So! Looking over the Other Games forum a bit, I've noticed a trend. People want a survival game. UnReal World, Cataclysm, Wayward, Harvest Moon, maybe a little Animal Crossing, along with multiplayers like Haven and Hearth, Wurm, and Minecraft with Terrafirmacraft...people like these games of "farming sim gone hardcore."
I've played UnReal World and Harvest Moon. And I'm a bit familiar with Minecraft. The rest I've never heard of. I can see some similarities.
Some.I found some fun in Harvest Moon... for a while. The farming gets repetitive after a while. The romance and dating-sim aspect is probably the more interesting part.
Growing up on a farm, I can tell you that in real life it's pretty boring, dirty, tedious, and hard work. Even so, there is something about gardening and seeing the fruits of your labor - especially in trying something new, experimenting with unusual varieties. Just look through a large (preferably color) seed catalog some time and try
not to be tempted to buy some of their seeds.
I can
appreciate the realism and details that went into UnReal World. It's more a simulation than anything else. But that's a problem for me. Personally, it's far too
boring as it leaves out all the fantasy, mystical, mythical, and magical stuff in typical roguelikes that might otherwise keep me interested.
A rather unusual implementation of "farming" might be the "Orchard" part of the
Legend of Mana (PS1). Instead of planting seeds directly, you give certain combinations of seeds to the talking tree behind your house. He "plants" and cares for the seeds and grows the fruit on his branches. It has silly and colorful fruits like Boarmelon (watermelon shaped like a boar), Diceberry (dice-shaped strawberry), Lilipods (pea pods open up like a lily), Springanana (spiral banana), etc. And each has a use to feed to your pets, raising stats in different ways.
(Actually, I found the Golem Workshop to be more interesting. You can use extra armor and weapons to build golem parts and "logic blocks", which fit together like a puzzle to dictate how the golem behaves. And the magical armor and weapon forging was complex and fun, too. Though, there is something to be said for finding monster eggs, raising them on your ranch, and training them to fight by your side. The choice of which monsters to raise and use is interesting, in itself. Though, honestly, I found the pet raising system of
Well of Souls to be better. You don't find eggs, but you tame wild monsters. I loved how we could feed unwanted weapons and armor to our pets.
)
Aside from Dwarf Fortress, another farming implementation that I found interesting was the one in
Ancient Domains of Mystery. The growing pattern of the herbs are based on
Conway's Game of Life. And the herbs are very useful.
Obviously, the sense of accomplishment in overcoming obstacles or figuring out a method is a primary way gamers get fun and satisfaction. Beyond that,
discovering new things is another aspect of games. And so is the sense of
acquiring status (such as a score or fame or "unlocking" accomplishments) or things of value (gold, treasure, items, weapons, armor, etc).
I'm just saying that farming in a game, by itself, does not seem that appealing. But if it is linked with something else, such as raising pets a certain way or having certain crops for specific uses, that adds to it.
The only issue is that it never quite fits the bill. Usually it's too easy - once you set your wheat in the ground then the game's over. You've got infinite free food and bears are the most dangerous thing that doesn't hunt you so you can just not go into caves and do perfectly fine.
You have some good points. With rare exception, when I play a game there comes a point where I find (in my mind) serous faults with the design. As you say, it often "never quite fits the bill" in terms of what I would have done. And I have to agree that - particularly with farming games and farming aspects - it usually is too easy.
3: Gain employees - Many farming sims fail here, you can only maintain so many tiles of crop before you run out of time in the day to tend them all. Delegating jobs to employees will be essential. You can set up a shack by the river and fish your life, sure, but you can also run a farm of a dozen employees, tending the fields, husbanding the animals (giggity), cooking food, and all the menial chores that one person just can't do alone.
This reminds me of the
Tropico series of simulation games. Personally, I found it pretty boring. The appeal of simulations like Sim City, I can understand. But what is the appeal of everyday employee and farm management?
Single-level, I don't see much spelunking here. I may steal Ultima Ratio Regime's idea of "each tile has a height" instead of doing blocky maps. More than likely I'll go UnReal World's style though (And Cataclysm), letting you build a floor+ceiling tile that prevents weather and does some fun things with how heat and light works.
Too bad. I enjoy spelunking and dungeon crawling in games, particularly roguelikes and RPGs like Daggerfall and Morrowind. And mining is one of the things that attracted me to Dwarf Fortress.
Perhaps you could do something like the simple terrain elevation in the
GearHead RPG? Certain isometric tiles represent slopes and it only allows a few levels of height.
Or maybe have the occasional dungeon entrance on the surface that leads to a 1 level deep - but sprawling - maze-like dungeon? It shouldn't be too hard to implement. There are plenty of code examples for random dungeon map generators, if one knows where to look.
I'd highly suggest swapping to Python. The syntax is similar enough that you can swap over if you already know C++, but everything is so much easier to write.
I can't find the links right now, but there are some websites dedicated to helping fans create their own roguelike games. They have stuff like design advice and source code. And communities to help each other. I'm not sure whether any of it is Python, but I know a lot of it is some flavor of C.
Zombies are kinda overdone, so I'd say drop them. Everything else sounds pretty good though. I especially like the idea of modifying terrain, it seems like not a lot of roguelikes do that sort of thing.
Indeed, I am tired of the zombie fad in both movies and games. Hollywood likes to beat a trend to death if they sniff profitability. They did the same thing with vampires and time travel and now it appears they're trying to milk the superhero genre for all it's worth. They've ruined whole genres for me. Sadly, the originals are usually better - or at least more fondly remembered.
Zombies... perhaps. Either you're making a zombie game or you're not. I don't know of any games with zombies where the focus is not zombies because of the nature of zombies.
Generally, I'd have to agree that a game either has a zombie focus or not. However, there are a few exceptions. Dwarf Fortress has zombies, but they've never been the main focus. And while it isn't finished yet, zombies are not really the focus to the isometric game
The Pocolypse webcomic creators are making - there's much,
much more to it than that.
If you do have zombies, I suggest trying to either make them fresh/different or at least not the focus.
For a different twist, I am reminded of the
Zombie Ranch webcomic. The zombies themselves are fairly typical. However, as
all the farmable animals in the world are dead, the survivors and remnants of civilization were forced to
EAT zombies for sustenance!
And they turn them into other products. They have ranches where they feed and care for zombies like cattle, being careful not to get bit. I'm sure they process them carefully, cooking them and spicing them up... but... YUCK!
The zombies I would use would be one of two ways, either the ancient Scandinavian Draugr, or some type of ancient zombie/vampire, because old legends are a bit similar. While Skyrim has popularized the Draugr, the old legends are of a warrior possessed back to life by whatever means, become immortal and consumed with bloodlust, unstoppable in its rampage until somehow lured back to set foot in his grave, which would tie him back to the earth. The other option would be a sort of "live zombie" idea. Not a shambler, but an active human being with all the speed and coordination as the player, and perhaps just slightly less thought than the average NPC. They would be quick and dangerous, hard to deal with and liable to sneak into the farm at night and feast on fresh cow corpses.
Skyrim may have popularized them, but Revenants in games go back a ways. D&D had them since either 1st or 2nd edition. Personally, I don't like the concept because they're just
too tough. They're like the demons in Dwarf Fortress. Also, I always
hated the concepts of "fast zombies" and "smart zombies". In my mind, if they are either, they are
not zombies. Hollywood tried to put a new spin on them to make them scarier and more interesting.
Your mention of the Scandinavian Draugr instantly brings to mind the
Ragnarok game for DOS (also known as
Valhalla). It is one of my favorite roguelikes, right up there with GearHead and Dwarf Fortress. The Draugr in Ragnarok are like the Revenant in D&D in that they are very hard to kill and even after death they just come back to life. (You usually have to eat the Draugr to prevent this.)
Speaking of Ragnarok, I loved it for the choice in classes (you could be an alchemist to create potions, a blacksmith to forge stuff, a scribe to write magic scrolls, etc) and all the interesting things to do and stuff to find. The wands, scrolls and potions are all interesting. One of the potions, for example, lets you bring inanimate objects to life, much like Micky Mouse animated that mop in Fantasia. Blacksmithing lets you forge all kinds of stuff.
Scrolls let you do stuff like
extinct an entire species or add charges to wands. My favorite is the Wand of Wishing, which is incredibly powerful. I usually wish for a stack of 100 Hel Dragon corpses as eating them permanently increases CON (and hit points).
There's all sorts of interesting creatures, too. The Weird Fume can mutate you, which sounds bad, but it has useful benefits. It can cause you to grow more fingers, which replaces any you lost in battle and allows you to wear more magic rings. It can cause you to grow more eyes, which replaces any you lost and allows you to see behind you and more accurately, etc. Eating certain herbs and things is useful, too. Like a mushroom that grants you heat vision like Superman. And picking up diamond needles... while it hurts you, if you survive you become an esper and can kill with your mind across the map.
Oh, and then there's journeying to different dimensions! When I find a wand of wishing I'll wish for a stack of 100 empty vials and travel to the realm of
magic pools, filling up and drinking magic potions to my heart's content. And then there's the hyperdimensional cube, which (if orange) can slow down time itself!
And then there's the "Sorcerer" creature. It will randomly transform stuff in your inventory to other stuff - unless it is stored inside your
bag of holding. Or, if you wear a silver mantle you are protected from their spells. But randomly changing your worthless stuff can be
extremely profitable!
...Ah, fun times!
This premise is surprisingly similar (identical, even) to the roguelike that I'm planning. If the languages weren't so different, I would suggest a big collabo.
Hrm...I need to do the exact same as you...we should be study buddies XD
I am just starting to work on my own roguelike as well and like you I have dipped into C++ multiple times and never followed through with it. Til now of course where I decided that I am just gonna do it already and quit making excuses.
PTW. You should definitely make it moddable to a point, at least having objects and reactions in a .xml somewhere, so we can help.
I'm slowly making a roguelike myself. I have to have both the time and desire to work on it, so it advances rarely. I'm using C++ because I like doing things the hard way? C++ is not a good language if you want to make a roguelike (or roguelikelike). You made a good switch. I hope you have more dedication than I do as well, because this could be quite interesting.
You should consider teaming up. You'd be more likely to succeed.
Growing up, I had a strong desire to learn programming and make games. So much so that I bought a small library of how-to books and majored in Computer Science for a while. Sadly, I never did much with any of that before I found a
different focus. But I did learn a few things.
One of these pearls of wisdom is that it's very easy to start a big project, but it can be very, very difficult to see one through to the end. I've seen countless indie and fan-made games and game mods started... never to be finished. Usually, it's because they bit off more than they could chew. That, and real life has a way of intruding or wearing down enthusiasm.
Another thing I noticed is that indie projects involving more than one person often have more impressive end results and seem a bit more likely to succeed. (Commercial games have large teams of game designers, programmers, artists, etc, and
it usually shows.) That said, if a project relies too much on one person and that person quits or goes on permanent hiatus, the whole thing can fall apart.
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Topic: Let's make a roguelike, amateur programming at its... finest? (Read 21455 times)