Age of Rogues WIP: Day 0
Published October 15, 2014
Yesterday I had a very nice (and productive) ideas exchange with some of you gdnetters, which
can be seen here.
It was about an idea for a pretty unusual roguelike. Don't want to rewrite all the brainstorming here, only to start a dev diary for a prototype of the game.
Day 0 is about some sketches and the choice of the wip title. After a couple of ideas, I chose
Age of Rogues, since the name contains the two identified keywords of the game:
Age (since it is all about world ages and humanity progression) and
Rogue (obviously, been a roguelike kind of game). A quick search on indiedb and google give me no results, so here we are.
I sketched down a couple of "screenshots", to give me an idea of what need to be putted on screen, and
why. This will change almost for sure, but I need to start from somewhere.
World Map view
Full game will have a dozen of technologies to be discovered in order to pass to the next Age, grouped into 4 types: Social, Scientific, Artistic and Spiritual. This will be the main goal of the game, so I like player can have this situation always under his eyes, hence the four screen corner covered with relative tech icons: they will show in fullcolor the discovered techs, and in black-white or the like the undiscovered ones.
Here each tile is a macro-tile: for example your native village will be the starting tile. You will see a fog of war on the not yet visited tiles. In order to visit a tile you need to step in and enter the area. This will bring to the Area Map view, which is where the roguelike part of the game take place.
Area Map view
This is almost equal to the World Map view, but all the stats refer to the character instead of the world. Here you will explore the area, searching for obelisks, fighting things etc. etc.
Final touches
I also chose the tools (c++ and sfml), set the prototype's goals (Age of Stone, with the implementation of the social techs and one of the scientific ones only, with 2 base classes for the characters and 1 unlockable class), and chose the free art (don't like to use standard free spritesheets/tilesets, but for a prototype I think it's better to not expect art to myself, considering I'm not an artist too).
I will not put a lot of effort on the procedural things, like the world/area/dungeon generation: just something to fill structures and have a playable map to test features.
With these restrictions I hope to have a playable prototype in about 7 days of develop. Wish me good luck!
Good luck!
Also, I couldn't help but think you're not a native english writer, am I correct? (I was led to that conclusion by the term "choosed", which should really be "chose" in past form (choose, chose, chosen).
Can't wait to see some progress on this though! Looks interesting. I'm not sure about the finite nature of obelisks to advance age, but let's see how it all turns out!