Imp City, build an underground kingdom

[Vandar]

I feel a bit uncertain when creatures should gain levels. Sending them out for quests should be one way, but maybe there should be other ways, too? I'm not too fond of the training hall idea of Dungeon Keeper, though.

[Danimal]

why not gain levels by working their trade?

[Vandar]

It could work, but what about those creatures which don't have jobs? Some are lazy, but good for questing, e.g. strong in combat and stealthy. A keeper might want to keep those although thay don't do any work in the dungeon.

But, I have news!

What's worse for a hero than mosquitoes? Mosquitoes under the armor!

r014-mosquitoes.jpg (3.93 KiB) Viewed 15207 times

I'm quite happy how these turned out

[Danimal]

create a "patrol" dungeon job, thats is the same as idling function-wise but gives XP.

[Vandar]

It's been a while. Ben bus with other game projects, the garden, the harvest, and lately building a music instrument. Some of those activities are still going, but my mind turned to the Imp City project again, and I was pondering about a few additions.

The first is, to make the forge and smithing more meaningful. This will be done by two changes. First, smithing will create weapons and armor for your creatures, to make them stronger in raids. But metallurgy must be learned, and now and then your bookworms will suggest raids to gather intelligence about metallurgy, e.g. learn bronze working from the upperworlders, or later, advanced steel. I plan on 6 tiers of metallurgy, I hope this will turn out alright.

The other is to start raids for trophies. Send your creatures to steal the skull of late king marowi from the castle crypt, religios items from temples and churches, artowrk from museums, or valuable jewelry from treasure chambers. The more trophies you assemble, the more likely it is that powerful or special creatures will join you. I'm not quite sure if these artefacts should be all random craeted, or taken from a litst. Maybe both .. I'll see.

It will start like this:

One of your bookworms suggests that you send creatures to gather intelligence about bronze working form the smiths of Blackmannon, to create weapons and armor for your fighters.

If your party returns, a book will be added to the library, and your creatures will be able to craete bronze items in the workshops from that point. Not sure if books can get lost again, but maybe late in the game, enemies will send thiefs to steal what you had stolen before

[Nikita_Sadkov]

The project looks great. There should be a superior open source alternative to Dwarf Fortress, which is really unappealing due to lack of graphics.

If you need isometric sprites, there a lot of free ones:
https://github.com/saniv/free-game-art/ ... ee-sprites

[Vandar]

Thanks for the link. These are quite high quality sprites indeed. Using those will open up the option of upperworlders invading the dungeon. I had excluded this, due to the lack of human (or semi-human) sprites, and my lack in animation abilities to make my own ones.

I haven't played dwarf fortress though, so I can't say how similar or different it is to my ideas. Inspiration to teh Imp City project came mostly from Dungeon Keeper, and then I've tried to deviate a bit from the original idea and add some ideas of my own. Right now I'm happy to have come up with some ideas that will bring this further away from the Dungeon Keeper original. I consider that a particularly lucky turn, since with Open Dungeons and Agent Keeper, there are already two remakes which try to be faithful to the original, and a third one in the same direction would just be a waste of resources.

[Nikita_Sadkov]

Thanks for the link. These are quite high quality sprites indeed. Using those will open up the option of upperworlders invading the dungeon. I had excluded this, due to the lack of human (or semi-human) sprites, and my lack in animation abilities to make my own ones.

I haven't played dwarf fortress though, so I can't say how similar or different it is to my ideas. Inspiration to teh Imp City project came mostly from Dungeon Keeper, and then I've tried to deviate a bit from the original idea and add some ideas of my own. Right now I'm happy to have come up with some ideas that will bring this further away from the Dungeon Keeper original. I consider that a particularly lucky turn, since with Open Dungeons and Agent Keeper, there are already two remakes which try to be faithful to the original, and a third one in the same direction would just be a waste of resources.

I would recommend checking Dwarf Fortress. It is freeware, but unfortunately not open source. Basically, it is like a more general version of Dungeon Keeper. With layered voxel 3d maps and overworld (i.e. not just dungeons). Various biomes, depending on the world map. DF also features basic fluid dynamics, allowing to flood rooms. Unfortunately there is no multiplayer, so the cool strategical elements of 3d maps left mostly unused and the game is more like a sandbox.

[Vandar]

Apparently I don't have the right motivation to work on actual code or gameplay, so I was trying to create a fountain animation for the healing wells.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B688J ... UJpWEFkVkk

In the game it runs more smoothly than in the captured video (and I hope the link works, this was the first time that I tried to capture a video at all).

[Danimal]

Hi Vandar, im happy you retook work on Imp city, its too cute to be forgotten.

I cant see the video, why dont you upload to youtube?, also, sadly agent keeper is dead since 2 years ago.

Regarding the game, heroes trying to retrieve valuables is a good idea and justfy having warriors , would be cool if the armor and weapons get some visual representation

[Vandar]

Thanks

I've been a bit shy with using my google account so far, but well, I guess youtube really is the best way to share videos. And amazingly enough, it worked on the first attempt. I'll eventually need some video editing tools, though.

https://youtu.be/RZGPD2c6JoY

If I can, I'll try to give the equipment items some visual representation. Metal caps, iron stingers for mosquitoes, steel pincers for the killer beetles. It's a lot of work, but technically it should be doable. I feel a bit worried that this easily will bring a lot of micromanagement, and I must see how to keep it easy for the player.

[charlie]

The fountain effect looks very good. The Google Drive link worked fine for me (and even showed it in a youtube-like player). I'm on Linux Mint 17.2 using Firefox.

[Akien]

The fountain effect looks really sweet indeed! Looking forward to testing the next snapshot

[Vandar]

I've published a new snapshot:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/jewelhu ... city/r014/

Due to the long break an my lazy habit of not keeping notes, I can't tell exactly what has been improved since the r013.

- The cave mosquitoes have not been in r013, I think, and I was surprised by myself, when they were working in the library. I have no idea anymore why I did that so many weeks ago, but well, it shouldn't harm, so I let that feature in.
- The funktion of the right mouse button has changed a lot - instead of reverting the tool selection to "mark for digging", it now drags the map.
- The "mark for digging" function has become another tool, currently the first icon in the "rooms" tool bar.
- Selected tool buttons are now tinted yellow.
- The healing wells are in, but there creatures don't use them yet.

[Akien]

Due to the long break an my lazy habit of not keeping notes, I can't tell exactly what has been improved since the r013.

That's where revision control software comes in handy. As long as you use human-readable commit logs, that is

[Vandar]

My commit messages are readable, but most often also incomplete. I.e. there use to be more changes in a commit than I feel bothered to write down (at times I also can't remember all the changes).

Lazy me

[Vandar]

Some news on the message system and quests.

In such realtime games, there use to come up a lot of messages, but the player doesn't always have the time (or isn't willing) to take care of them right now. So I picked up an idea that I saw in the game "Startopia" the first time - messages drop in, shaped as message icons, and sit in a stack on the right side of the display, till the player clicks a message icon to open. On click a dialog will show, with the message and options to respond to the issue. Outdated messages will be removed from the stack.

The message icons and the stack display isn't final yet, but the it works.

Along with the message stack, I worked on a first attempt at technology quests. Your creatures a
have an interesting idea of research - knowledge has to be stolen. But it should work anyways:

The game can now keep track of a bunch of stats, like keeper experience, and the mentioned technology levels. At the moment I have these levles:

* 0 = no metal working skills
* 1 = bronze working
* 2 = iron working
* 3 = steel working
* 4 = advanced steel alloys
* 5 = mithril working (low magic metal)
* 6 = adamantite working (highly magic metal)

I'll have to see how that works. Maybe the list needs expansion, maybe it's already too detailed and e.g. advanced steel has to go. It's just an idea to start with.

[charlie]

I love that message stack idea. I think the original DK had something similar? It's either that or I wished it did.

[Vandar]

I can't remember either. But I found it very useful in Startopia for sure.

[NoNotCar]

I think the game could be improved if you added text to tell the user what the currently selected room does. The reputation statistic is also unclear - there could be a message to say your creatures don't have enough food.
Also when I pressed T a half-transparent message came up.

[Vandar]

Yes, the buttons need tooltips. Unfortunately the UI toolkit doesn't support tooltips yet. Will come some day.

The keeper reputation stat does nothing yet. It's mostly there for me to see if the calculation works as intended. I'll add messages to let the player know if e.g. food is missing for a longer time.

T is just a debug command at the moment, to instantly trigger a "t"rophy quest. The UI is broken in the r014 release. I've been puzzled myself, and I still am, how it happened that the message background was set to full transparency. I can't imagine how that happened, but well, it's fixed in the SVN and the fix will be included in the next version.

Thanks for the feedback The tooltips are definitely on my list of things to do, the reputation calculation will take a bit longer to become meaningful.

I'm not sure if I should make a new thread for it, today I'm too lazy to. There is a sister project, which uses the same codebase, but it's "just another single player rpg". For that I made a nova type spell effect:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hj0OyozWqwg

a) I'm not all happy how it turned out, but it works. And the current code in the SVN actually has a damage calculation ibcluded, while the version used for the video only had the visual effect.
b) The spell effects might be useful for Imp City too, once there is some sort of combat implemented. Planned are missile effects, beam effects, arcing trees and the shown nova spell type. It's been surprisingly hard to get the nova implemented, and I'm afraid the other effects won't be much easier, but missile, beam and arcing tree all are made of lines, so I guess once I have the line, the three effects will be done easily.

[NoNotCar]

Although tooltips don't work yet, you could do something like this https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7ZaA-2Efea3VC10TlBiMWppZjQ/view?usp=sharing instead.

[Vandar]

Great minds think alike

Last evening I wrote some kludgy code to show such labels when the mouse is over the buttons area. It should help, and it also allows to have smaller buttons. I think the game will soon need a second row of room icons.

[Vandar]

After a long break, I think I'll return to this project for a while.

- The lowest tier of workshop products (no metal) will be labeled "leather and wood", that should be readily available to a dungeon keeper and his creatures (well, maybe bones and hides, but anyways ...)
- I've split forges to melt metals from workshops to produce equipment. So you'll start with workshops to produce equipment from wood and leather, and after succeeding in a technology quest, get the option to build a forge.
- Bookworms working in the library actually trigger technology and treasure hunting quests now. I have problem to test this though, because such quests should happen infrequently in the game. And the back-link from these quests to changing knwoledge and posessions of the keeper and his creatures is still missing as well.

[Danimal]

Its nice you retook it