth for the various kinds of resources and damage types, where everything damages something, and so each battle is less about wanting to avoid death (although that would also be a concern) and more about avoiding wrecking the rare materials a monster corpse provides.
i was also kinda thinking of a skill system somewhere between ff7-style materia links and the ffx sphere grid, where you have some kinda web of nodes and links, and you slot your skills into there, and depending on what's adjacent you get various synergies -- just [fire] gets you a simple short-range fireball, but place it next to [chain] to get chain-fire, or [power] to get a bigger aoe blast, or [arc] to get a cone of fire, or [sweep] to get a broad melee fire-hit that also does slashing damage, etc. and there would be butchery skills too that would harmonize with attacks or modifiers in different ways, and so forth and so on.)
ultimately that's a bit of a big idea for one week, but the good thing about these two-week projects is w/e, i don't have to really think about wasted potential because uhhh it was a two-week project anyway. and anyway, for the next idea i have i'm probably gonna reuse this isometric grid math, just slightly tweaked.
