Imp City [Proof of concept prototype]

[Vandar]

In a manic coding spree, I hacked something together, inspired by Dungeon Keeper, and using parts of my "Hunt for the Lost rainbow jewels" project. I wanted to see if my code base is suitable for such a project.

I think I have a presentable prototype now:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/jewelh ... city/r001/

You start with a small dungeon map. You can:

- Order the imps to excavate wall blocks, by clicking the blocks.
- Declare squares as "monster lair" spaces, by clicking the "bed" icon in the lower bar and then clicking the square to convert.
- Revert to excavation orders from lair placing by pressing the right mouse button.
- The "food" icon is not functional yet.
- Pan the map with the cursor keys.

There are three imps in the demo, waiting for your command, and one conian, which is waiting for a place to set up its lair. Once it has a lair, the conian will wander aimlessly and now and then return to its lair in order to sleep a while.

I don't aim at making a particularly close Dungeon Keeper clone, but an underground city management game. I want to expand on creature behavior and rooms types, but there will not be fights with other keepers, at most occasional upperworld heroes who disturb the city. Let's call it a toy instead of a game.

[Vandar]

One step further:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/jewelh ... city/r002/

I think I have everything in place now, to actually work on the game part.

Imp City
--------

Imp City is a proof of concept prototype, inspired by the old Dungeon Keeper game.

You can order the imps to excavate new areas by clicking wall blocks.

You can declare a square as monster lair square by clicking the "bed" icon in the lower bar, and then clicking the square.

You can revert from "change to lair" to "excavate" by pressing the right mouse button.

The "food" icon works like the "bed" icon, just that it converts floor squares to farmland.

There are three imps in the demo, waiting for your command, and two conians, which are waiting for a place to set up their lairs. Once they have lairs, the conians will wander aimlessly and now and then return to their lairs in order to sleep a while or visit the farmland, looking for food.

You can save the game state by pressing "s", and load it again by pressing "l". There is only one saved game supported at the moment. The game will be saved to the installation folder.

Project site:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/jewelhunt/

[Vandar]

I could fix some bugs in the monster AI, so that they will place their lairs far enough from each other, in order not to overlap. One map tile can be home to more than one creature, though, it will depend on the size of their lairs.

Also, the farmland produces edible mushrooms now. Larger areas of farmland are more efficient. The conians will now and then pluck a mushroom to eat it. Slowly it's getting into shape

Downloads (Java, start scripts for Windows and Linux included, also source archive):

http://sourceforge.net/projects/jewelhu ... city/r003/

[Vandar]

New version:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/jewelhu ... city/r004/

- Rewritten Imp AI, old code was too convoluted. I hope the new code does everything the old code did ...
- Loading/saving of worker jobs fixed.
- Imps build lairs too, now.

[Bertram]

Fun!

[Vandar]

I'm glad to hear So far it's fun to develop as well

[Vandar]

Icanhaspowersnails!

[Bertram]

O.o' Noo, they'll come to me (while I sleep), and eat me (if i don't wake too early for them ;]).

[Vandar]

If you survived the Kreatur from OD, you'll survive the powersnails. But to be sure, maybe you should place a bowl with some lettuce heads as sacrifice to the snail gods near your bed, and they'll spare you

[Bertram]

Buy Lettuce - Check.

[Vandar]

Power snails like dungeon farms!

[Vandar]

I've assembled a new release, including the powersnails and dungeon farms.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/jewelhu ... city/r005/

Known bug - after loading a saved game, powersnails start jumping instead of gliding ...

Edit: I think I'll try to transform this prototype into a game project. I like the ideas behind it, and I got some more ideas which I want to try. On the other hand, gardening season is slowly starting, pre-growing plants, so that they'll be ready for outside once the last frost nights stop (mid of may usually). That means decreasing time for such projects, since I have big plans for the garden this year. Time will tell where it goes. Next steps will be to make new graphics, to replace some of the current, and improve the performance of some parts of the prototype code.

[Julius]

Any plans to make this run on a touch screen device like Ubuntu Touch or Android? Would be cool to have that and it should run well on mobile devices with the 2D graphics, no?

[Vandar]

The AI code is somewhat heavy on the CPU, too, but also not very optimized currently, so yes, it should run on smaller devices too. But I have no such plans, I lack the knowledge and also such devices. I just have a very old cell phone for emergency calls.

Progress:

- Permanent wall to surround the map.
- New graphics for earth blocks.
- Portal (tunnel mouth) spawns monsters every 30 seconds until there are no more available lair spaces.
- Testing with bigger maps, currently 60x60 blocks.
- Testing multi-threading to use more than one CPU core.

Problems: Many graphical glitches.

[Vandar]

I feel a bit stuck. Actually that isn't bad, since I need to take care of other things too, and this project had taken up too much time in the past two weeks already. But I've included another creature, which I made some time ago, a sort of giant beetles.

The area where I'm stuck is the design of further room types. I want to deviate from the original DK design, but it's harder than expected to deisgn the rooms.

[Vandar]

I've put up a new testing release, r006:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/jewelhu ... city/r006/

There have been bigger internal changes this time, a try to make use of more processor cores required a strategy to save the game when it's consistent, and avoid processing of old dungeon data while new data is loaded. I think it should work, and it did in my tests, but it is hard to test such multi-threaded code.

Besides that, there is a new starting map, and the already mentioned giant beetles are included in this release. A number of sanity checks for user input also made it into the code.

[Vandar]

It seems the dwarf wyverns like my bird tables

[Danimal]

i favor more dark settings but this is looking pretty cute , have you though of adding production chains? like:
Farm-> conians harverst and get packet to -> kitchen creature cooks rations -> Mess hall rations are stored here for hungry creatures

Since you aim to create a monster city without much combat (as oposed to OD focus) you should try to give enough micromanagement not to get players bored and simple to not drown players in tedious chores.

[Vandar]

I've been pondering to make the powersnails carry buckets of water from the well to the farm, in order to increase the productivity. They should like the plants most from all the dungeon creatures. I also must expand the creature AI to tell it, that no only the mushrooms are edible. Hundreds of small details to fix ...

A kitchen is a good idea. So I can lure some creatures from OD to my place, "Tired of raw chickens? Come to the Imp City restaurant to experience new food pleasures! And yes, we even have food that tries to flee from the plate, if you lift the hood."

I've published a new release:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/jewelhu ... city/r007/

- Better monster lair placement
- More AI bugs (no, not really, but sometimes the "thought bubbles" are wrong)
- Dwarf wyverns as new creatures.
- Meditation room (aka "failed library"). The creatures will go there for some meditative spinning exercises.
- Some adjusted and some new floor graphics.
- I've forgotten the rest ...

[Vandar]

I assume the next release will be coming some day next week. Over the weekend I'll be busy with gardening, fairly warm and at least partly sunny days are forecast.

I could teach the creature AI to make sleep and hunger depend on passed real time, and I tried to balance that with the growth speed of the plants in farms. Also, creatures can now eat all plants, once they are ripe - mushrroms ripe the fastest, the other plants need a longer time. Still there are a lot of pathfinding issues, and I have no idea yet how to deal with rooms that have furniture, particularly furniture that the creatures are supposed to use.

[webshinra]

Notice that stonesense offer some nices artwork for «anaxometric projected voxel world» under an open source licence. Even if their pipeline differ from yours they can serve as a good texture base.

One of my colleague should (professionaly) work on 3D tile texture for a demonstration project we have, I'll ask if I could free it and give it to you.

Have a nice day, you have all my encouragement !

edit : stonesense link https://github.com/DFHack/stonesense

[Vandar]

Stonesense is a very interesting project. I didn't know of it yet, thanks for pointing me to it

http://sourceforge.net/projects/jewelhu ... city/r008/

- Creature hunger and sleepiness now depend on passed time.
- Creatures can eat all types of ripe plants now.
- Added spells tab. Plus, you can spawn new imps now.
- Added some sound effects. Sorry for all the squeakiness.
- Dungeon collects dust and debris over time. Moving creatures clean that up again.
- Proper display of two creatures sharing a map cell.

So far, still a lot of ground work to be done ... next steps will be to complete the library and make it useful. I have a few ideas there, quite different from the classic DK, but it will be a long path to go till then.

[Danimal]

what will you use the library for then? i cant think anything outside of attack spells and new rooms

[Vandar]

For OD, I think researching creature skills would be a nice addition.

- broom riding for black witches, so that they can pass lava sqaures.
- wall passing for ghosts, so that they can enter enemy dungeons even if they are surrounded with walls.
- spy skills - steal knowlodge from enemy keeper libraries!
- Dung Fu, the dungeon variant of Kung Fu. Gives creatures better fighting skills.
- Cooking recipes. Requires a kitchen room, but allows to attract higher culinaric creatures.
- Invent dungeon sanitation. Will attract intellectual creatures.

[Vandar]

I couldn't find matching graphics for the library, so I had to create something myself. First I made some bookshelves, and then I was wondering about a creature, suited for doing research. And, ta-da!, the bookworms were created

I must say, I like them.