Hey, B12ers! I haven't been able to spend as much time among you as I'd like during the past year or so due to work and a determination not to get distracted by videogames/too much conversation, but I've been around on these forums for a long while (though I rarely have time to play DF anymore).
There's another topic for this game under 'Cult Kickstarter', but the name of the game has recently changed and I'm not the OP of that topic (I've asked alexpoysky if he can lock it at some point just to avoid bloating this subforum), so I wanted to start up a fresh topic about the game proper that I can actually exhibit control over as the OP.
So, for anybody who
doesn't know - Empyrea is a game that started off as a hobby project using the libTCOD library/framework here on the B12 forums. It gradually snowballed into something much larger, and I was able to run a successful Kickstarter campaign for it. I then got bogged down by a bunch of huge, discouraging technical problems which I was eventually able to overcome through a lot of stubbornness and banging my head on the keyboard repeatedly, which evidently creates working code (scientific confirmation of this phenomenon has not yet been verified). Now I'm finally moving past the 'overhaul everything' stage to the 'move forward with new mechanics' stage, which is really exciting, since I feel like I'm finally crawling out of a big rut that I've been stuck in for far too long!
I will unashamedly copy/paste the description of the game from the homepage (
http://www.empyrea.org) here for a quick description of the project's premise and goals:
You can contact the author of Empyrea at dm.hagar@gmail.com.
Empyrea is a multi-genre RL (roguelike) variant game that is currently in the early development stages. It is coded almost entirely in Python (although some processor-intensive parts of the code are replaced by C/C++ extension modules in order to increase speed) and utilizes the excellent libtcod library for roguelikes.
While many of the individual aspects of the Empyrea player experience are still being planned, some of the eventual goals of the project will include:
Customizable user-generated worlds replete with their own rich, unique procedurally generated histories
Procedurally generated races, creatures, spirits, and gods
Procedurally generated and identifiably unique languages
Procedurally generated religions
The ability to join or found nations and religions
The ability to recruit and maintain both a traditional party for small-scale exploration/battle and a larger army for wide-scale conflict (with situational restrictions on the uses of both)
Unique dungeons, dungeon guardians, and artifacts to explore and pillage
Construction of both small-scale and large-scale settlements according to play-style
Strong focus on main character customization and development
Free-form, highly open-ended gameplay
Because the combination of these goals makes for an inarguably epic scope of gameplay, Empyrea is intended to be a long term project which will hope to one day combine all of the above aspects of play into a single gaming experience that will deliver an incredible amount of replayability and customization to the player.
In the short term (and probably far more practically), the main developmental goal is to establish a functioning (and hopefully interesting) world for the player to explore and to add features piece-by-piece which will gradually allow the main character to influence their world in new and exciting ways.
In addition, two new development videos for the game have just been released, showcasing some of the gameplay mechanics which are finally making their way in (these are primarily in the second half of the video, for those who want to skip the first - which is largely an overview of the world generation process, for those who haven't seen it).
Here are the videos:
Video 1Video 2The game is just about to go on presale (in fact, you will probably be able to prepurchase the game by tomorrow via the website). For now things are still in alpha development, but I'll be releasing monthly or bi-monthly builds now that things are really rolling again, so new mechanics will be going in on a regular basis. The plan all along has really been to utilize a DF-like development cycle, since the scope of the game makes that more or less a necessity (though to be fair, I thought I would be farther along at this point than I am - addressing looming graphical issues wasn't something I expected to do so early on, when I launched the campaign). The benefit to buying the game in alpha will be that you'll gain access to the community-only subsections of the website at a considerable discount (this is explained in the videos). I
think at this point I'll be making the game freely downloadable - barring any sudden changes in my gut feeling, or good advice from more knowledgeable sorts - just because that seems to be more in keeping with the spirit that the project started in (i.e., as a not-entirely-subtle offshoot of the roguelike/DF-inspired subgenre).
That's all for now - I'll keep this thread updated as progress is made!
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Topic: Empyrea (Read 10539 times)