Hi Bay12, for the last few months I've been working on a game inspired by Goblin Camp, which you might recall was inspired by Dwarf Fortress with an emphasis on a streamlined UI. I figured this would be the best community to post about a project like this and the most likely place to find people who might be interested in the game.
It's a roguelike-inspired real-time strategy/town builder game. The focus of the game is complex AI and their interactions between various factions, hostile or otherwise. You control a tribe of mongrelmen who start in the wilderness around a totem from where they spawn. Throughout the map initially is various threats like humans, kobolds and wolves, but soon more dangerous enemies begin to arrive and pose a real threat to the safety of your group. Orcs in particular act very aggressively but there's much more lethal monsters out there.
Resource gathering is fairly simplistic at this stage - I've deliberately abstracted out the concept of stockpiles and different types of resources. Currently there's only food, wood and bone as potential objects to collect but that will be expand over time. Instead of that aspect of the game, I've tried to work on interesting and varied AI - currently different creatures react differently to various scenarios and they all exhibit different behaviour. Kobolds for instance will avoid combat unless they see they have overwhelming numbers. Mongrelmen are braver but not by much. Orcs don't care about what odds they face and will always seek out a fight. All creatures show different behaviours when they aren't in combat and they go about their business on the map if left undisturbed. Liches go around raising unattended corpses. Shamans throw fireballs and heal allies. Most humans pathetically cower from everything. Carnivores feast on their fallen enemies (or former friends). Peaceful herbivores graze harmlessly. There's even a few unique enemies which I've started working on, and the initial group I've included are lifted from Dungeon Crawl in the form of Duvessa, Dowan, Grum and Sigmund!
There are elements of city building already in the game - you can construct a walled fort around your totem after collecting enough wood and dig pits to slow down enemies (and mongrelmen) who are trying to invade your base. At the moment you can also build huts but they don't have an in-game function yet. There's a lot more along these lines to come and I think the way it's going to progress is to introduce the concept of religion into the game - mongrelmen will be able to build certain structures devoted to different gods which have subtle (or maybe quite dramatic) effects on gameplay. An example I'm thinking of is that if you kill enough kobolds (say 20 or so) then a branch of buildings are unlocked which you can build to worship whichever god I come up with that hates kobolds. That's probably the next stage of development, along with refining player control of combat situations with the introduction of unique leader mongrelmen who you can control a bit more.
The concept is best shown by way of screenshots and gifs, so here's a whole bunch. Some of these are a little bit older and show the way that development has progressed.
Screenshots:
Gifs:
You can download the current build of the game here:
https://patjw.itch.io/mongrelmenThe game is coded in python with help from libtcod, and player input is almost entirely by mouse with the use of a few hot-keys. Space bar to pause. Hold right-click to move the map around and left-click to select and interact with units. If you are allocating collection jobs then you can hold down left-click and move the mouse to bulk select tasks.
Let me know what you guys think!
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Topic: Mongrelmen - ascii RTS/town builder in development (Read 19953 times)