Age of Rogues WIP: Day 7

posted in arka80's Journal
Published November 13, 2014
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Another update, with several improvements, new contents and a couple of things with heavy impact on gameplay. Let's proceed with order:

Content milestone reached
The prototype's goal for content creation was to have 3 social obelisks (in order to complete a collection) and a Scientific one. I added Social Organization: Tribe (social obelisk) and Agriculture (scientific). With Fire and Stone Tools of the previous entry I can say I reached the goal, but this is not the only one...

Tribe gives me the opportunity to add a character to the options of the player, the Chieftain (the Tribe obelisks actually unlocks the Chieftain). So I had to code the lock/unlock system for evolute characters. You can see all characters in the list from the beginning, but can choose only the unlocked. A picture:


aor14.png



With the Chieftain I reached the second goal: to have three playable characters, one of which locked at the beginning.
Chieftain has the power of found new villages, and is pretty good at fight. He has also a wider field of view, which is getting a lot of importance in this "release" because of a major change in the mechanics, which is next point.

Gameplay mechanics changed
Exploration: when in world map, you can move only starting from an explored tile (area). Before, an area was setted "explored" simply going into the first time. Now this is not enough. You have to actually explore a certain amount of tiles before area is considered explored (61% at the moment). A tile in the area map is considered explored when reached by your field of view. Logical consequence is that the wider the field of view of the character, the better.

Cost of new characters: It's clear that you need more than a character to actually explore an area. You need at first harvesters because of their power of gather plants and thus food. But they're weak, and map is filled with beasts, so they die quickly. You then pick hunters to clear a bit the area, and finish with harvesters again to pick all the food (and obelisks if any!).
I found this fun, but a bit ripetitive because of the absence of a real challenge. So I thought: what if every new character born with a cost? You have to keep more attention to your character's life.
Cost is not per character (which can seems logic: high cost for evolute characters). Instead, it simply grows after every new character. It starts from 0 and increase of X every time a new character born.

See again the picture above: here I was using X=10, so that was the 14th character.


First time I played with this new mechanic I lost (gameover!), because I started to loose villages for starvation.

To end with, not a real mechanic but an improvement: persistance of area map data. It's lack was quite a bug, or a not yet implemented feature, but now it's there and works as expected. Characters shares explorations and area maps are not regenerated every time you enter in, which brings at situations in which you can have the most of them uncovered, like in the picture below.


aor13.png



I left only one big feature before I can consider the prototype finished: dungeons!
5 likes 2 comments

Comments

Migi0027

Im really enjoying to see the progress, please keep posting and developing. :P

Keep it up!

November 13, 2014 07:05 PM
arka80

It will be done, sir! ;)

November 14, 2014 08:21 AM
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