Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Eagle]

Shit. This is awesome. I love terrain modifying tools in general, and this sounds like a literal sandbox. Im looking forward to your progress, and I would be happy to help make stuff up for it if you wanted. I fail at coding though, so i cant help there unfortunately...

[LegoLord]

I wanted to ask something about those sympathetic crystals you mentioned.  If you make a matching pair into lenses, would hitting one side of one lens with a laser make the laser come out the other lens?  That could be awesome, and a good reason to make them rare.

[Eagleon]

I wanted to ask something about those sympathetic crystals you mentioned.  If you make a matching pair into lenses, would hitting one side of one lens with a laser make the laser come out the other lens?  That could be awesome, and a good reason to make them rare.

It would indeed, and it would also add to the beam's power. If the beam is too powerful for the lens down the line to handle, it may crack or explode, so you'd need to arrange them from impurest to purest if you wanted a crazy death-ray, and you'd need to search for better (purer, larger) crystals and up your skills in lens grinding quite a bit too. For the largest rays-o-deaths, the ending crystal would have to be quite large originally, and very pure, so the difficulty in making a sympathetic lens (they're created by splitting a lens perfectly down the middle along its grain using precisely controlled steam-pressure) compounded with the clunkiness of carrying around a large fragile meniscus of pure firey death (perhaps on a cart?) would indeed make things like that rare. But awesome.

I haven't worked out all the details on how mixing lenses will work. Like what happens when you take a fire lens and focus it into a prism with a growth lens? I guess I could make it color-based. Red and green create yellow, which in my original list would be lightning. That kind of makes sense.

Focusing a beam onto a lens that would absorb its color could create nasty or interesting consequences. The obvious thing to do for some colors (for instance fire focused on water) would be for it to explode, but for less volatile combinations the lens could gradually convert to a different type of crystal. Either a mix of the two colors, or the beam's color if there's no intermediate (Orange = earth, yellow = lightning, the red would gradually be forced out)

Prisms made of a crystal whose color blocks part of the incoming beam would act the same as lasers in the same situation, but perhaps quite a bit less quickly. But a clear prism (mana) would split all beams into their component spectra, creating a rainbow of MAYHEM 

[LegoLord]

So hopefully one could potentially build a tank with an array of complex weapons, all powered by some sort of gigantic rainbow array at your base?

[Eagleon]

Hehe sure, why not. Lay siege to the crater! Maybe you could get some sort of huge reward from the king for clearing the surface so that they can move in and dig.

That, and mole tanks. If there are tanks, there will be mole tanks. Box2d has what I need for vehicles, so I'm not too worried about not being able to implement stuff like that. There could even be an interface to build them yourself, so that you could add armor and have your own custom design. Hmm.

[LegoLord]

Oh.  I guess I should've worded that differently 

By tanks I just meant some armored shell with wheels on or something to make it easier to move.  But real tanks are cool too. [thumbs up]

I just had the image of a dude picking up an un-wheeled metal shell covered in weapons trying to carry it around by his hands. 

[Boksi]

Could we build a tank that moves by way of a dozen legs that end in a steam-powered piton? Basically it moves the leg onto a surface and uses steam pressure to drive the piton into it.

And equipped with retracting, rotating and heat seeking turrets, preferably ones that can't target your boiler.

[Eagleon]

It's possible I suppose, with how I have the engine planned, but not really likely. I don't want to get too steampunk with it all, especially not steammecha. Maybe after other things have been included and the game is playable in a couple of ways, I'll have parts for that sort of thing buyable, if I can come up with a plausible explanation for how they would work with crystal tech. No guarantees, though. I don't want to ruin the game's flavor.

[Hawkfrost]

It's possible I suppose, with how I have the engine planned, but not really likely. I don't want to get too steampunk with it all, especially not steammecha. Maybe after other things have been included and the game is playable in a couple of ways, I'll have parts for that sort of thing buyable, if I can come up with a plausible explanation for how they would work with crystal tech. No guarantees, though. I don't want to ruin the game's flavor.

You could have an engine powered by a water + fire crystal setup that creates steam, thus propelling the vehicle forward, and ropes used to change the direction of the momentum by turning the engine.

[qwertyuiopas]

Or it could be described as some crazy scholar's attempt at creating a powerful war machine without using crystals, but it was expensive so the only portotype can be bought in parts for large ammounts of whatever the currency is. Due to engineering issues, a boiler couldn't fit on the prototype so it ironically used crystals to produce the steam. Because of that, all funding was cancelled, and the parts were put up for sale, though nobody was crazy enough to buy them. There could be a hidden quest like thing where you can meet up with the guy and he has ideas for how to make his prototype reliable enough for regular use, though it would still need a crystal powered boiler, but he would need the parts.

Thus, you could include a leg-mech without breaking the setting of the game.

[LegoLord]

Or the mechas could be like number adders in DF, being made by applying things that are normally used for other purposes.  This could include the crystal boiler thing.

[Raz]

How much programming experience do you have? Have you ever worked on a similar kind of project? Do you have enough free time and dedication to consistently work on this?

Before you ask, I would like this project a lot, and I'm asking this because so many people plan to work on a game and it just dies out for various reasons. People get excited, but in the end they often lack the proper skill and dedication to pull it off.

My advice to you (hopefully I don't sound patronising, just trying to help you), is start out small. Assuming you are indeed a programmer, don't recruit more than one or two other people, if any. Plan out the basics first and continue the brainstorming later, when the need arises.

I'm sorry if I'm coming off as a know-it-all, but I've been in co-lead on a rather ambitious game project for two years now, and people have come and gone over that period. While we were (and are to some degree still are) hammering out the basics, people started working on stuff that was unneeded at that point, and just kinda lost interest over the course of time. In the meanwhile me and my co-lead never lost interest and did pretty much all the multitasking. (We're mostly trying to avoid attention, but if you're interested just ask anyway )

Kinda drifting off-topic here ( ), but what I guess I'm trying to tell you is that dedication is probably the most important if you're serious about making this.

Good luck.

[Raz]

How much programming experience do you have? Have you ever worked on a similar kind of project? Do you have enough free time and dedication to consistently work on this?

Before you ask, I would like this project a lot, and I'm asking this because so many people plan to work on a game and it just dies out for various reasons. People get excited, but in the end they often lack the proper skill and/or dedication to pull it off. It's sad to see how these things go, really.

My advice to you (hopefully I don't sound patronising, just trying to help you), is start out small. Assuming you are indeed a programmer, don't recruit more than one or two other people, if any. Plan out the basics first and continue the brainstorming later, when the need arises.

I'm sorry if I'm coming off as a know-it-all, but I've been in co-lead on a rather ambitious game project for two years now, and people have come and gone over that period. While we were (and are to some degree still are) hammering out the basics, people started working on stuff that was unneeded at that point, and just kinda lost interest over the course of time. In the meanwhile me and my co-lead never lost interest and did pretty much all the multitasking. (We're mostly trying to avoid attention, but if you're interested just ask anyway )

Kinda drifting off-topic here ( ), but what I guess I'm trying to tell you is that dedication is probably the most important if you're serious about making this.

Good luck.

[Eagleon]

How much programming experience do you have? Have you ever worked on a similar kind of project? Do you have enough free time and dedication to consistently work on this?

Not enough, no not really, and yes, in that order

Usually programming isn't entirely a means to an end for me. The challenge and reward of figuring something out that I couldn't do before is enough to keep my interest, or else I'd just be writing. Believe me, I've had enough experience with what I lose interest in to know that this is something I can finish eventually. The big push might only come after I finish my C course this fall, but I am working at it now and learning the things I need to in the process.

A small update: I'm working on the basic graphics functions right now. Cairo seems like a decent bet for my needs, but it's a little difficult to wrap my head around all the functions it throws at you. Still, I've got things importing and drawing in iteration. The next step is to scale the tiles appropriately for the resolution, and let the tile type determine which tiles to draw in its section, instead of just plopping them down manually.

Or the mechas could be like number adders in DF, being made by applying things that are normally used for other purposes.  This could include the crystal boiler thing.

This is what I'm leaning towards. If the game's ancillary mechanics allow for it, so be it, but other things will go in first, and I'll maintain the mostly-renaissance-ish feel I want for the main game.

[LegoLord]

I was looking at mood rings earlier today and had an idea for this.  I'll put it in spoilers because it sounds like an Easter-egg type thing.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Basically, to have mood crystals.  I had ideas on three major things that could be done with the crystals in various forms (lenses, prisms, rings).  First, being able to tell what your character's or an npc character's mood is.  The different moods could each have both positive and negative effects, and could be based on what has recently happened to a character.  Then they might also be used in a way to produce, for example, a beam with an affect based on your mood (angry=fire, happy=water?).  Third, they could in one form be used to control your characters mood (but with something to restrict how often that is done).  Plus, there could be other cool stuff they could do.  Just some food for thought here though.  If it sounds too complex or doesn't seem to fit game flavor, Earthsage is still an awesome idea without it.