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[Fniff]

Sir, you are an inspiration to me, sir. If I ever make a game, in the credits will be David "Lord Dullard".

[Lord Dullard]

Well, thank you, Fniff. That's very kind.

[Fniff]

And that, Dullard, is what you need on the internet.

[squeakyReaper]

I donated as "Kenneth Gould".  All I request is that you add Cheese at some point in the game.  Perhaps as a trading commodity.  Even if it isn't efficient or great, I just want cheese.  =)

10$ isn't much, but...  It's what I have on hand.

[Lord Dullard]

Worry not, cheese shall be added! I'm on my smartphone at the moment so typing is awkward, but I'll shoot off an e-mail to you as soon as I get home tonight. As the #1 contributor I think a special bonus is in order.

Cheers and thanks much.

[Knight of Fools]

I've got about three games that I've got lined up to donate to now, and one blog.  Some day, I'll have money...

Until I'm stable enough to indulge in some charity, I'll keep asking questions and making a nuisance of myself.  I guess that'll make up for the delay, right?

Looking forward to what comes of this.

[Lord Dullard]

More than make up for it, KoF! Your input has been excellent and extremely helpful.

I am dead tired and I *really* need sleep. Driving home took longer than I thought. E-mail first thing tomorrow (and more coding)!

[lishain]

I really look forward to what comes of this and wish you good luck.I decided to donate,because I want to support this
game development.20$ isn't much,but I hope that will help you a bit.

[Lord Dullard]

Thanks so much! lishain, I've sent you an e-mail.

Early morning today (I was up at 6 for a conference call and because of an avian biology class that I had to take someone to). Creatures are coming along swimmingly, though creating varied descriptions definitely takes some doing. I'm really hoping to get enough done soon to post some screens (I could post some with progress now, but I'd really like to wait until the descriptions are more fleshed out so I can give people an idea of what to expect).

[Frajic]

*bimp*

How are the descriptions coming along?

[Lord Dullard]

They are coming! I have some screenshots to post today. My time this morning was primarily spent completely rewriting the World Atlas menu implementation because I realized it was horribly inefficient. So, the latter part of the day will be reserved for adding to creature content.

Speaking of which, creature content *IS* coming along. It's just taking longer than anticipated (surprise, surprise), because, as usual, adding in the variation in content necessary for a world's worth of plausibly interesting descriptions takes a bit of doing. Luckily, the main stumbling block of getting the code framework in place is over and done with (at least for descriptions).

I'll post screens in just a moment.

[Lord Dullard]

Okay, here are some screens of (very preliminary) work on the bestiary so far:

Bestiary Images

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I should note that although a fair amount of content related to limbs, body structures, and whatnot are already finished in the world generation process, I haven't gotten around to including all of it in the Atlas yet. Most of what I'm doing at this point is adding things line-by-line to tweak the way that descriptions end up reading to the user (there are still a lot of grammatical oopsies to weed out). I left some of these in the first couple of pictures just to display the sorts of things I'm in the process of sifting through (i.e., repetitious or redundant phrases/words like 'this animal is a blah blah animal').

The bestiary is going to end up displaying a wide variety of information about individual creatures, including detailed statistics and species characteristics, ranges of habitation, legends and references to each creature type within other sections of the Atlas, and so forth. For now I'm just focusing on hammering out the basics so that more can be added as I go. Luckily, with redesigned menus, that will be (blessedly) about a thousand times easier to manage.

Creatures are automatically given a representative ASCII character and color according to their name and which other colors have already been selected for other creatures. Eventually colors will correspond with individual creature traits (i.e. a brown-furred creature should end up with a brown character shade as long as there aren't already too many other creatures that are shades of brown, in which case an alternative will be selected based on other traits). For now colors are just randomly selected because I wanted to make sure the display code was working.

Creatures above a certain size category are given upper-case characters to give users an immediate reference on their size. I figured that players would probably want to have an immediate way to know 'oh crap, that thing's huge, maybe I'd better just leave it alone...'.

[Levi]

Oh that is cool.  I can't wait to see more. 

[Frajic]

Oh that is cool.  I can't wait to see more. 

Seconded Once the game is coming together, maybe someone would even sketch some of the creatures?

[Lord Dullard]

@ Pyrate: I was actually considering something like that. Unfortunately I have no way of drawing any non-ASCII graphics over the console at present (because SDL/pygame functionality is broken for the Python version of libTCOD). I think there are workarounds, but they'd be big time-sinks and at the moment it's probably much better for me to focus on making continued progress towards gameplay. There is an alternative possibility that I could create the images off-console and then blit them to the screen as ASCII characters using existing libTCOD functions, although really I don't have the artistic expertise to be attempting to draw any sort of decent-looking creatures (let alone the dozens/hundreds of morphological variations amongst them).