Im a visual thinker. Having never played Actraiser and going only off pictures scavenged online and by your descriptions, I wish I had other examples to go on to get a *feel* for what this game is. do we use diagramming or other schemes to help visualize our game? Is there any other game out there that you can point to as another example? perhaps we can try to rough draft some concepts of what the game looks like to a player?
I think its never too early to draft out and draw EVERYTHING. Art is inspiring and having a picture of what we are working toward can make the game feel more tangible and not like just a lot of text descriptions. i am more than willing to chip in here.
Also I think that kind of visual team thinking is what helps indies get a more cohesive workflow, so that no matter what role you play on the team, you always have diagrams you can look at and say "there, thats what Im working on" type of thing.
On 5/18/2010 11:20 PM, Alan Wolfe wrote:
oh a couple more....#8 - when building a building on a tile, the type of building it will try to build (in the case of the 2x2 house... or if we have a couple different varieties of the same "tech level" houses), and the rotation of the building will be chosen by taking the X and Y position along with the tech level of the building, putting it through a pseudo random number generator. What this will do is give us an even distribution of variety across the map (ie there will be farms in some places, houses in others, etc). All this stuff will be cosmetic only (ie a farm has no significance vs having a 2x2 place there instead) but is there to make things look better.#9 - each 4x4 grid tile (see #2!) has 7 squares taken up by road which leaves 9 squares left for houses. I'm thinking that each house square should have some fixed amount of occupants. Lets say that number is 3 citizens per square. That means in each 1x1 house there are 3 people, and in each 2x2 house (or farm) there are 12 people. That means that any given square, if fully built, will have 27 people. When you level up your tech, you get more people per house square. Like at level 2 tech, you'll have different looking houses, and they will have 4 people per square for instance. At level 3, you'll have 5 people per square etc.#10 - If a house or farm is damaged, all the people still remain there, but it should show signs of damage (maybe it catches fire, looks burnt, etc). If a building is destroyed, you lose the population of the people that lived there (they just die lol) and we can put a decal (scorch mark) and/or a model of a destroyed building there for where the building was destroyed.#11 - the game will show you the population of the current area on the UI. The game will also show your entire world wide population, along with what the next population level up is.On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 9:06 PM, Alan Wolfe <alan.wolfe@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:alan.wolfe@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:I have some things worked out for building the town and some things not yet worked out. Posting it to hear what you guys have to say about any and all of it! _*Pretty much worked out*_ #1 - find tiles on the world that are ok to build on because theyaren't too steep, they dont have anything obstructing them etc. (already done... generated from the nav mesh which is generatedfrom the terrain model). #2 - each tile is a 4x4 grid where a road runs through it horizontaly and vertically at the "3s". Check it out: H H R H H H R H R R R R H H R H where H is "house" and R is "road". This way there is road from every tile to each neighbor tile so people and monsters can path through a town unhindered. Also, there is a 2x2 grid of house space in the upper left. This is where the 2x2 houses can go, or the 2x2 farm. the other "H" places will be where the 1x1 houses will go. We can randomly rotate the houses and farms, or do some other things if we need more diversity. If it still looks too grid like maybe we can come up with some solutions to that :P #3 - im thinking we can paint the road onto the terrain using the decal code (ie how we paint scorch marks onto the world). #4 - if you don't instruct the town how to build, they will just build on whatever tile is closest to the wizards tower that hasn't been built on yet. If there are damaged buildings, repairing those will take priority over building new buildings. #5 - if you DO instruct the town how to build, it has to build from the town to the location. IE there has to be a continuous line of built tiles from where the wizard tower is to where you want the town to be built. So, if you tell them to build far away, it might take a while for them to build along the path to get to there. _*Not Sure*_ #5 - In the original act raiser game, the town went into a "build cycle" every so many seconds. Should we do the same or something different? We could do something like the town is under perpetual construction, and the higher your population, the more people are out building stuff. #6 - In the original game, when a new building is being built, a person would run out from the central temple (ie our wizard tower's equivelant) and would run to where the building would go, then essentially the building would appear around them. Should we do it the same way? Or...?? #7 - In the original game, when a building was being built, basically it would appear in stages. Like a little wooden square wood appear, then 2 seconds later it would switch to looking like half the frame of a little house, then 2 seconds later it would switch to being the full frame of a house, then 2 seconds later it would be the fully constructed house. Would we like to do it that way? Or any other ideas? One idea I thought of is we could actually have the houses have a skeletal 3d animation of them being constructed out of their components. Like a logs from a pile of wood would form themselves into the frame (with or without workers present banging it on hammers and stuff). We could even make it look magical maybe like it was being done with telekenesis or something? Not sure. Anyhow, what do you guys think about this stuff?
