The new project is underway. I frequently miss working on EverEnding, and so far I haven’t gotten to do the sorts of things I really came to this project for, but I’m also getting really excited about some of the ideas I have for the future while I lay the necessary groundwork to proceed.
So, what have I been working on? There’s a lot, really. I got the basic collision system up and running, though that part is still glitchy as hell. I’ve created a simple but potentially very flexible scripting system which I’m going to use for all entity behavior in the game, which is going to make modifying entities in the editor largely a matter of literally copying and pasting the behaviors I want between entities and should make saving and loading pretty straightforward. However, the bulk of my time so far has been taking up on developing tiles, tools and editors for using them, and an understanding of how they’re going to be implemented in the game.
This is the tileset I’m testing with right now. It’s pretty ugly and rough around the edges, but right now I’m just trying to figure out a way to make all the tiles that I need for the game world fit into the minimum possible amount of space in a format that makes some degree of visual sense. If you do any art yourself, you may have noticed that the perspective here is, to put it mildly, kind of messed up. I’m working off the model established in the tilesets of the early Legend of Zelda games, particularly Link to the Past. The angles don’t really fit together or make sense, but it still creates a cohesive space for the player to navigate without obscuring anything the player needs to see. In the long run, the Escher-esque nightmare presented by this kind of world design may work in my favor, since I want the world to seem kind of surreal – but more on that later.
The big issue I’m facing at the moment is creating a tool to automatically fit these tiles together. There’s a small immediate and a big future reason I want to do this: The small reason is that figuring this out will allow me to build tools into the level editor that let me really quickly make rooms and connect them in a way that looks natural without having to individually place a bunch of tiles. The big future reason is that eventually I want to be able to generate rooms entirely using code using the same algorithm, and create procedural environments for the player to navigate.
That segues nicely into what my plans are for the project. Actually, none of these are plans yet, these are just ideas for now – plans will mostly wait until I have a playable chunk of game and can begin making hard decisions about what works and what doesn’t, what’s feasible and what isn’t. The setup I want to explore, here, is being trapped in a big creepy house – there are other people here, and it’s a bit up in the air how long they’ve been here. Some of them talk like they’ve been here a few days, some of them seem like they might have been here for centuries. Everything is blocked off in different ways though, bricked and boarded up, papered over, hidden behind secret passageways, and in order to begin to find your way out you need to explore and find tools both to open up passageways and to fight off the creatures that have taken over parts of the house.
That’s the basic idea. Let’s call that tier 1, where I just make a little Zelda clone and call it a day.
Here’s a more interesting version of that idea that I’ve been playing with. There aren’t monsters in the house, but in order to actually make progress you find different beds to rest in. Each bed you rest in puts you into a dream where you play as whoever the bed belonged to, and in reliving their story you can perhaps change it, and by so doing change the state of the house. Or maybe you just find the tool you need in the dream and bring it back directly, or perhaps you are able to recruit an NPC by telling them something they’d forgotten a long time ago. The dreams, of course, are infested with weird nightmare monsters, and you need to be able to defend yourself in the dream, so procuring equipment is still necessary.
That’s tier 2. This would be a much more substantial project, but I think there’s room to do some interesting things here.
I have an even bigger idea, though, and this is one that could get really out of hand. Take tier 2, but each dream world contains other beds, and you can keep pursuing nested dreams deeper. Past one or two levels, dreams begin to be procedurally generated, but the resources you get in each dream can be brought out of them and used to progress through the next. The game becomes an adventure game containing a roguelite, where progressing through the roguelite sub-game allows you to progress naturally through the world of the main game. Eventually, perhaps, getting lost in these many nested dreams could become a genuine danger.
Tier 3 is fun to think about, but for now I have to focus on tier 1 – or, really, tier 0, which is building the toolset that will allow me to build tier 1. That’s where I’m at right now, but if progress continues at this rate I should be able to have my toolset done by the time of the next devblog and can really start building out the most basic version of the game.