The Days of Daniel - Game (Idea)

[Matthew Shute]

Continued from here.

I've been spending some free time building a game inspired by this post:

I'd like a pixel art style life sim/RPG about being a school pupil in the 90s. There'd be procedural world generation. The school life and home life bits could vary quite a lot every time you play. You'd have to deal with all the things you might expect: school work, homework, friendships, petty schoolyard politics. It would be possible to bunk off school altogether and freely roam (procedurally generated streets, shops, houses, school, etc), and your actions in game would influence the opinions of persistent NPCs. You could get into all sorts of trouble; you might easily find yourself getting expelled. Basically you could do pretty much anything that a real school pupil could do, and the consequences would be fairly realistic. However, there should probably be an option to have something like a zombie apocalypse or alien invasion trigger randomly, perhaps two or three years in.

Why? Well, the exact game that I fancy playing doesn't quite exist anywhere as far as I can tell. I'm a fan of sandbox games with RPG elements, such as CKII, where the gameplay is emergent rather than scripted in advance. It sets up some starting conditions, a world to interact with, and leaves you to do whatever you like. The consequences resulting from what you decide to do are what constitute the gameplay, basically. There are many excellent games like this, but I'm yet to find a satisfying one that's exactly like the one I fancy playing. So I thought I'd see how far along I could get with making one, one that'll probably entertain me if no one else - and if I fail miserably, at least I might learn something along the way.

Consider this barely even worth calling pre-alpha, as much of it is at the stage of being a series of ideas, some vaguer than others. There's no graphics, and I'm even toying with the idea of making it all text-based with maybe some ASCII maps to interact with. You can't do anything yet except travel to some locations that appear be in the game, and wait around watching your needs go up.

Here's the code I've got so far.

Daniel.zip

[VazScep]

Have you played any roguelikes? This one seems fairly ambitious, though nowadays, Dwarf Fortress is the gold standard. DF was supposed to start out as a single player adventure game in the style of classic roguelikes such as the original Rogue, but the designers wanted a really rich world simulation, and eventually they ended up with a base building game.

But the general idea of building a simulation and then putting a player in it seems really cool to me. And I'm a fan ASCII. I like the idea of a game that I can play at the terminal.

[Matthew Shute]

I have. This is a bit of an inspiration, a game I've had many hours of fun and hilarity with, although my world will have fewer guns and less political violence in general. My memory of trying out Dwarf Fortress is one of not having a clue what I was doing and then giving up, but that was some time ago. I should definitely give it another look. CataclysmDDA sounds very much like something I'd enjoy playing, I'll have to keep an eye on that one - thanks for bringing it to my attention!

[VazScep]

I noticed you had a framerate count, but I'm assuming you're not looking to make a realtime game, and turn-based is fine?

[Matthew Shute]

At first I guessed I'd probably need one (see my original description). And I still could, depending on what I add; but now it mostly just brings me amusement. It's like remaking Advanced Lawnmower Simulator and including an FPS, except even less necessary. More like doing a text-adventure based on Advanced Lawnmower Simulator and keeping track of the FPS.

[Matthew Shute]

The world now feels like less of a ghost-town. There's now a chance to encounter randomly-generated characters when you

- enter a new cell.
- wait in a cell.

It's a bit disconcerting to see a rando appear in the kid's bedroom, for instance. I can put in cell ownership so this only happens in public areas - or only certain types of randos appear in certain types of areas. The NPCs don't do anything, but it already feels like more of an inhabited world.

[VazScep]

The furthest I ever get in writing games like this is the part where I have to do the data entry. I either need to rely exclusively on procedural generation, or figure out a way to trick players into building the world for me, or steal someone else's data.

I'd be interested in how you produced the "World.java" file. There's a lot of raw numbers in that file that I know that, if I were having to enter them manually, I'd easily screw up. Do you have a more robust system?

[Matthew Shute]

No, I'm flying by the seat of my pants.

Whenever I notice daft redundancy with data entry, I try to minimise it with rules-of-thumb. Like there's no need to manually set all the exteriors to public access, I can just set it that way as default, then I only have to deal with the exceptions.

I had a moment when I noticed what I'd been doing, here:

redundant.png

I'm sure there are lots of little things like that where I can save myself time and tedium. I enjoy the world building aspect in general, though.

[felltoearth]

[quote="Matthew Shute";p="2601536"]I have. This is a bit of an inspiration, a game I've had many hours of fun and hilarity with, although my world will have fewer guns and less political violence in general. My memory of trying out Dwarf Fortress is one of not having a clue what I was doing and then giving up, but that was some time ago. I should definitely give it another look. CataclysmDDA sounds very much like something I'd enjoy playing, I'll have to keep an eye on that one - thanks for bringing it to my attention![/quote]
FYI Oubliette is available on iOS.

[VazScep]

[quote="Matthew Shute";p="2601632"]No, I'm flying by the seat of my pants.

Whenever I notice daft redundancy with data entry, I try to minimise it with rules-of-thumb. Like there's no need to manually set all the exteriors to public access, I can just set it that way as default, then I only have to deal with the exceptions.

I had a moment when I noticed what I'd been doing, here:

redundant.png

I'm sure there are lots of little things like that where I can save myself time and tedium. I enjoy the world building aspect in general, though.[/quote]I think in this sort of thing, you inevitably work your way towards editor tools. You can start very simple: have a method like "connectRooms" which takes two rooms and makes sure there are bidirectional links between them, so you don't accidentally have dangling connections. But you could also work towards a simple ASCII art map format:

Code: Select all

###X###
###X###
##XXXX#
##X##X#

where "X" represents a location. This could be read in at start-up to build up a simple grid-based world that you can navigate. To fill in descriptions, maybe you have a developer version of your interface where you can edit location descriptions as you play, so you can fill them in as you go and have the data persisted to map files which are read in on reload.

[blindfaith]

Your game sounds a bit like skool daze i used to play on the speccy back in the 80's, i loved that game

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skool_Daze

[Matthew Shute]

[quote="VazScep";p="2601646"][quote="Matthew Shute";p="2601632"]No, I'm flying by the seat of my pants.

Whenever I notice daft redundancy with data entry, I try to minimise it with rules-of-thumb. Like there's no need to manually set all the exteriors to public access, I can just set it that way as default, then I only have to deal with the exceptions.

I had a moment when I noticed what I'd been doing, here:

redundant.png

I'm sure there are lots of little things like that where I can save myself time and tedium. I enjoy the world building aspect in general, though.[/quote]I think in this sort of thing, you inevitably work your way towards editor tools. You can start very simple: have a method like "connectRooms" which takes two rooms and makes sure there are bidirectional links between them, so you don't accidentally have dangling connections. But you could also work towards a simple ASCII art map format:

Code: Select all

###X###
###X###
##XXXX#
##X##X#

where "X" represents a location. This could be read in at start-up to build up a simple grid-based world that you can navigate. To fill in descriptions, maybe you have a developer version of your interface where you can edit location descriptions as you play, so you can fill them in as you go and have the data persisted to map files which are read in on reload.[/quote]

Good idea, I'll look into doing that. In the meanwhile, pressing the E key now does something - you can wander around a couple of simple layouts I made in notepad (I should make a map editor, ideally). The "@" is the player character, of course.

PRIME_BBCODE_SPOILER_SHOW PRIME_BBCODE_SPOILER:

[attachment=1]dan1.png[/attachment]

[attachment=0]dan2.png[/attachment]

The layouts are just char arrays that I convert into String arrays to display them.

Next thing: nerf the player's remarkable ability to walk through walls like they're not even there.

[Matthew Shute]

[quote="blindfaith";p="2601852"]Your game sounds a bit like skool daze i used to play on the speccy back in the 80's, i loved that game

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skool_Daze[/quote]

Click here. That screenshot I posted is from Back to Skool, the sequel to Skool Daze.

[VazScep]

[quote="Matthew Shute";p="2601909"][quote="VazScep";p="2601646"][quote="Matthew Shute";p="2601632"]No, I'm flying by the seat of my pants.

Whenever I notice daft redundancy with data entry, I try to minimise it with rules-of-thumb. Like there's no need to manually set all the exteriors to public access, I can just set it that way as default, then I only have to deal with the exceptions.

I had a moment when I noticed what I'd been doing, here:

redundant.png

I'm sure there are lots of little things like that where I can save myself time and tedium. I enjoy the world building aspect in general, though.[/quote]I think in this sort of thing, you inevitably work your way towards editor tools. You can start very simple: have a method like "connectRooms" which takes two rooms and makes sure there are bidirectional links between them, so you don't accidentally have dangling connections. But you could also work towards a simple ASCII art map format:

Code: Select all

###X###
###X###
##XXXX#
##X##X#

where "X" represents a location. This could be read in at start-up to build up a simple grid-based world that you can navigate. To fill in descriptions, maybe you have a developer version of your interface where you can edit location descriptions as you play, so you can fill them in as you go and have the data persisted to map files which are read in on reload.[/quote]

Good idea, I'll look into doing that. In the meanwhile, pressing the E key now does something - you can wander around a couple of simple layouts I made in notepad (I should make a map editor, ideally). The "@" is the player character, of course.

PRIME_BBCODE_SPOILER_SHOW PRIME_BBCODE_SPOILER:

[attachment=1]dan1.png[/attachment]

[attachment=0]dan2.png[/attachment]

The layouts are just char arrays that I convert into String arrays to display them.

Next thing: nerf the player's remarkable ability to walk through walls like they're not even there.[/quote] I've played so many roguelikes that seeing an "@" in a corridor gives me warm fuzzies. I'd like to check out this version. Would you be up for putting the code under version control and pushing it to github?

[Matthew Shute]

https://github.com/MatthewShute/TheGittery

I've added some very simple procedural generation for the layouts, so you can "[E]xplore" in every cell. All the exteriors look like roads and all the interiors look like rooms for the moment until I flesh that out. Walls now also contain the player.