FreeGameDev

Imp City is a toy project, inspired by the old Dungeon Keeper game. It's about building an underground kingdom and keeping your creatures happy. It's light-hearted with a touch of silly, and will focus on management more than on combat.



You start with three imps at your command, which will build tunnels and dig out space for rooms. Rooms include underground farms (yes, indeed), lair space for your creatures and libraries. More to come, so far it's been mostly proof of concept work. Creatures will enter your dungeon one about every 30 seconds till there is no space for lairs anymore. Currently it's totally random which sorts of creatures will enter. Later it will depend on the features that your dungeon has to offer.

It's coded in Java, using the LWJGL library. Code is under the GPL v2, graphics and sounds come with a mix of free licenses, depending on their sources (see credits.txt and impcity_credits.txt). You need Java 7 or newer to run it, start scripts for Windows and Linux are included in the releases.

Former announcements and discussion:

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=6169

Currently latest release:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/jewelhu ... city/r009/

New in this release:

- Bookworms and bookshelves added.
- Some pathfinding fixes.
- Demolish room function.
- Fix for multiple sounds playing at once bug.

Edit: I've started a web page for it, including a sort of manual - don#t expect too much right now, but it's a start:

http://gedankenweber.wordpress.com/imp- ... e-keeping/

At some point I want to distinguish unpaid creatures, which come to your dungeon just to have a place to sleep and some food, and higher level creatures, which will work for you, but require payment. So there was a need to generate income, and until I have come up with better ideas, I just adopted mining from DK.



I like the look of the the coins

Other news is that powersnails now work in farms for free, and bookworms work in the libraries. Also for free at the moment.

You thieving cat! stealing all of our totally original Open Dungeons mechanics, ill sue you to hell and back!

At times I'm quite creative with ideas, but too often I'm just stuck, particularly if I know patterns that work. In such cases I tend to stick to those pattern. I've been thinking a while about generating income for keepers in other ways than to mine gold, but the problem was bootstrapping - higher creatures, required for the more difficult tasks, will require money, so you need some money to attract them - and without them, you won't be able to generate income. Catch 22, I belive, this is called. So I decided that I'll go gold and mining to get the scenario started.

Some distance to the project would help to get creative, but currently there is so much ground work to do, that there is little space for ideas in my head

The only other option that I could come up with was to create a black market for keeper wares, and sell mushrooms there. If any keeper would actually need those, since every keeper can build farms of their own and the demand (and therefore price) for mushrooms should be, ummm, like zero or so. Unless they are magic mushrooms.

But as it seems, I can soon compete with Smaug



The mining code isn't entirely stable yet, though, at times mining jobs get lost although squares are marked for mining, and you can trap imps if you unmark a treasure block in the wrong moment.

add iron besides gold (or any other metals) , a forge room and a creature that can work on it (a blacksmith) and transforms each metal unit into a weapon, then sell it into your underground magical-portal-connected-blackmarket; same could be done for mushroms, you could even add a room in which crystal is made and another where crystal+mushroom = magical potion made by alchemist creature and sold in market.
Weapons could have different prices on market depending of metal they were made with; and your wares are sold ramdomly at market at ramdom times, and maybe even add a high demand time for some wares that empties your stacks by surprise.

Iron+Coal+Blacksmith is a good idea. That is even basic enough that such a creature will join for food and a sleeping place, and still works for you. I'll see to create matching graphics, and then there is already a difference to OD. I don't want too much overlap either, so every idea that goes into a different direction, while keeping the underground kingdom idea is welcome

This reminds me that I already was looking for anvil graphics for the workshops, and OGA didn't have something usable for me. But it shouldn't be too hard to make an anvil-like thing by myself.

is the one we used for our forge not good?; Where will you get the coal from? i dont think there is enought trees underground or big enought map (mineral coal tiles) to keep production running for long, maybe you should drop coal or make it from your farm plants.
Also, you could add a warlike or rough looking creature to your dungeon that is attracted to weapons, he just wanders around eating and sleeping and doesnt contribute much but is good at a figth so it justifies having a few of them in an otherwise pacific underground city.

The anvil is fine, the problem is that don't have the tools and knowledge to make use of the 3D assets. I'd need to install Blender, learn how to import the things and also learn how to make isometric renders from that. But I should learn Blender some day ...

At the moment I'm thinking to do it like the early settlers games did - resources last a while. So one can dig coal or anything out of a tile several times.

But I think I'll start with copper ore and tin ore to make bronze from, and leave the coal out. Bronze making needs less knowledge than iron, and making iron will need to be researched first.



I've tried to make different tiles, more underground looking ones. Normal earth, copper ore, tin ore, and a bit behind, gold. Now I need a room to smelt metals, teach the imps to bring the ores there and such. Will be some coding work, and the system reminds me of settlers III, the first one without fixed paths. But it fits, just this is settling underground

the dirt is too rounded, i would made it a bit more squarish or uniform

I'm also not entirely happy with it. A first try to improve it didn't really work out, though. Guess I'll have to try again. Thanks for the feedback!

I've uploaded a new snapshot release:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/jewelh ... city/r010/

It's less stable than the former releases, due to the high amount of internal changes, and the more features there are, the more difficult it becomes to test all cases. A known problem is, that an imp can get stuck if it's digging at a resource mound just while you unmark this mound for mining. If this happens, mark the mound again, wait till the imp runs off and unmark again.

Another known problem is, that digging jobs become lost, if you don't start marking earth blocks adjacent to a corridor or room. To avoid this, just start new rooms or corridors right from existing rooms or corridors.

Changes in this release:

- different sounds for creating rooms.
- new earth and resource mound graphics.
- new room, workshop.

New feature: Mining

You can click a resource mound up to three times, to order up to 3 imps to dig there. The fourth click will unmark the mound. Gold mounds will convert to treasure, which is brought to the treasury by the imps. Tin ore mounds will give tin ore, copper ore mounds give copper ore. The ores will be brought to the nearest workshop by the imps, and stored there. Nothing further happens in this release, smelting will come in one of the next releases. Resource mounds also last infinitely in this release. And I guess weird behavior will start once there is no more space for ores in the workshop (likewise, no more space for treasures in the treasury. I haven't tested this yet, just, but there is no code to handle the situation).

The "gold to treasure" is a leftover from older plans and will be replaced by a production chain similar to the tin + copper ore -> bronze one.

There is a saved game included which showcases most features. Just press "l" to load the game after you start the demo.

Horrid coding, but it works, basically. I got some creatures (the Conians) to work in the workshops, and they actually convert resources laying around in the workshop (sloppy Imps, they just drop them where it's most convenient for them ...) to products. There is a lot missing though, but a start has been made.

Somehow I think an evilish keeperish underground smeltery needs a volcano rather than an ordinary furnace. Now I need some usable volcano art ...

I've added volcanoes as forges, with some simple particle effects. Fits well with the other underground graphics, I think.

Now I've got anvils, too. I like the look of the smeltery, I think it can stay this way.

Woot! I've got the first production chain working! Imps will bring mined copper and tin ore to the nearest workshop. Conians will produce bronze coins from the tin and copper ores, and imps will eventually carry those to the treasury.



http://sourceforge.net/projects/jewelhu ... city/r011/

Also, the game has a splashscreen now, to shorten the wait while the textures are being loaded.

This version feels like a breakthrough to me.

The dressage of the powersnails, it worked! They actuall plant new crops in the farms now, and therefore have joined the ranks of useful dungeon inhabitants

I finished two short tutorials:

https://gedankenweber.wordpress.com/imp ... g-started/
https://gedankenweber.wordpress.com/imp ... beginners/

I'm amazed by how fast you code this already great looking dungeon management game! I haven't tried it yet, but I do read your progress reports and enjoy them a lot :-)

I should slow down a bit, but I'm very eager to get it forward. But it sure helps that I could start with the code of an older project, that had all the core functions already, that I need here I like to see it come alive, and see the creatures do more and more jobs in their little world.

I had a bug infestation in my code >.< Well several, actually. But I could clean up a good number of them.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/jewelhu ... city/r012/

- Some mining and path finding related bugs fixed
- Some AI related bugs fixed, some more are still present
- Bookworms can read now
- Powersnails plant crops now.
- Saving loading now by ctrl-s and ctrl-l (before without ctrl)
- WASD camera controls for right-hand-mouse users

To help getting started with food production, powersnails will join right away. Best is to start with building a farm and wait till there are some crops growing, before expanding the dungeon with new rooms. If all creatures are hungry and nothing grows you're pretty much stuck, because hungry powersnails won't do any work, and without them, nothing will grow.

There is a saved game included in this release as showcase of the current state.

I'm working on a bigger subsystem right now, will take a while till it's ready for a new release. The idea is to send monsters to overworld raids, and retrieve treasure, magic items, maybe even other creatures. This will be triggered by research in the library, where your creatures may gain knowledge of interesting overworld locations, and bring up quests for you as keeper.

The screenshots attached are 90% mockups, but I'm slowly backing it with code.

PS: Intelligence is an important party stat, if they are too dumb, they might not even find the place ...

I'm also looking to do similar 'expeditions' in my game and for them to be a ultimately a large part to the end game, encompassing such things as...

Collecting raw materials from your own suburbs (low risk and reasonably quick, prevents resource exhaustion issues)
Found outlying colonies to serve a variety of purposes such as defense, trade, resource tribute (workers sent on this are consumed as they live in the colony)
Trade missions to other civilizations (given a shopping list and goods to trade, no guarantee you get the exchange if the other guys out-of-stock)
Fex-Ex quests, get the item, destroy the item, reforge the item, return the item to it's rightful owner etc etc
Politics, send your representative to negotiate alliances, trade, etc etc
Full blow Armies sent to war

Interesting ideas. I plan on a smaller scale, but a sort of market for exchanging goods with other keepers I do have planned. I must say, it is a surprising lot of work behind such features, but I hope it will add interesting additions on top of managing an underground settlement.

Have any of you tried Gnomoria? you should pick up its demo, its the closest graphical version of dwarf fortress you will find; you can get a lot of ideas from it, in fact you already have some mechanics that are the same.

Dwarf Fortress somehow completely escaped me. Thanks for the pointer, I'll take a look into it