Outpost, a "Stratformer"

[Ryan]

I decided to keep a Dev Log at TIGSource to try and interact with the broader indie game development community, but ssjx rightly pointed out I should also have a thread here to interact specifically with the FB community. So... here it is!

As I mentioned in the original competition thread, Outpost is a "stratformer" - a cross between a city-building strategy game and an action based platformer.  The two modes of gameplay are meant to affect one another, so the type of city you build will give you access to power-ups to complete the platformer levels while the people and resources you locate in platformer levels will give you a boost in building your city.

Status: Planning / engine development

Screenies: None yet

Engine status: I have a barebones platformer engine here needing some testing on various systems.  It uses HGE, so it's Windows dependent, but I'd love to see if anyone on Linux can run this in Wine and I'ma give it a shot in a VM on my MacBook later.

Latest build: Outpost (dev2) - Platformer engine demo

Overview:

My working name of the game is simply "Outpost", and you will play a squire in the court of some duke.  You have previously distinguished yourself as an able administrator and adventurous spirit, so the duke sends you off to establish an outpost on his frontier. With some luck and good leadership you should be able to grow it into a bustling city of commerce / culture / whatever-fits-your-fancy in the hopes that you will be promoted to a court baron and awarded the land around your outpost as a hereditary estate.

I'm on the fence between a Metroid style world where you can explore anywhere you are able to complete missions in the platformer levels and a more linear Mario style world.  I want the missions to have some bearing on the general story of the game (i.e. go save this guy so he can help you build your outpost), but given the timeline I'm not sure I'll be able to do enough level design to make it interesting.  Definitely interested in feedback on this... one thought I had was to keep definite stages representing areas along the frontier but revisit them in later missions with differences in the level itself and in your character's physical abilities.

For the city building strategy part of the game, you'd use resources and personnel gained in the platformer levels to build up some aspect of your city.  I haven't figured out how time will progress yet, but I think it will have to do with how long it takes you to complete the platformer stages.  The personality of your various workers will affect how much work they get done while you're away, how good they are at staying on task, how much initiative they take when they've gotten to the end of your explicit instructions, etc.  I'd like to see NPCs have unique names / sprites / personalities, with attributes like Initiative, Endurance, Creativity, etc. and specialists like Soldiers, Engineers, Architects, Artists, etc.  Common laborers can perform well under different specialists, so it behooves you to assign personnel wisely to build the kind of city you want to create.  I'd like to have multiple winning scenarios for the different types of towns this can create.

Feedback on the concept, ideas for the back story, and types of specialists / influences they have on your city building would all be most welcome.  I'll keep the thread updated as I work.

Outlook: I doubt I'll accomplish a complete game by the time the competition ends on January 17th, but I should at least get a platform game engine out of this with a proof-of-concept split gameplay.  If what I get accomplished is looking half way decent, I'll keep working at it once the competition is over. 

[Lachie Dazdarian]

Sounds like a very interesting idea, but also very demanding to complete, regardless of any time-frame. Not sure if you ever played Blizzard's Blackthorne, but maybe you could go in that direction (talking about the platform engine part). The very game worlds Blackthorne featured didn't provide much varied content or missions to complete, but the game mechanics itself, running around, shooting stuff and using switches, was enough fun to play to push you forward. I would suggest that approach. To develop enough challenging, smooth and fun platform engine to play, that you don't need to fill it with much varied content (from graphics to mission objectives) to keep it interesting.

I do hope you'll have something playable by the end of the competition deadline, but the most important thing is that you develop enough content to drive you to complete it later, free of any time restriction. Looking forward to this...

[Ryan]

New build, Outpost (dev-2) linked in the original post.

Added a new development build with improved collision checking and more terrain tiles.  Unfortunately I don't have map layers yet, so my trees have to float on top of the grass at the moment.  I need to change the way I'm loading and storing tilesets (i.e. instead of trying to keep every tileset in memory, just use the active map's tileset) and decide what to do about the game screen.  There's too much vertical space for the tileset I have at the moment, at least.  I may end up restricting the viewport artificially and/or with a HUD.

I can slice and dice an image into any number of tiles, so the next thing will be to get a little map editor going instead of these DATA statements in my main source file.

I did include the source this time if anyone wants to poke around.

[Dr_D]

Not bad man... I like the look of it and everything. The only thing I can say negatively... which isn't actually that negative, is just that he seems to fall back down kinda slow after jumping.

[Ryan]

Gonna have to sideline this, at least during the course of the competition... explanation in the compo thread.

In any event, I did make further progress and should at least post it up - I tweaked the physics a bit, threw in more sprites, and experimented with a widescreen viewport (i.e. letterbox format with a thick black border on top and bottom).  I liked the way it looked, and it was going to be a game with little vertical movement anyways.

Might come back to this, but without the competition driving me forward I'd probably just revert to a Roguelike project.  I also think I wanna ditch HGE, as I don't like the hardware acceleration requirement (hard to play on lappies) and couldn't figure out an easy way to accommodate slower FPS.  For this project I wasn't using any of the particle routines or other special sauce from HGE, anyways, so I probably could've got by with fbgfx if I knew how to replicate the basic frame / render framework that HGE provides.