Shadow Covenant

Damn, woke about one hour ago and saw the theme… “Tiny World”…

Been thinking about an idea for one hour now, and I still have nothing concrete…

Until now, only two things come to mind:

1. Generate a procedural world for a side-scroller kind of game, with a very small character… This is what I feel like programming, but I have no game for this… Just a guy moving about in a procedurally generated world, in a Metroidvania style… Doesn’t have anything to do with the theme and it might push my resources a bit too far…
2. A tower defense kind of game: generate a procedural small planet and the player can build stuff on top of it (mines, cannons, power-plants, farms, cities, etc). He has to sustain and evolve the planet, defending it from stuff that comes from space (aliens, meteors, etc).
   The ideia is to do this in 3d, but that has the big problem of spatial perception: the player would be hard pressed to prepare against incoming threats, since they could come from everywhere.
   Going 2d on this idea might be more feasible from a gameplay perspective. Still, I think on this idea and there’s not actually much the player can achieve: he places some stuff around and then waits for an outcome, which sounds pretty boring.

Was hoping that writing this blog post would help come up with something else, but no success there…

Hum… Now for some web-searches on “Tiny World”…

Bah, no help there too…

Ok, let me try a different approach… just throwing some random ideas and see if any of them can be combined into something cool:

1. The world is tiny
2. The character is tiny (breaks the theme, I think)
3. We build the world, having to manage its growth so that it becomes viable for something…
4. We defend a tiny world
5. We fight to conquer a tiny world
6. The world grows/transforms from your actions
7. Our tiny world is dying, need to find a new one (breaks the theme, I think)
8. Our tiny world is dying, need to fix it (breaks the theme, I think)

Not many ideas… Most of my ideas are usually of bigger scope, so tending to “huge world”, more than “tiny”.

Can’t shake the feeling that there’s some grid-based small idea of a game that could be built, using the fact that the playing field is small and lending itself to fast playing sessions, but for the life of me, I can’t come up with anything…

……

Been brainstorming with my wife for a bit, and an idea came up… It’s not a “game idea”, but it gives me a starting point, and maybe a game will evolve from there…

I’m going to do a “voxel”-based construction kit, in which the player can put different color blocks in the world and then there will be some creatures that react in some way to the blocks…

But just making the construction kit will take some time, so I’ll start by that…

Once more into the breach (or something to that effect…)!

Taking part on the Ludum Dare 48-Hour competition this weekend, and I’ll be cross-blogging the whole time (on the Ludum Dare site and here), so if you want to follow the development, just follow this website!

Anyway, I’m using the same framework as last time, done by me, just added some stuff to generate simple geometry (quad, cube, spheroid, caps and cylinders). Since my art sucks, better suck in big style going beyond programmer drawn art and going directly to programmer-programmed art!

You can download the framework here, if you want to use it (it has three sample applications that show most if not all the features):

• D3D9 initialization and some helpers
• FMOD interface for sound
• 2d Sprites (with sprite caching, etc)
• 2d Particle System
• Text
• 3ds file loading (only tested with 3ds generated by 3d Studio Max). Loads lights, meshes and cameras.
• Small simple math library (vectors and quaternions)
• Simple 3d camera handling system (just with a “look at” operation)
• XML loading/saving (might come in handy for configuration files, load/saves, etc. The XML loader was created by Frank Berghen, not me… the writer is all me, although the loader also has save functions, but I’m too lazy to figure out how they work)
• 3d particle system (based on the 2d one, so very rudimentary)
• 3d sprite system (quads that always face the camera)
• LUA library support (it’s actually ripped from my engine, so it’s a good support system for LUA)… Last time I used cutscenes and scripting, and loads of the game code was much simpler because of that…
• DDS image loading for an offscreen buffer (just supports A8R8G8B8 images). Might be useful for some level design stuff, although I’ll probably go back to my old days of text files.
• 3d Tilemap (Kind of a blocky heightmap with an automatic texture atlas generation and partition of the map in chunks for possible culling (not implemented)).
• Simple geometry generation (quad, cube, spheroid, caps and cylinders)

On the tools side:

• Visual Studio 2010
• Photoshop CS5 (for 2d graphics and textures if I decide to adventure into 3d, and for map creation, etc)
• 3d Studio Max (for modelling if I go 3d, or for title screens and such otherwise)
• sfxr (or Bfxr) (for audio effects)
• Wolfram Tones (for the music creation – fun tool, saves loads of time) and MIDI Converter Free (to convert the MIDI generated by Wolfram Tones to OGG)
• Live Writer for blogging
• Chronolapse for time-lapse.
• Everything I get my hands on…

Hopefully this will go better than the last one (in which I got totally bored halfway through and quit)…

Probably going for my usual 48-Hour compo drill… Go to bed at normal hours, wake up at 3am to see the theme and go back to bed… then start working early in the morning!

Good luck if you’re participating (and you totally should, it’s great fun!)