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[Zemat]

Hi,

So someone brought up the idea in other thread of creating a something of a spore roguelike or at least a game that fixes what spore made wrong. So I'm starting a new thread to separate the discussion from the other one and focus on the designing and development of this project.

Whoever is willing to participate in any way possible is free to do so and contribute with any ideas they can come up. I'll try to manage them along with code development.

I will make the project open-source (license is up to discussion) and create a repository for the code so that anyone can contribute.

The forum for the project is at http://spogue.forumer.com/

----NEWS!!!!----

The first prototype request went live, this is your chance to participate with actual code!

[Jreengus]

Can I submit a name request? Spogue 

[Zemat]

Can I submit a name request? Spogue 

Anything goes

But try to come up with a name that isn't reminiscent of Spore. We don't want to receive Cease & Desist letters too soon.

[Keiseth]

Ooh, have you decided on a language yet? The latest stuff I've been working on is in Python, the previous one was C++ and prior to that, Spidermonkey Javascript. They're technically all similar, but it's still fun learning new ones.

My suggestions:

* Don't be afraid to do something different with this. I just played a Roguelike that plays in psuedo real-time (think Baldur's Gate); it worked quite well. That's just an example. There was still strategy, but the tension and "oh no, I'm losing!" was amplified.

* Avoid making the player grind for anything, but don't *force* them to keep moving. I liked Dungeon Crawl, but the game was designed to force you to keep moving forward. It's fun, but I like being able to do what I want to do, even if what I want to do is boring. I doubt that will be a problem with a concept like this, but I thought I'd mention it anyway.

* Possibly look into a customized character set. ASCII is great; I love ASCII. Even Toady mentioned, however, the stress the letter "E" was receiving. If you make it ASCII, consider having custom characters that resemble letters and symbols. Incursion had tiny smileys for halflings, thin smileys with long ears for Elves, and a few other little additions. You can maintain the style and ease of use while still going beyond the usual boundaries.

I can't think of anything else relevant. Good luck, though! Show how awesome the community is.

[Boksi]

If you're making custom tilesets, I might try to contribute something. It doesn't sound too difficult.

[Kagus]

SP☼GUE

... I like it.

[Drakale]

Sounds like a great idea ,i might chip in if the language used is one im familiar with.

I was thinking, instead of dungeons depth like many rogue like, each "level" could represent a few million years so the evolution is somewhat justified. You then get to level up depending on how well you did on the current level... Not very fleshed out, im just throwing out ideas heh...

[wallish]

Sounds like a great idea ,i might chip in if the language used is one im familiar with.

I was thinking, instead of dungeons depth like many rogue like, each "level" could represent a few million years so the evolution is somewhat justified. You then get to level up depending on how well you did on the current level... Not very fleshed out, im just throwing out ideas heh...

First part: same here.

Second part: I think it'd be cool to have a game that's an ASCII cross between SimEarth and Spore.  Throw in geological events and "influenced" evolution and there's a kickass game idea.

[Dasleah]

This sounds like a great idea, and I'd be happy to help in any way I can.

Can I suggest we look to be 'inspired' by the worldgen options of Dwarf Fortress? I haven't played Spore, but from what I've seen, all the worlds look very generic. All far too Earth-like. Imagine what would evolve if you started on an ice planet, starting off the game as an insignificant germ amongst the deep water vents,  before evolving and breaking through the ice-sheet continents? Or a gas planet, where no solid ground could be found - where you start off skirting the very edge of the atmosphere, and as you evolve, you can move closer and closer to the dense liquid core?

Of course, for all I know, Spore already does this 

[PTTG??]

This sounds like a great idea, and I'd be happy to help in any way I can.

Can I suggest we look to be 'inspired' by the worldgen options of Dwarf Fortress? I haven't played Spore, but from what I've seen, all the worlds look very generic. All far too Earth-like. Imagine what would evolve if you started on an ice planet, starting off the game as an insignificant germ amongst the deep water vents,  before evolving and breaking through the ice-sheet continents? Or a gas planet, where no solid ground could be found - where you start off skirting the very edge of the atmosphere, and as you evolve, you can move closer and closer to the dense liquid core?

Of course, for all I know, Spore already does this 

You just ruined spore for me. It does none of that.

[olemars]

Sounds insanely overambitious, so I'd love to be involved (as far as free time allows).

Edit: As for language, I'd like to casually mention Stackless Python. I haven't really looked very deep into it yet (or into python itself for that matter) but I've been planning to. Stackless is interesting for its ability to efficiently run hundreds of thousands of concurrent tasklets, which has its obvious uses for such a project.

[Zemat]

Hey people. In a few hours I will release an executable of one of my pet projects which contains a working sprite engine. It could work as a base for the project if you like it. Otherwise we can go for any other proposal you have.

[MeshGearFox]

Why not use something like the biological model used in Creatures, where you have biochemical thingums going on? Given the broader scope of this, you might want to scale it back and simplify it (Limit it to dealing with respiration and metabolism I guess), but it'd be a good place to start.

[Zemat]

Here's the demo of the engine I was talking about:


Edit: made the image bigger for easy reading.

You can download it here.

What it is?

Is a C++ app that use both SDL and Lua to generate a random tile world.

What it contains?

The executable for the demo EngineTest.exe and several configuration files, fonts, images, and scripts.

What it does?

It generates a random tile "world" with a few sprites using Perlin Noise and scrolls from left to right over it. Also it generates a number of fake "minerals" with fake names using a random name generator.

What you can do with it?

 - press ESC to close.

How can you modify it?

The scripts/ folder contains all the Lua scripts which you can modify as you please. There's an extra file called imported_functions.txt which is a small documentation for all the ported funcions from C++ to Lua which allow the creation of everything you see on the demo right from Lua. Everything else lacks documentation or comments but it's somewhat easy to figure it out. I promise I will document and comment it though.
If you want to understand the program flow (at least for the scripted part) start through the init.lua file. Is the only file directly loaded by the executable and everything is done through it.
The configuration/ folder contains some non-Lua simplified scripts which parametrize everything you see so that you can modify it without meddling with the Lua scripts.
The font/and sprites/ folder contain some example files used to draw on screen.

Basically you can create a complete sprite based roguelike game with it as it stands. The whole of the demo is coded in Lua and I use C++ only to support SDL and some functions that demand high performance like the Perlin Noise function. But I intend to add more functionality to it later since it's very incomplete.

If you are interested in using this engine for the project I will upload the whole C++ code so that we can work with it. By the way I have compiled the project in Linux too without problem. If you are not interested in it then I'll investigate other options like Python and Java for the project.

Test it and give me feddback, please

[eerr]

nobody will do anything untill the language is chosen! Takin a java course right now, but we're just dealiing with binary bs, and no hands-on java jet.