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[telkoth]

Aileen and I both think that "after the trail" is a more interesting game than "during the trail", especially since "during the trail" is already The Oregon Trail

that being said, the option to move your Wagon is something I'd like to add, and I don't see why an in-game mode of "I just want to travel and survive" can't be an option! (from right to left, old-school Oregon Trail-style!) it just might not be the mode getting the most attention. of course, if we accidentally make an awesome "travel and survive" mode that everyone loves way more than settlement-building, I'm sure development focus would shift to match

regarding Native Americans, Aileen and I also agree on the following points:

• racism isn't cool
• ignoring history is rude

and have decided to have our cake and eat it, too: to acknowledge history without putting the player in the middle of it. for example, your colonists' first meeting with the Native Americans could be a tense one - both sides cautious for their own reasons - but one which ultimately plays out well. there may be evil and wrongdoing in this world, but your colonists and the Native Americans they have met are not part of it. future meetings would be friendly, for trade.

there could be other such acknowledgements sprinkled through the game; but equally, perhaps there doesn't need to be.

this can be thought about more when development actually catches up. for now, I'd really just like to get your colonists building warehouses and human-houses

[telkoth]

having a bit of fun/trouble applying burningpet's textures... which has nothing to do with burningpet's textures, and everything to do with me not knowing a damn about 3D programming (invoking XNA/MonoGame's 3D methods was the most-convenient way I could find to draw shapes from verticies, but maybe I should look deeper for a 2D approach... using 3D to do this stuff seems kind of overkill, anyway...)



and now it's way past my bedtime >_> [passes out]

[burningpet]

Yeah, kind of an overkill

Just create 2 background planes with one being the cliffs on a layer below and the other being the ground, cut it for the diagonal shapes without distorting the texture. it should look ok for a start.

[telkoth]

yeah, I know what I want to do, I just don't know how to tell XNA/MonoGame to do it.

I haven't been able to figure out a solution, so I posted a question to StackOverflow (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20293378/a-texture-that-repeats-across-the-world-based-on-x-y-coordinates). while waiting for a reply there, I'll focus my efforts on getting colonists to build things.

[telkoth]

thanksgiving adventures (and an "exciting" start to the work week) are over, and I'm getting back into coding this thing.

two happy things to report!


one, I've somehow overcome the biggest hurdle I was facing in these 3D textures... check it:



you can see that they're not quite lining up at this time, but what's really most important is that it's not stretched or garbled at any point! getting them to line up should be easy from here.


two, and completely invisible, is a bunch of coding work toward getting colonists to work on constructions. I've drawn a little warehouse graphic, and... well, here, I'll upload that, also



(my poor drawing skills are revealed!)

so you might think "oy: the door is floating in the middle of it. that's dumb."

but since you will often be building on slopes, the idea is to center the base of the door on the point where you build the building, allowing that stone "foundation" to peek out on the slope down, rather than having the building just kinda' floating there

that being said, looking at the mockups burningpet drew, and my desire to match his beautiful pictures, I might end up flattening the terrain out a lot more; at least enough that the buildings could sit there and not look funny, even without this "foundation" part...

for now, though, I'm gonna' go with the slopes and things as I have them.


hopefully, in the next few days, I'll be able to show you guys colonists building warehouses. that'll be exciting, as once that code is in, it will open the doors for colonists building all KINDS of things, and building a town is where the game is really supposed to start happening! I'm looking forward to it

[mastahcheese]

Awesome!

[coolio678]

I myself think this game could be really cool for making stories. Like legends in DF, reading (or watching!) your colonists create and maintain relationships with each other is something that would really interest me. Also, there wasn't too much to entertain yourself with back in the day, so I'd imagine gossiping about each other was a fairly common occurrence in the colonies.

I like where this is headed, though. It could become something really cool.

edit: I would also love to see some parallax backgrounds. That is the number one thing I love seeing in 2d games. They're just so pretty and stylish.

[GiglameshDespair]

Looking good. The foundations thing seems liek a good idea to me, though logically you'll need some kind of stone to build it (unless to just say there's enough in the ground the foundations will go). With towns, though, I'm assuming you'll add farms / plantations to grow crops?

[telkoth]

definitely intending on agriculture, yes! at the very least, planting things from seeds (ex: new berry bushes!), and then harvesting those. since plants don't require lots of materials (like buildings do), I could even implement this now with relatively minimal effort.


BUT: instead of working on buildings at all today, I played around with applying textures over the scene, to give a painterly look to things.

I poked around google image search, and just grabbed some paint texture graphic, desaturated, transparified, etc... you can see that the one I'm using has a watermark logo on it (picture below.) 'obviously can't be used in the long-run. (you can also see it doesn't tile quite right >_>) I don't mind dropping a few bucks for good textures, but now is not the time to be spending ANY dollars on this, so these stand-in graphics will do, for proof-of-concept.

I also noticed that the graphic burningpet created for the ground doesn't tile quite right. I had thought it was me getting the math for tiling the texture wrong, but it turned out my math was perfect! so I've dropped in some other texture, just to demonstrate to myself that, indeed, it's all working great.


picture!




okay, okay, but I promise: NEXT time I'll finish up colonists building buildings >_>

[burningpet]

wow, starts to look really good!

cant see where the tiles don't connect 

if you place a lighter floor and extend it a bit upwards, so as to convey the guys are not walking on its edge, you could already have a great looking visual start.

[GiglameshDespair]

"Truly, this was the land of God, and their journey had been blessed. They have argued for long nights around the campfire of what it could mean when the words faded into view as the wagon trundled along, but they were farmers and journeymen, not philosophers. Few could read one word, and none could read the other. What could it mean? Nonetheless, it was a sign.

They spoke with natives, whom them found friendly: through gestures and effort they asked about the words. 'They were not always there,' said the natives, 'until one day the sky changed.' The colonists were amazed. It was a sign from God - confirmed by the natives themselves! They unharnessed the oxen and disembarked the wagon. A nearby pine pointed proudly towards the sky as dawn peaked over the horizon. Thus began the holy ceremony that lasted through the ages: as one, they knelt and intoned...

'Deposit photo.'"

 

But anyway, yeah, I like it. Having a more painted sky fits in with the ground as well.
Maybe have the fog of unexplored territory white rather than black? Black just seems... unfitting for the game to me, if you get what I'm saying. For me, a black hidden thign represents unknown danger and menace, when a white one (for example) does not, and as a happy game like this it seems like it would fit a bit better. Also I keep thinking it has something to do with night approaching. :L

[telkoth]

UI stuff always takes up more time than I expect:



and I realized just now that I've done it wrong, and have to do some things over again >_>

so: the way it works currently is you click the "build" icon on the left, and then that building menu appears, and follows your mouse around, while staying stuck to the ground... to start the order, you'd click the building name you want.

the last bit - clicking on a building name to start an order - doesn't work, although as mentioned, I've already done a lot of code needed for the for colonists to build (finding resources in buildings, bringing them to the site, and using them)... though it's still untested, so I'm sure there's lots to do there.

but anyway, this is a bad UI:

• who's ever seen a floaty-followy menu thing like this? it's weird. we should use conventional UI behaviors/elements.
• I'd like to publish to mobile (even if just windows at some point. I've never done this before, and it may end up murdering me so bad I give up. but until then, I'm going to assume I'm going to do it anyway: you can't hover on a touch device! (well, okay, some fancy styluses let you, but...)

what I'll change it to do instead is something more normal: click/touch on the "build" icon on the left, and a sub-menu pops up just to the right of that build icon, fixed in place, like real menus click/touch on a building in that list to build, or click/touch elsewhere to cancel.

[Sumyunguy]

This is some great stuff! Your game has a ton of potential. I only wish that I had the coding knowledge required to craft a quality game.

If you want suggestions, I could give some ideas but it is up to you. It's your creation, and I don't want to intrude on anything unless I get permission to do so.

[Elephant Parade]

This looks incredible!

I'm no programmer, but if you ever need a proofreader, I might be able to help you out. Or if you just need a passage of text written up, for whatever reason.

[telkoth]

ideas would be great!


I feel bad about having slowed down recently. it's been a week or so, and all I have to show is textured polygons... and approximately zero new game-play features. but game-play featuers are the most important part! I still haven't gotten the building stuff in, although I've made some more progress on the UI for building (semi-transparent preview of what your building will look like, as you choose where to place it). somehow LIFE keeps distracting me... (what's up with that? c'mon, life. geeze.)


BUT: definitely feel free to post ideas. also: I should probably consider scribbling up some design philosophies/pillars, to keep all our ideas - yours AND mine - in check. I'm also willing to talk about what those core philosophies would be.

off the top of my head, I am wanting:
1. strong setting: 1840-1850 colonization of the west. The Oregon Trail.
2. characters/personality. I think I mentioned earlier that I made a web game with pets whose behaviors were based on maslow's heirarchy of needs, and triangular love theory (or triangular theory of love? I forget - it's on wikipedia).
3. simulation/survival
4. building/achieving

these deserve "why?"s
* 1 is kind of trivial, in the sense that you can do 2-4 in ANY setting... sci-fi, fantasy, etc. I've chosen The Oregon Trail both for nostalgia reasons, and because it's an uncommon setting. in reading about the history on wikipedia, there's a lot of good stuff to draw from. (it wasn't a boring place or time )
* 2 and 4, I think, will serve as the main motivators for play. the more real the characters seem, the more responsible and attached to them you will feel. as they live, make friends, fall in love, and die, I hope players will find characters they like, and characters they hate. a drama to follow as the colony grows and expands; a drama you can play a part in through building; a drama you can tell stories about.
* and 3 is the obstacle, the real game, the puzzle: as you build, and follow the lives of your colonists, you will contend with forces of nature, the needs of your colonists for food, shelter from the elements, and even love and self-esteem.

I suspect 1 (setting) and 3 (simulation) will often come together to help with 2 (characters). ex: how will your people interact with the native americans? wanderers, or other colonists that pass through? the effects of winter with the limited technology of the time? etc


assuming you're on-board with the above, any mechanics/game suggestions should support these. the best will probably support multiple points, or help to tie multiple points together. with my pet game, I had a bad habit of just adding whatever seemed like a great idea at the time. the game was fun, but it was a mess of concepts and ideas which did not always play together well, and the main points of the game often got lost. I'd like to prevent that this time, by sticking to these design pillars/philosophies.

it is also fair to NOT be on-board with the above; I'm happy to talk about that too... if people have other directions they'd like to go, etc.