Asciilands is a game

So far, creating Asciilands hasn't required a lot of creativity in terms of the nature of the content. We haven't started on the story or anything like that and there are recurring game elements that are more or less expected to be included in games of a certain type. This is where most of this early-stage development work as gone. Some may say that simply complying with expectations is to stifle the creative process but I see it differently: it cuts down on the time and frustration required to learn the game's mechanics.

When a player is interacting with a game, they have certain expectations surrounding how various things will work. Creativity should come into the process of combining these elements rather than creating new ones from scratch (unless the whole point of your game is to introduce and explore a handful of interesting and new mechanics).

I read an article once about the game Bulletstorm and how when it first went to beta testing, the explosive barrels were green. Because of this, NONE of the play-testers used the exploding barrels to their full effect. The dev team on Bulletstorm decided that instead of putting in some kind of contrived lesson to demonstrate how to use the explosive barrels, they'd just make them red. As soon as they did, everybody knew how to use them. They expected them to explode when shot, they shot them and the barrels exploded. Lacking in creativity or just cleverly tapping into a frequently reinforced paradigm? I don't think it matters. Don't frustrate your players and they won't think it matters either.

On that note, here are a bunch of features that cement, in my own mind, Asciilands as a game beside other games I've enjoyed.

Pictured with Duke Nukem by Apogee Software

Health bars! This is a fairly recent addition but obvious a crucial and long-time-coming one. There was no point adding it in until it could display useful information so combat needed to be implemented first.

So yeah, health goes up, health goes down, health runs out, death. More or less like you'd expect.

Pictured with Binding of Isaac by  Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl

Opening and closing doors are a must. How else can you strategically manage the location of enemies trying to chase you? Should have left that one closed.

Pictured with Pokemon by Game Freak

Push blocks make for great puzzling. By "great" I mean "ok for the first few seconds but rapidly turning awful". For me, the formula for enjoying push-block puzzles is this: if I can't work it out in my head just by looking at it or I get myself stuck and have to retry more than three times, I don't want to do it. The exception, of course, being a a push-block puzzle in a dedicated push-block puzzle game. We'll be careful to keep the push-block puzzles to a minimum in terms of frequency, magnitude and difficulty.

Pictured with Diablo 3 by Blizzard Software

You can't just make people explore large areas of terrain without whacking in a few bridges. Something about them just...I dunno. They're needed so they'll be included.

Pictured with Borderlands 2 by Gearbox Entertainment

Diverse damage types with equally diverse visual representation has always been something I've liked in a game. It's good, satisfying and instant feedback to a successful hit in a way that stays fresh; a successful hit with this weapon looks different to a successful hit from my last weapon.

Pictured with Titan Quest by Ironlore Entertainment

NPCs with nothing interesting to say who just wander around are a MUST. I'm not even kidding. They are the perfect example of something being greater than the sum of its parts; an NPC who says "goodness, what a horrible thing to befall our farms" is boring and pointless but if you have a town that you want to make feel safe or a character that you want to make feel powerful, you add a bunch of weak, useless people and you can achieve both those feelings. Just like a pretty girl who only wants ugly friends, you feel like you want to save the towns people for no reason other than that they are there. Also, if you accidentally let the zombies out, the towns-people aren't so benign anymore.

Pictured with Prince of Persia by Brøderbund Software

Health potions: the obvious next step after health bars. Added them just today so I could test the health bar multiple times without resetting the game-world. Cool.

Pictured with Diablo 2 by Blizzard North

Nobody wants to get lost in an RPG world. Not knowing what to do, where to go or how to do something are the most frustrating things in an RPG. The minimap fixes ~33.3% of those issues!

Pictured with Path of Exile by Grinding Gear Games

Can't have a loot game without lootable chests. As expected, randomly generated loot with appear in random quantities in randomly placed chests.

That's it for now. As you can probably imagine, Asciilands is becoming quite playable in a way that is more an more resembling a game and less and less like a tech-demo or proof of concept.

Be sure to contact me (Jared) if you're interested in testing some time.

Also get over here and like the Asciilands facebook page! https://www.facebook.com/asciilands

Damage types

Just a quick update to show you what's been the recent focus of development; also it's a very visual area of development so I get to make screenshots!

Basically all the code required to apply visual effects to weapons and enemies is in place as well as the the logic behind choosing the right modification based on the damage type (e.g., fire damage will put "flames" on the weapon's sprite and on enemies who are set on fire by the weapon).

With all my lovely effects finished, I didn't really have a good place to test them out so I made some skeletons and chucked them in the bluff cave. I'm sure the hermit won't mind.

Enough talk, show some stuff:

Here we have a bunch of randomly generated swords with elemental effects attached (left to right: poison, cold, water, fire, lightning, trauma).

For the most part, at the moment at least, different damage types mostly determine how attack damage is reduced by defence. You can be resistant or immune to the various damage types and reductions are made accordingly. You can also be resistant to what's called the "damage delivery" which is kind of a "blanket resistance" that will make you resistant to an entire attack made with that delivery method.

What did I just say? Hold on, this example should clear things up: A sword might do 20 trauma damage and 10 poison damage and the delivery method would be "cutting". If you had 50% trauma resistance you'd take 20 damage:

(20 * 50%) + 10 = 20

If, however, you had 50% cutting resistance, the damage would not be selectively reduced and you would take 15 damage:

(20 + 10) * 50% = 15

A combination of the two would leave you with 10 damage:

((20 * 50%) + 10) * 50% = 10

Clearer? Perhaps!

The main thinking behind this scheme is to make it possible to include new, different attack types without requiring people to plan for all kinds of things. Delivery resistances will see you in good stead but those who want to micromanage will still have a bit of an edge, especially if they know what's lurking in the area they're going into.

Ah! Got a bit side-tracked there. So we have our lovely weapon effects! Grab those swords, run into the bluff cave and find those skeletons so we can watch them die in all kinds of ways!

I recommend playing this song while you read over the next part:

*Sound of skeletons being hit by magical weapons of all kinds*

When you attack a dude with a weapon that leaves a lingering damage-over-time effect (e.g., 20 poison damage over 6 seconds), they will show this status with the corresponding damage type's effect!

Stay dead this time, skeletons.