OK so, this is vaLair(WIP)

[idk]

Hi, I'm very new to the forums and in general not great at the whole forum thing, but I want to participate in the community so be patient with me if you can.

This is, thusfar, my game https://cmotc.github.io/lair-web https://github.com/cmotc/valair. It's called vaLAIR because it's written primarily in Vala, and it's still also pretty much called Lair and parts of it have been written in C#, FreeBASIC, and C++ at various stages, then abandoned, since I was a teenager up through a couple years of college, where I decided to name it Lair for reasons that are hazy, then there was about a four or five-year lull, and I picked it up again a little while ago and turns out, I'm a much better programmer than I was when I was 20, even though I know that there are better ways to do some of the things I am doing with Lair it's much better than the horrors I committed back then. Lair has been a way for me to flesh out some of my thoughts on procedural content generation and how the depth to which it might be applied might affect how the game is played, thoughts which I'm sure aren't exactly original but which I felt needed some doing to understand. The reason I thought this is because I didn't quite get why there wasn't something between Nethack and Linley's Dungeon Crawl(Two of my favorite games) and a "Legend-of-Zelda" type real-time action RPG, generating environments for people to play in on the fly, but also allowing them to play in real-time. I realize that some of this space has been filled in that time, but I still think mine is worthwhile.

What it ends up being is a sort of scriptable game-generator that works in stages, first creating a dungeon from a description(written in lua) which contains instructions for making decisions about how to construct the dungeon from a library of paper-doll style "component-art." Each piece of component art corresponds to a single Entity(A class for defining in-game objects that is also capable of organizing other Entities within itself) I'm not sure I've licensed it explicitly yet, but all the component art I create is going to be CC-BY-SA. Then it populates the dungeon in much the same manner with mobile entities, who's behavior is also scriptable(This is the area where I'm working right now, but all the basic features are enabled). With everything being an entity(Open a door? That happens when a collision is detected between an entity tagged "door" and an entity tagged "mobile." Cast a spell? Well that's basically just a really dumb mobile entity with predictable, repetitive behavior. Change levels? You do that by bumping into an entity. Use a weapon? That's an entity that's set to behave as though it's attached to your hand when it's told that it's in your inventory, both of which are organized by the "Inventory" part of the Entity class. At least in theory.) and everything scriptable, my next goals will be a library of helpers for creating dungeons and scripting behaviors, a set of default dungeon generation rules, an example mob decision-maker script, and finally multiplayer. I'd say maybe 15% of what I have left to write is in Vala, the rest is Lua.

On the subject of art, I've also made some compromises and altered my goals along the way, and I think I've learned to do more with less on that account. For instance, this crude, improvised, quick-and-dirty tool in desperate need of revision I call DigitalAndy https://github.com/cmotc/digitalandy I created so I could generate variations on a piece of "Art" defined as a short text file. Andy was the original artist for the game, but there were certain things Andy wasn't really big on doing, and as a result his life went in a different direction, and after struggling with art for a few years I watched someone play a non-free game where the art was similar in concept to mine, but very different in execution and I decided that I would take inspiration from them and adjust my approach. The result I keep https://github.com/cmotc/lairart/ and can be viewed as an overview https://cmotc.github.io/lair-web/art/art.html. As much as the original style was lost, I feel like this way is better. I'm also using sounds from http://opengameart.org/content/512-sound-effects-8-bit-style for now, but sound is subject to some more fine-tuning so to what extent is to-be-determined. Also, just because I couldn't use them doesn't mean you can't! Andy gave me permission to release his art to the commons years ago and http://opengameart.org/content/paper-doll-style-sprites it's been available for a while. I hope to see them in a Free game someday.

Anyway, I feel like I'm going on-and-on because I'm nervous about showing this off. But I feel like it's ready to start showing people now. Don't exactly need any help at the moment, but it's sort of modding-centric if you think about it so if you feel interested and find something you want to add I promise to take it seriously and never be offended by forks.