Hail Wanderers!
Somewhat thin post today, partially because some of the work that was completed this week will end up going unused, but that's not necessarily a bad thing! Anyway, on to the news.
I spent some time this week working on the farm system for The Last Days of Greys (aka the sprite game) and had the mechanics for that fleshed out. The player would upgrade the core trees using resources obtained in each level, allowing them to grow more seeds for less resources and upgrade how powerful the effects of those seeds were. The trees would consume water (which would be distributed by the player to the trees from a pool that would regenerate over time) to create new seeds, and the amount and type of seeds that would be created would depend on how much time had passed since the player had last returned to the farm, which would in turn be measured based on how many area transitions the player had passed through.
In addition, I had created a system for crossbreeding the seed types with each other (a feature that was often mentioned in test sessions, in class discussions, and in conversations among the team). In early versions, entirely new seed types would be created as a result of these crossbreeds, but that eventually became too cumbersome both from a systems design and a level design standpoint, and I shifted focus to instead applying modifiers to the effect of each seed type based on what other element the seed was mixed with. For example, seeds that were modified by the air element tended to have their range expanded, allowing the effects to function as projectiles or to extend beyond their normal area of influence. These crossbreeds would be discovered by selecting a base seed, selecting an element to cross it with, giving it some water, and then letting it sit at the farm and (hopefully) germinate into a new seed type which would then start to grow from the appropriate core tree.
That all being said, after further exploration into each game concept, the team and I made the decision to go ahead and devote our full efforts onto Treevolution (formerly known simply as the tree game). For that game, my efforts have focused on the new biodiversity system that we have just recently implemented into the game.
The main idea behind the system is that as both players create more entities within the game world (be they trees, grass, animals, what have you) they will increase the biodiversity of the overall ecosystem, thus unlocking more entities in the game world as the ecosystem is now robust enough to 'support' them. This will hopefully add a strong sense of progression to the game, and also has many interesting implications as the biodiversity level can actually go down if too many entities are destroyed without enough taking their place.
For the moment, I've been working on the first level of this new system which adds two new entities and one new ability to the game, birds, bugs, and seeds.
Bugs are a non-controlled entity that spawn randomly on trees. When on a tree, they burrow through the tree's back and eat the leaves, dealing one point of damage to the tree every turn. This is countered with...
The birds. Birds will eat any bugs that are adjacent to the tile that they currently occupy, saving any associated trees from being chewed hollow. The players can not directly control the birds, but they can attract them by having their trees grow...
Seeds! But not the sort that grow into the ground. These seeds instead serve as a beacon of sorts that draws in any birds on the map. The birds will fly over and roost in the tree that produced the seeds, ridding it, and its neighbors, of any pesky insects.
Interestingly enough, these three systems, while designed to work together, have implications on systems outside of this cluster. Just as one example, bees, which are a higher tier entity that are attracted to flowers (grown from grass) and give an energy boost to nearby trees, may also fall prey to the hungry birds. Once we have more of the different systems fully fleshed out, tested, and implemented, I plan on making a food web of sorts that will show the various interactions between the entities in Treevolution. The end goal is to create enough simple and interconnecting interactions, just as in a real ecosystem, that the players will have a great depth of strategic options available to them.
Lastly, and on a rather unrelated note, I've finally completed the revised combat system for the dungeon cralwer! It still needs to be tested, which may result in some (hopefully minor) changes, but I'm much happier with the direction that the system has moved in and hope that it can more successfully convey the experience I was aiming to create with that game. Next on the list of things to do when I have time is redesign the dungeon system. I already have several interesting ideas that I want to test out, so look forward to hearing about them sometime in the future (though I'm not sure exactly when).
Until then,
Guardian Soul
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