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[Anvilfolk]

I think she's using a looking glass. If I'm not mistaken, my wife did that using the scene where she's spotting for Lord Yupa from the fossilised skull of a fire demon in the toxic jungle. That's right at the beginning of the movie

[Soadreqm]

So cool!

Now, I would very much like to keep the game as close as possible to the atmosphere of the movie/manga. All the ideas I am coming up with, however, will make for an insanely depressive game. I would love feedback and other suggestions (if you haven't watched the movie, do yourselves a favour and watch it!):

• Events - every "season", different events can happen:
• Insects sometimes travel to the village. Ideally, you'd get rid of them without violence (how, not sure). If you don't, you will enrage the forest and more insects will come. They will have a certain "rage" level, and they will leave once they have done damage corresponding to the rage level. This includes killing villagers, so your village gets progressively smaller and smaller as people die...
• Spores, either from insects or just drifting with the wind, will sometimes come into the village. If not taken care of, they will kill crops, grow miasmas and make people go sick and take over the village. You'll have to burn them.
• Enemy nation attacks/visits. They will land, and they might be militaristic or not. Defend or trade or pay taxes or something. Not too sure about this.
• Village management: how many people should tend the crops and care for them, how many should search for spores, search and harvest chico nuts, build buildings, draw water, etc.

The traditional roguelike interface isn't particularly suited for village management, and even less for international politics, but I'm sure there are ways around that. If you want to have political intrigue, I'd recommend looking at the turn-based strategy genre. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, in particular, had this nice ecological damage mechanic that could work in a Valley of the Wind setting. The greater your industrial output, the more goop you're spewing into nature, and the more hostile the Planet-covering alien fungus becomes. And then your bases start getting attacked by psychic worms. It's also affected by things like whether you're running free market or green economic policies and whether you've built nature preserves in your bases, but the basic gist is that you gotta strike a balance between building things to deal with the other players, and living in harmony with nature. (Or you can just tear down the fungus and kill the mind worms as they attack, but that still takes effort.)

I don't see why you would force the player to explore the sea of corruption. It's a hostile and toxic place filled with deadly creatures. Exploring it should be something special that you need to plan and prepare for, not something that you need to do for your village to survive. Of course it'd be harder to survive without exploring the forests, but it should still be possible to. The forests should be high risk, high reward areas that favour the bold and the prepared. Just my two cents though.

Eh, the anime opens with Nausicaä just casually looking around the Sea of Corruption. The manga has people living in it. Sure, it's toxic, but that's why there are breathing masks. As for the deadly creatures, none of them seem actually hostile. They're just guarding and maintaining the place, and only attack when provoked. The insects don't really pay any attention to Nausicaä walking around, but flip their shit when that older guy, whatshisface, shoots something.

Admittedly, Nausicaä is psychic. The jungle might react differently to different people. Do you want the player to be the CHOSEN ONE, who can commune with the Ohmu and is destined to discover the true nature of the Sea of Corruption, or just some random bloke who happened to be born in the wrong era?

The storylines of the Movie and Manga are fairly major. They involve major changes to the world, the Vally of the Wind, and revelations about the state of the world and what nature is actually doing. In that sense, the overarching story for humanity is a struggle to survive long enough to see that purified world.

Before that point, the stories are more...typically post-apocalyptic. A crumbling world full of danger, but many interesting things to do if you're traveling around in it. If you think about Master...Geppo? Whatever his name was, who traveled around and explored ancient ruins and whatnot, that makes for a pretty good basic Adventurer type game. Doesn't need a huge story or goal, simply explore and maybe try to help out the various towns and villages so that they survive longer. Could be an interesting exercise in a changing world and trying to have an impact.

For a town, it's going to generally be about normal farming, trading, building, repairing...town stuff. Insect Attacks should be rare, unless the player gets greedy in some way, and anything other than occasional traders from other towns should be minimized. That is, if you want to focus at the low level like a DF Fort. Running an empire in a post apocalyptic world would be interesting, but a very different game from what I think you're trying to do.

Nausicaä's life before the plot started seemed to consist of helping people around the town and rooting around the Sea of Corruption for useful raw materials and interesting fungus specimens, the latter of which she studied in her secret fungus lab in the lower reaches of her castle. If you could turn exploration and scavenging into a fun mechanic, that could pretty much carry the game. Searching the jungle for interesting things, overcoming obstacles (which would preferably not be enemies all the time since canon says you can't kill insects or the whole forest flies off the handle, and Nausicaä was a pacifist anyway), balanced by organizing civic engineering projects and doing science. Yeah, I think you should definitely have science. Lost knowledge of the elder peoples was a pretty big deal in the original works, on both sides of the message being delivered. Pejite was digging up lost artifacts like airplane engines and discovered a dormant ancient walking nuclear death tank. The worm-handlers had cloning vats and were growing ohmu to use as bait for more ohmu. The Doroks had clinical immortality and hydras. On the other side we got Nausicaä, trying to discover the secrets of the Sea of Corruption to build a better life for everyone, and of course the elder peoples themselves, fucking the world over in nine different ways while simultaneously saving it.

[USEC_OFFICER]

Eh, the anime opens with Nausicaä just casually looking around the Sea of Corruption. The manga has people living in it. Sure, it's toxic, but that's why there are breathing masks. As for the deadly creatures, none of them seem actually hostile. They're just guarding and maintaining the place, and only attack when provoked. The insects don't really pay any attention to Nausicaä walking around, but flip their shit when that older guy, whatshisface, shoots something.

Only... the Worm-Handlers and the Forest People live in the Sea of Corruption. Definitively not a large segment of humanity. At the very least, the forest should be hostile enough to discourage settlement for all but the most dedicated.

[Anvilfolk]

Thanks for all the input guys I've been having some tough weeks, so I haven't been able to put much work into this. I keep changing the way the entities.xml file is written to make it more and more general

Right now I'm working on a basic equipment system. Hopefully, all actors will have certain "parts" (like left hand, right hand, feet, etc) in which you'll be able to equip objects, which are equippable at those locations. This'll be the basic system. Some ideas for the future at part-specific HP, similar to IVAN, multi-part objects (two handed swords) and so forth.


Regarding your comments... I'm not a fan of fixed storylines, so I don't see this game being about taking exactly the same steps that Nausicaä did. I also don't want it to be a managing game like DF. I'm imagining some basic decisions for percentage of village population in each activity, but don't want to go much further than that just now. We can just say that you are the prince/princess of some periphery valley where wind blows

I do want visits to the sea of corruption be relatively common. That's where the more roguelike-ish aspect of the game will crop up. You go there for rewards like we discussed (ohmu shells, firedemon skeletons, etc).

I really like the mechanics you mentioned from Alpha Centauri. It ties nicely to the ideas I had about insect "anger level". The more you hang around the sea of corruption harvesting stuff, taking stuff, etc, the more the anger level of the forest raises. The higher it is, the higher the chance of certain insect colonies attacking you. I'm also thinking there should be rogue insects that you have to fight at no anger penalty...

Not too sure how to make progression work in this game. I'd like both character and village progression. I'm tilting a little towards IVAN's way of doing things. No levels, you just become more proficient at things through use. I find levels a little arbitrary.

Also, we can have wormhandler colonies or wormhandler levels in the sea of corruption. I remember Nausicaä not really liking them, so perhaps they could be high-risk high-reward zones?

[GuyNamedJoe]

Looking forward to seeing what you come up with! I really like the direction you're taking this in, especially the emphasis on exploration + building over a more combat-focused game. Really feels like it's going to be more true to the source material that way.

[GlyphGryph]

Also, we can have wormhandler colonies or wormhandler levels in the sea of corruption. I remember Nausicaä not really liking them, so perhaps they could be high-risk high-reward zones?

The wormhandlers weren't really bad guys. Nausicaä disliked them because they were unclean, and defiled graves, and because she saw them as weak and dirty and pathetic. It's very much a nobility thing, and the worm handlers, ostracized for the ability to commune with the worms, were considered the "lowest, most unclean class", and dealing with them was seen as unsavoury.

But they weren't really bad guys.

MIYAZAKI I don't think that I'm qualified to comment of the caste system or its discrimination problems, nor do I want to.
But those kinds of people will always exist, I think. I don't mean that they are especially necessary, I just think that, regardless of the society, they will somehow exist. I used the worm handlers to bring this out. At first, Nausicaa couldn't bring herself to use the worms. She could not forgive such things as opening the graves of the dead. Such feelings are natural, of course. I don't think anyone could understand something like the worms right from the start. You agree, right?
I think that that's an integral part of being human. Looking at the worm handlers from a much broader perspective, based on the things she herself had had to do, Nausicaa was finally able to accept them. She didn't accept them after studying and thinking on the problem. Her experiences and enlarged viewpoint enabled her to do so.
In the same vein, Selm claimed that the blood of the worm handlers also flowed through his people's veins. This says that even the most despicable thing has an element of nobility. I can't say for sure, but somehow that's true. It's part of the spiritual make up.
[...]
I think it was the same in Japan, as well. People who make steel, and others like them, are not found in the centers of villages. They are on the outskirts. Ethnologically speaking, these people exist apart from the villagers.
The worm handlers are like that. They and the wind readers were probably considered special races in their villages. Not everyone in the village could read the wind. So, people who could, although greatly valued, were considered to be different. They were treated carefully, but could not live together with the villagers. They had taken on different responsibilities. This is what happens when people band together.

[Anvilfolk]

I have a workshop paper deadline due this Saturday, so progress is a little slow. I'm almost done with implementing equipping things. I'm working on the menu for it, then it should be done since I've already gotten bodyparts in. These bodyparts can be different for each creature type, which I find is pretty cool.

I swear using a graphical system is a huge pain in the ass. All the graphical things take over 1000 lines of code at the moment. I'm about to start not giving a **** about efficiency and just render all text anew everyframe. Makes things a ton easier.

 Then it's off to think about how I can specify the effects of items in XML

I'm wondering how general I want these things to be. Presumably, I might be able to say in XML when something should be activated (i.e. onEquip, onAttack, onDefense), and then the class name for some effect to be executed. I'm not sure if I want to refer to specific class names in the XML though. I would rather write out the effects in XML themselves, though then it might require more code support for them.

I think an easier system might be have these all be item properties, like armour class/protection, damage, etc. Then, most items will have protection of 0 unless they are armour, most items will have no damage rating unless they are weapons, and so forth. This also allows for more traditional RL things like cursed items by having a boolean property "cursed", or probability of an item of that class being cursed, and so forth. Or perhaps cursedness or items is a level property.

There are too many ways to organise things, hah

[Anvilfolk]

Well, doing the equipment screen took much longer than I anticipated, as usual in programming Of course, I've only managed to put in a very small number of hours into this recently. I quite like how it turned out though. I've already learned a ton about GUI things, and whatever game comes next is going to have them rehauled for sure

I am getting more and more worried about using PyGame, but now is frankly a little too late to switch. We will see whether I can get very far without running into performance issues (on a roguelike, no less - can you believe it?).



Anyways, here's a screenshot. I think I've made it nice and userfriendly

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Like I said, I think next will be item effects, then possibly combat so there's something to do and test out usual RL gameplay

[Mephansteras]

Looking good!

[Anvilfolk]

I've finally moved, and now have more free time. Itching to get back on this! One of the things that had me feeling awkward about the project was the way that even with very simple rendering, PyGame was already making the game go down to 20-30fps or so, on a decent machine. I'd like the work I am putting on this to be generic enough that it can be reusable in other projects, and for anything other than a static game it wouldn't work.

However, I just heard that SFML2.0 is finally out, and that the Python bindings, PySFML are also out, supporting Python 3.x and 64bit architecture.

Before I go any further I'm going to change the way things are rendered, and probably make a separate, slightly more generic, GUI library. That might take a little, but it's going to be worth it in the long run. I am also thinking the animations will also be much smoother since I won't necessarily need individual frame animations for the windmills, for example. I'll just make a sprite for the windmill base, a sprite for the blades, and have that spin around

I'm also wondering how moddable/generic I should make things... I'm wondering, for instance, whether I could put Python code within the XML files, and execute that. That's pretty much as generic as it gets, but on the other hand having things too generic is definitely bogging development down at the moment.

Either way, I'm super excited to get back on this

Is anyone interested in participating in this? I seem to thrive a bit more from collaboration, and could definitely set up a github thing. This is going to be Python 3.2 + PySFML2

[zombie urist]

I'm not too familiar with Nausicaa but I can do some bugfixes or something.

[Anvilfolk]

Hahaha, once we get to the point where there's enough game for there being bugfixes, I'll let you know

To be honest, what I'm looking at is real collaboration. As in, meeting over skype, chatting about it, discussing ideas, objectives, reserving some weekly time for working on it together, that kind of stuff. That way it kind of forces the game to happen, since you don't want to let the other devs down

I'm currently EST, or GMT -5

[Anvilfolk]

Got myself reading Game Coding Complete, which approaches the subject of how to organise an engine an so forth. I am going to peruse it for a few more days before making any changes, since I think I'll do a fairly hefty rewrite and would like to organise things so that the engine is usable for other games and so forth.

In the meantime, if anyone is interested in looking at the current SDL-based code, it's at https://github.com/Anvilfolk/NausicaaRL

Let me know if you have any questions as to how it's organised, how things work, and so forth But like I said, probably going to undergo a bit of a rewrite to make things a bit more reusable