asteroid garden
well back on the microgames saddle
this two-week project i made this thing, which is less a 'fun playable game' and more the bare-bones pre-alpha of one. starting with the isometric renderer i worked on last time, i expanded that to 3d and made rendering more efficient, and then also implemented something like a minimal tweecode so i could write text and have it automatically laid out in canvas. in between doing that i wrote up some minimal simulation logic and had it play out across the generated maps, as the player plants stuff.
i'm using signed distance fields to generate the 'asteroids' (& there's a lot of room there for more interesting generation -- there are a bunch of more complex SDFs i could use, or more interesting ways to glom them together, or use them to determine different materials)
in terms of gameplay there's not really much going on & nothing ties together. the idea was that you'd start 'shipwrecked', kind of washing up on an asteroid hanging off a single plank, with one plant cutting to your name. then you'd plant the star grass on the asteroid & have it spread so that you could harvest another cutting. you'd also have (or be able to make) a mana condenser, which would be something you could place in the environment and have it suck up all mana on that tile and store it. the idea was that you could unlock further plant seeds by condensing the right kinds of mana, or by having plants mutate or crossbreed.
so the 'first stage' would always be a barren rocky asteroid of the style the game currently generates, and you'd be starting with only 'star grass', and you'd be stuck there until you could build up to the star grass mutating into a star tree (so you could harvest it for some wood, which you'd have to do several times so it's more like, gotta make a grove of trees and sustainably harvest from that) as well as like, using the fire mana put off by the star grass to generate ashmoss spores, planting ashmoss, having it survive and mutate into ash ferns, doing the same with cyclone reed, and using the wood and optionally the ash ferns, cyclone reed, and lumenrot to make a boat that you could store further cuttings in and sail off the asteroid.
after that there would be other asteroids with other materials (ice and metals, mostly) that let you produce/hybridize/mutate other plants, until you have a big enough collection that you could actually terraform an asteroid. the idea was that... so, as you play, the plants release 'life' mana into the ground, in addition to releasing mana clouds of various types into the void. somewhere inside each asteroid there was gonna be an invisible 'heart' or 'vein' tile, and it was gonna hungrily suck up mana. each asteroid would have some saturation level, like ~1000 mana or so, where after eating that much mana the heart was gonna start emitting mana instead, and that would be what would qualify as 'terraformed'. i'd need a more involved growth system for that to mean anything -- currently life mana is a useless byproduct from plant growth, but it would make more sense if plants both emitted it while growing and absorbed it for a growth boost, or something like that, so that having all the life mana drained out from the ground would kind of suck / having a constant source of life mana would noticeably speed growth.
likewise i had kind of envisioned three basic 'types' of plants: ground cover, like grass, plants that would be bushlike/treelike, and vining plants that would grow on tile walls. they could coexist in the same tile, & part of the game would be planting things three-sisters like that mutually support each other. (right now the four plants all absorb an element until they're grown, at which point they emit a larger amount of the element. that's fine for starter stuff but i'd want the later stuff to be much more complex.)
also there was gonna be some kind of 'crafting', in that you could both harvest cuttings and store them on your boat, or harvest parts of the plants (which might require doing it at the right growth stage, and might slow the plant's growth or kill it if done excessively) which you could use to build stuff on your boat. so like, process the cyclone reed into fibre thread that you could use to make simple sails, that kind of thing. a big, built-out boat would basically be a whole ecosystem unto itself since it would also be full of mana crystals and plant cuttings and gardening stuff.
there was gonna be some light story/plot stuff w/ dialog from the 'main character' but that was all pretty hazy and unformed. anyway none of that got done! but basically all of it is doable if i just keep picking away at it. really, the big thing was assets. it's all well and good to be like "okay this plant has 6 growth stages and mutates into 3 different other plants, and also for visual variety each of all of these plants should have at least 3 different sprites for each growth stage" but uhhh then there are already dozens of sprites to draw. and it's not like these are complex sprites (22x22 base size, palette of 64 colors) but having to draw a billion different things definitely was a bit of a stumbling block. i'm not actually an artist here.
still, this was a bunch of stuff to get working in two days, even if it wasn't really a full 'game'. i'm definitely gonna come back to this at some point in the future and add in some of the stuff outlined here. just not right now
(it's actually kind of funny to me the degree to which working on the isometric code here reminded me of hell game. it has the same fundamental set of issues -- picking, layering sprites correctly, rerenders being expensive -- and when i was thinking about how to make cursor movement faster i was like "wait, didn't i have this exact issue in hell game?" and then i remembered what i did (partial rerenders around the cursor, using a clipping mask) and just did the exact same thing here. i'm kind of curious about what the hell game map code would look to me now, but that seems kind of like a nightmare given how messy it's likely to be. not that this code isn't messy, it's just uhhh messy in a different way)
this two-week project i made this thing, which is less a 'fun playable game' and more the bare-bones pre-alpha of one. starting with the isometric renderer i worked on last time, i expanded that to 3d and made rendering more efficient, and then also implemented something like a minimal tweecode so i could write text and have it automatically laid out in canvas. in between doing that i wrote up some minimal simulation logic and had it play out across the generated maps, as the player plants stuff.
i'm using signed distance fields to generate the 'asteroids' (& there's a lot of room there for more interesting generation -- there are a bunch of more complex SDFs i could use, or more interesting ways to glom them together, or use them to determine different materials)
in terms of gameplay there's not really much going on & nothing ties together. the idea was that you'd start 'shipwrecked', kind of washing up on an asteroid hanging off a single plank, with one plant cutting to your name. then you'd plant the star grass on the asteroid & have it spread so that you could harvest another cutting. you'd also have (or be able to make) a mana condenser, which would be something you could place in the environment and have it suck up all mana on that tile and store it. the idea was that you could unlock further plant seeds by condensing the right kinds of mana, or by having plants mutate or crossbreed.
so the 'first stage' would always be a barren rocky asteroid of the style the game currently generates, and you'd be starting with only 'star grass', and you'd be stuck there until you could build up to the star grass mutating into a star tree (so you could harvest it for some wood, which you'd have to do several times so it's more like, gotta make a grove of trees and sustainably harvest from that) as well as like, using the fire mana put off by the star grass to generate ashmoss spores, planting ashmoss, having it survive and mutate into ash ferns, doing the same with cyclone reed, and using the wood and optionally the ash ferns, cyclone reed, and lumenrot to make a boat that you could store further cuttings in and sail off the asteroid.
after that there would be other asteroids with other materials (ice and metals, mostly) that let you produce/hybridize/mutate other plants, until you have a big enough collection that you could actually terraform an asteroid. the idea was that... so, as you play, the plants release 'life' mana into the ground, in addition to releasing mana clouds of various types into the void. somewhere inside each asteroid there was gonna be an invisible 'heart' or 'vein' tile, and it was gonna hungrily suck up mana. each asteroid would have some saturation level, like ~1000 mana or so, where after eating that much mana the heart was gonna start emitting mana instead, and that would be what would qualify as 'terraformed'. i'd need a more involved growth system for that to mean anything -- currently life mana is a useless byproduct from plant growth, but it would make more sense if plants both emitted it while growing and absorbed it for a growth boost, or something like that, so that having all the life mana drained out from the ground would kind of suck / having a constant source of life mana would noticeably speed growth.
likewise i had kind of envisioned three basic 'types' of plants: ground cover, like grass, plants that would be bushlike/treelike, and vining plants that would grow on tile walls. they could coexist in the same tile, & part of the game would be planting things three-sisters like that mutually support each other. (right now the four plants all absorb an element until they're grown, at which point they emit a larger amount of the element. that's fine for starter stuff but i'd want the later stuff to be much more complex.)
also there was gonna be some kind of 'crafting', in that you could both harvest cuttings and store them on your boat, or harvest parts of the plants (which might require doing it at the right growth stage, and might slow the plant's growth or kill it if done excessively) which you could use to build stuff on your boat. so like, process the cyclone reed into fibre thread that you could use to make simple sails, that kind of thing. a big, built-out boat would basically be a whole ecosystem unto itself since it would also be full of mana crystals and plant cuttings and gardening stuff.
there was gonna be some light story/plot stuff w/ dialog from the 'main character' but that was all pretty hazy and unformed. anyway none of that got done! but basically all of it is doable if i just keep picking away at it. really, the big thing was assets. it's all well and good to be like "okay this plant has 6 growth stages and mutates into 3 different other plants, and also for visual variety each of all of these plants should have at least 3 different sprites for each growth stage" but uhhh then there are already dozens of sprites to draw. and it's not like these are complex sprites (22x22 base size, palette of 64 colors) but having to draw a billion different things definitely was a bit of a stumbling block. i'm not actually an artist here.
still, this was a bunch of stuff to get working in two days, even if it wasn't really a full 'game'. i'm definitely gonna come back to this at some point in the future and add in some of the stuff outlined here. just not right now
(it's actually kind of funny to me the degree to which working on the isometric code here reminded me of hell game. it has the same fundamental set of issues -- picking, layering sprites correctly, rerenders being expensive -- and when i was thinking about how to make cursor movement faster i was like "wait, didn't i have this exact issue in hell game?" and then i remembered what i did (partial rerenders around the cursor, using a clipping mask) and just did the exact same thing here. i'm kind of curious about what the hell game map code would look to me now, but that seems kind of like a nightmare given how messy it's likely to be. not that this code isn't messy, it's just uhhh messy in a different way)
