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[Neonivek]

Spirits, as far as I'm going to be defining them, are 'less than gods but more than mundane creatures'. Not that a creature is prohibited from being magical in some ways, but I think the difference is in that a creature would be considered 'more physical than magical' while a spirit would be the opposite.

Ahh Spirits, elementals, and little gods.

[Carrion]

Cult will be mostly in first-person, will not prioritize fortress/city-building over other gameplay elements, and will (hopefully) be experienced as something like a mix between King's Quest and Dragon Age (with elements from any number of other genres thrown in) on massive amounts of steroids. I think a love of reading about things will probably be a common trait of future Cult players.

I am guessing that by 'first person' you mean, from the perspective of the protagonist and not 'first person perspective.'  Is that right?

[Lord Dullard]

@Carrion - Yes, sorry, that was a slightly awkward phrasing. The game will be top-down so I was referring to the story perspective, not the actual physical perspective.

The only dictionary entries left to make are for segmented bodies, stings, horns, antennae, and exotic appendages. Which is wonderful, because this has been an incredibly tedious section of code to deal with. I'm not really looking forward to populating other content-driven areas in the future, though I imagine it'll be necessary to do so. I may make a repeat of this venture for plants at some point; I'd like the player to be able to read descriptions about both the flora and fauna of their world.

All told, I've added about 450 lines of code so far, so the trait dictionaries will probably amount to some 550 lines of code total once I've finished with the last few of them.

[GrayFoxUA]

Cult will be mostly in first-person

so if it's going to be first person what graphics will it be using? correct me if I misunderstood.

[quip]

Cult will be mostly in first-person

so if it's going to be first person what graphics will it be using? correct me if I misunderstood.

I thought it would use ASCI like all the other rougue(did I spell it right?)likes, then again even I do not trust my word on such subjects...

[Hugehead]

@Carrion - Yes, sorry, that was a slightly awkward phrasing. The game will be top-down so I was referring to the story perspective, not the actual physical perspective.

[Lord Dullard]

All of the morphological trait dictionaries are complete (wooh!). I am currently working on the code that will generate body descriptions based on all of them. Next will be morphological function assignment and the addition of descriptive detail (selection of purely descriptive traits such as body coloration along with the actual description generator itself). Luckily, all of this should be immensely fun to code compared to the dictionaries, although body part functionality may (I suspect) be mildly tedious. It may also entail setting up skills, which might derail me for a while.

The good news, though, is that this means that I am one step closer to generating completely intact creature entries, which means I am one step closer to implementing a wholly new feature into worldgen and the Atlas! I hope to complete this soon and compile a new version of the code for people to play around with. Since worldgen has also been massively updated, it'll also be nice to release all the new stuff pertaining to terrain and nation generation.

[Frajic]

Looking forward to 0.16 and creature gen

[Lord Dullard]

So, I've been doing a bit of thinking lately, and I think there will be a slight change of plans. Or at least a slight change in my approach to getting this finished.

I've decided that once I finish with procedural creature generation, most of the rest of worldgen will go on hold. There is already sufficient data for each world for me to start on gameplay elements, and as much as the OCD perfectionist in me wants to finish worldgen completely before I start working on gameplay, it doesn't seem practical if I want to turn this into a serious project with sustained community interest. No matter how neat a game engine may be, without a way to interact with it, it just won't generate the momentum and interest necessary to propel it forward (at least, this is what I'm beginning to believe).

So, procedural creatures will be the last major hurdle before I begin working on gameplay itself. I'll still do a final tech demo release with the worldgen and World Atlas features that are currently functioning, and then I'll begin work on getting an actual game together. The first release or two are likely to be basic and probably somewhat buggy, with the primary draw begin an open, very large (and hopefully interestingly variated) world to wander around in and interact with to some degree. I doubt towns will be coded as of yet because the level of detail that civilizations will require in this game will necessitate me doing a lot of extra work on them before I start to implement them in-game (especially with some of the goals I have in mind like culture-differentiated architectural styles and whatnot).

But, anyhow, the good news is that after I get some gameplay elements in, I can work on worldgen and gameplay at the same time, since changes in gameplay will depend largely on adding new code to worldgen and then working it into the game in an interactive manner.

Wish me luck!

[Dwarf]

yay :3

[mendonca]

Good luck dude.

[EagleV]

Yeah, good luck. And great work so far, can't wait for the demo!

[Frajic]

Can I expect creatures by my birthday? I'll expect creatures for my birthday. And it'll be fun actually getting to PLAY the game

[Lord Dullard]

There's a new post on the Dev Blog!

Also, I'll reiterate the fun-to-look-at part of the update here, since most of the rest has already been posted in this thread.

The world now has swamps:
http://cultrl.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/swamps1.png

They are the ugly olive-colored tiles. Someday someone with actual skill at tile creation will design something nice for all of these sorts of things, I hope! Until then, you get my funky-looking blotches of non-art.

[Lord Dullard]

Another new post on the dev blog. Cut-n-pasted to here:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I’ve went ahead and created a Donate page on the devblog for now, although I don’t really expect anything. Especially not before Cult becomes more interactive. Of course I am a poor college student and I don’t feel too bad holding out the proverbial beggar’s cup because for those of you who’d like to see a project like Cult come to fruition more quickly, any donations made save me time that I’ll otherwise be spending working a menial job by enabling me to spend my days at the computer instead of waiting tables.

Every donor will receive my personal thanks, a hand-written letter (if they so choose), and a future bonus that will be announced if and when the game is ready to launch a Kickstarter-style campaign. Early donors who donate prior to a possible future campaign will receive a special bonus in addition to any other bonuses (bonii?) they would normally have received under the campaign REGARDLESS of the amount of their donation. Believe me when I say that it will be something COOL. Just to give you a hint… the gods in Cult might be procedurally generated, but that’s not to say I can’t sneak some randomly-selected deities with static names, appearances, and personalities into the selection process.  This is my way of thanking those special contributors who are willing to stick their neck out during the shakiest part of the development process.

Naturally, any donations would be vastly appreciated. But I would be lying if I made the claim that a lot of other developers of startup projects do if I said ‘I can’t do this without your help right now!’. Cult is a long term project and I plan on completing it with or without monetary backing, mostly because I love the creation process and the possibilities that can be opened up with imaginative coding. I’m also really excited about the prospect of providing the gaming community with something free of charge, because I believe the gaming community has the integrity to support itself and encourage creativity in such a manner if developers are willing to take the risk and abandon the traditional ‘me-first’ mindset that corporate game production has spawned.

As a gamer I’ve come to the point where I won’t really play a game if it’s not incredibly open-ended and immersive, so open-endedness and a uniquely immersive game world are exactly what I intend to create and foster through the Cult engine. Even more importantly, I’d like to scout out heretofore unexplored (or barely explored) aspects of the gaming experience such as the role of procedurally generated religions in games, the meshing of multiple genres into one game to create a single cohesive gaming experience that allows each genre to stand on its own but also be used in conjunction with the others, and finally, procedurally generated history and quests motivated by (also procedurally generated, naturally) unique NPC and group/national/cultural NPC organizations that provide their own context-rich background and sets of goals and consequences.

That all sounds really fancy and fun, but of course the challenge will be in the implementation. And I intend to take on that challenge wholeheartedly because… well, because it sounds FUN!

At any rate, I thank you very much for your support and input. All of which is welcome, donations or not. Just the encouragement of the community in general and suggestions to help steer the course of game development are more than enough for me, and everyone who’s keeping track of Cult and adding their thoughts to the process is giving the game an incredible boost.

Thank you all,

David (a.k.a. Lord Dullard)

Much progress has been made in the last few days, although I've been very busy with social obligations. But those are good because they keep me feeling chipper and productive. I'm ready to move on to new parts of the function-selection algorithm and I hope to be able to move on to creature description generation pretty soon. Brand new screens to come soon, methinks.

I may also take a slight detour to enable point-and-click dragging of the world map during worldgen for quicker navigation and overview. I created a 'scale map' button after terrain generation is finished to let users get a very quick look at the entirety of the world they've generated, because I figured it would be far more convenient than going to look at a generated PNG, even if it's not quite as pretty. But since convenience often takes precedence in terms of game enjoyability, I want to try to accommodate as much as possible.