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[telkoth]

A god game inspired by Dwarf Fortress and The Oregon Trail.

I post screenshots here: http://imgur.com/a/2HH4R

I've also made some demonstration videos:

• Jan 9, 2014: http://youtu.be/xfKJRolIMIY
• Dec 20, 2013: http://youtu.be/9nfpXtno6qE
• Dec 22, 2013: http://youtu.be/_60CpNM0H2U
• Dec 15, 2013: http://youtu.be/gE85Ve_WIhs
• Dec 12, 2013: http://youtu.be/a_1KWuo3Q1o
• Nov 18, 2013: http://youtu.be/FE5D1PwhOGA

and I bought the domain name and threw up a blog, but it mostly just repeats everything I've said/say in this thread:

• alittlewilderness.com

Existing features:

• You can create orders to cut trees, collect berries from bushes, and fish
• You can create orders to store "resources" (wood, berries, and fish) in a building.
• Colonists get hungry, and eat.
• You can create a build order for a Warehouse (a building that can have things stored in it).

Plans for the near future:

• getting sick when in bad health, and dying
• temperature, wind, cloud-cover, and weather
• the moon. I hate that most games only show the moon at night. the moon is super-obvs visible during the day, too, guys. srsly. goodness. ( )
• coloring according to time of day (the sky and ground at least; I've used pixel shaders before, but I can't say I've enjoyed the experience, so I'll probably hold off on coloring the trees and people and things for now...)
• hunting/butchering

Plans for a little later:

• wild animals eating food you leave lying on the ground
• aggressive animals (bears!?) my drawing skills are limited (ex: I didn't draw those trees; I did do the covered wagon, though) so most animals will probably either look stupid, or just be placeholder boxes, for a while
• smarter picking of jobs. ex: if you give an order to cut a tree, it's possible that between two lumberjacks with nothing to do, the one super far away ends up taking the job. colonists basically just take turns claiming jobs, in the order they're stored in the array of colonists... this will clearly not do long-term.
• socializing
• assigning houses to colonists; colonists sleeping in their houses, instead of on the ground
• speaking of music: background music for the game. I've found some nice instrumental pieces on freemusicarchive.org

Plans for later still:

• more socializing, including singing for others (singing is a skill in the game already!) and relationships (and lovin's)
• pregnancy and child birth, for humans AND animals
• collecting salt (which involves collecting water, and either boiling or evaporating it)
• building smokehouses
• smoking and salting meat
• decay of food over time

of course, if this is project interesting to you, I'd love to hear about what you'd like to see (or would NOT like to see), and any other thoughts you may have... that's why I'm posting this here!

[acetech09]

PTW. Awesome.

Assorted comments:

"the moon. I hate that most games only show the moon at night. the moon is super-obvs visible during the day, too, guys. srsly. goodness. ()"
If you do that, you have to go the full nine yards and make the positioning astronomically accurate. Otherwise, just keep it as moon = night, sun = day.


"and/or maybe be killed by (bears!)"
Not sure how well this will work with a 1d environment, you can figure something out though :p.


"speaking of music: background music for the game. I've found some nice instrumental pieces on freemusicarchive.org"
I know a bloke who makes great music. If this project does come around, I could see if he'd be interested.

[telkoth]

currently, a full day in the game takes an hour in real life. since I'm not interested in making people wait 9x28ish real-life hours for a 9-month pregnancies to finish up, for example, each "day" is going to need to represent a larger period of time... perhaps a week?

I haven't yet sat down to figure out the math, and this will admittedly make correct lunar cycles/phases a bit crazy - maybe even impossible?


1D combat... since you mention it, a bear acting as a roadblock could be very bad. I hadn't considered this. two options come to mind:

• the world is kind of 1.5D, really? just as trees and the covered wagon don't block movement, it's possible we could give colonists a way to "escape" an aggressive creature, passing "through" it. or maybe they could "hide", allowing the bear to pass them undetected? but what's a good way to instruct colonists to do these things? you'd probably be super-pissed if a colonist decided on their own, after a battle they were losing, to pass an angry bear, effectively separating themselves from the rest of the colony! should the game pause with a "bear encounter!" alert, giving you time to give orders?
• part of procedural terrain generation could include placing these creatures according to some kind of pacing design. ex: you've been playing for a while, and encountered some scary bears, and avoided them... but now, you've cut down every available tree, and hunted all available nearby deer. and where's all that stone you saw people talking about? I guess it's time to take on those bears in order to explore more of the world...

both of these could be cool options for different reasons:

if combat is meant to be an important/interesting/tactical part of the game for the player, making a big deal of every combat and giving you greater control over that combat and the colonists involved could be interesting... whether to have them hide, attack, or run in one direction or another, etc. (thinking about it more, you could even go into some kind of crazy turn-based mode just for combat - right there on the map! weird!)

on the other hand, if combat is not meant to be a big part of the game for the player, and a danger to be avoided until you have what you need for an overwhelming victory, then using bears as obstacles to discovering more game content is another interesting solution. (I'm reminded of how you must defeat certain Terraria bosses to get to certain places of the world, such as the dungeon, or to unlock hard-mode world.)

I had not considered the problems of 1D combat until you just now brought it up, so everything I've said now is off the top of my head; not well thought-out, etc. there may be entirely different solutions I had not considered. if anyone has any other ideas, that'd be super-great.

I should get back to my real, full-time job, though, for now - heh


later edit: ideas from talking with a friend of mine:

• ability to "load" save game data from the original Oregon Trail game, to seed a new game with (including character names, and whatever other relevant data we can pull). unfortunately, the original Oregon Trail does not feature a save system, but if I wanted to be crazy, I could make the game load the save state from the Applewin emulator >_> (I was able to locate the character names in that data; it's apparently easy to find; not sure about things like broken arms, though.) alternatively, Oregon Trail II _does_ have a save feature (though having never played that one myself, the more-insane save-state loading for the first game is somehow more appealing to me )
• background terrain, parallaxed, not only for decoration, but to show the arrival of the "trade caravan" (to put it in DF terms). (the question was "where will traders come from if you're surrounded by bears?" a good question; I jokingly suggested traders from the 2nd dimension. this solution was born.)
• looking over the professions in Oregon Trail II gives lots of ideas for possible trades/crafts in this game, including wainwrights, for the building of carts (quickly getting around a world is squared as important in a 1D world than in a 2D world I think. math >_>)

[mastahcheese]

This looks pretty cool.

[GiglameshDespair]

The important thing is for them to be able to catch Dysentry.

Cool work, though. This may should weird but I really like the way the trees look.

[telkoth]

I wish I could say the trees were mine. I lifted them from an abandoned project on a pixel art site, completely without permission >_> they will ultimately need to be replaced.

minor update: I've got fishing in place. harvesting fish is surprisingly different from harvesting trees:

• fish respawn
• colonists can fish from a not-insignificant distance
• the product of the work is dropped at the feet of the colonist, rather than at the base of the "object" being worked

I'm also half-way through making the map hidden until explored by your workers. I'll need to implement some kind of scouting order, though.



one new super-adorable/useful idea came up while talking with that same friend of mine. (I will henceforth identify her by name, because names are useful and built for just this sort of purpose Aileen. I also suspect she'll be helping out a lot with this game.)

• the ability to freely decorate your colonists with hats of customizable shape and color, allowing players to create their own identification scheme (ex: "I gave all my lumberjacks green triangle hats")

I created a to-do list on an online todo list website, but I don't think it has the ability to make the to-do list publicly-viewable. if anyone knows of any online services that allow someone to have a publicly-visible to-do list, that'd be awesome. I could pretty quickly roll my own, but I'd rather not re-invent this wheel

[GiglameshDespair]

The hat idea is a good idea, yeah. MAybe it could generate automatically based on their jobs?

Eg lumberjacks have a cap. Hunters have a feather.
People with both lumberjacking and hunting enabled have a feathered cap.

Would that work?

[coolio678]

The hat idea is a good idea, yeah. MAybe it could generate automatically based on their jobs?

Eg lumberjacks have a cap. Hunters have a feather.
People with both lumberjacking and hunting enabled have a feathered cap.

Would that work?

I was thinking more like the uniforms in DF, myself. Like, define the fishermen to have a straw hat or something, and then all your fishermen will put on that type of hat. Maybe the highest enabled skill determines what hat they wear.

[dreadmullet]

A one-dimensional, procedurally generated god game influenced by Oregon Trail? Posting to watch.

[NobodyPro]

Just posting to say I'm very interested in this project.

[telkoth]

end of week was busy at work, but now it's the weekend!

I want to work on eating and sleeping next, but realized with only fish, there's not really enough food to gather >_> so I've implemented Blueberry (and Redsberry) bushes, along with gathering and growing times.

Bushes can hold multiple... let's call them "charges" of berries. they gain a charge every 2 days, and can hold up to three. harvesting a bush consumes a charge, and yields 4-6... bunches? pecks? bushels? nameless units.

finally: they only grow new berries during summer and spring (for now, each month is 4 "days", but I've made sure it's easy to change these things, in case I Want to change it later). and it's not implemented yet, but I want them to gradually lose any "charges" of berries they have in fall/winter, if they have any.


here's an investigation of a blueberry bush:




I had trouble getting a good screenshot of people carrying back the berries from that one, due to how close it is to the covered wagon, so I found a couple more off to the right:




the only fishing spot in this world (each world is generated using the name you give it as the RNG seed) is kind of far away, and the new "you have to explore the world" mechanic makes it hard to get to, since I still haven't implemented a scouting order >_> so no screenshot of that yet

I need to do some chores today, but hopefully I'll have sleeping, eating, or maybe both, in before the day's end

[GiglameshDespair]

Nice! What's the darkness sweeping in from the right in the top pic, is that night?

Don't Starve has it plants grow incredibly slowly in Winter rather than not at all. Maybe you could have it as no new berries grow in autumn, and any remaining charges are destroyed upon winter? Maybe the bears could roam about in autumn and try to eat the berries that remain.

[telkoth]

the darkness is the edge of the known world.

critters eating berries and other things (food you leave out?) would definitely be cool. I'll add that to my to-do list

unrelated: I'm trying to decide at what point it makes sense to release an executable. there's no save/load feature, and even if there was, I'm not worried about trying to make sure old saves work at this point.

[GiglameshDespair]

When all the main systems are in place - eg colonists eat, sleep, do tasks, etc that when it's worth releasing a .exe. Can you make/will you be able to in the future other buildings or will it all remain with the wagon?

[telkoth]

building structures - houses, warehouses, and smokehouses come to mind - is definitely on my to-do list!

I'm afraid I didn't get to eating and sleeping today; I got distracted with other things:


I changed how love, safety, and esteem are handled. rather than being "fuel" like food or energy, each colonist has a base love, safety, and esteem value. so some colonists might, for example, be more nervous than others, or more certain of themselves. these values can be modified by feelings, or moods, similar to The Sims 3's "moodlets". I haven't implemented any specific feelings, but the framework is all there.

I tend to get crazy-nuts with OO in all my projects: a Feeling is an abstract class that has an Update method (like many other objects in the game... hm... do I detect a refactoring possibility?) every time a colonist takes a step, all of his/her Feelings are updated. Feelings know which colonist they belong to, of course, and can also check on any other World data... so it's possible to make Feelings that change according to the time of day, closeness to objects in the environment, or anything else. (it's a bear! I feel unsafe!)


I added a bunch of methods and constants to do with keeping time... number of "days" in a month (four!), number of months in a season (3), number of seasons in a year (4)... along with number of frames in a day (216000, I believe? 60fps), it's easy to figure out the current year, season, month, or week of month (first, second, third, or fourth).

this game's "epoch time" is Jan 1st, 1848, based on the original Oregon Trail's starting year of 1848. in the original Oregon Trail, you choose to start in March, April, May, June, or July. the trail takes 4-5 months, so you arrive in Oregon between July and December. the Oregon Trail game warns you that you shouldn't go too early or too late, so I've decided on a starting time between August and October!

math!

this also involved going over old code and updating hard-coded frame count numbers to use the new, wonderful consts, which maybe sounds boring or useless, but in the future, these numbers could now be loaded from a text file, instead of being hard-coded into the game, which would give people an interesting way to customize game-play