Some work in progress pictures of the skills and equipment tabs in the character window, like with most other things new skills can be added via xml!

Skills can be gained by using up an amount of skill points which is gained by several different actions, be it defeating monsters, hacking at a wall or fishing, it’s an equalent to an experience-system without levels.

Some skills might require a specific item to learn them, like tomes of knowledge or a specific item related to the skill.

The very first skill will be the cheap craftingbag skill, which when trained will give the ability to craft things and store crafting-recipes, it’s a cheap skill and serves a simple way to get people started gradually.

It has been quite some time since I wrote my last entry, but I’m always working back on forth on the project, even though it some months go very slowly due to real life and work.

One noteworthy new thing is that I wrote an actual proper system for plants, which is easily shapeable to any kind. I will most likely even use it for things that aren’t plants but might grow and become harvested in stages, such as a crystal formation.

So other than the tree I’ve been adding a few new plants, such as regular grass, and a new type of fruit-bearing plant I choose to call the bloodshrub. It grows through roughly four stages in a complete 32 minutes before reaching fruit-stage and then having a fruit grow and drop from the plant every 24 minutes.

I’ve yet to construct any in depth system of actually spreading plants around, as they’ll currently just grow and reach full age without actually spreading around. One idea is to have smaller criters eat the fruits and spread the seeds around at a reasonable rate, and have each plant have a configurable set limited amount of fruits it can grow.

Here’s how the plant is set up in its data format in xml:

That’s it for now, here’s some fresh fruit!

Eldpack 3.8a is up, which is fully compatible with minecraft 1.0. Terrain and items are updated so far.

Monsters and Gui will be updated later on.

www.eldpack.com

So Eldpack v3.7 is up now at www.eldpack.com which means I can go back to the eldgame soon enough ;)

Built a house with the new building system, it’s pretty tedious having to work at each scaffold into completion on your own but it makes it so much more important to find npc’s that can do it for you if you want to build something bigger than a house ;)

Something I added, subtle but effective, off on the top picture and turned on at the bottom picture.

Haven’t had time to work on the project due to real work crunch and that taking time, but I thought I would save a minute to write something short.

I have been thinking a bit about how to handle construction of blocks, walls, floors etc, and have gone through a multiple ways to handle it.

The block-placing way was the first thing that came to mind, it would’ve been a simple solution if it wasn’t for the fact that blocks and items are separately defined. Defining two sets of data for every tile just to make it placeable would’ve been a pain, not to mention that tile blocks are big and would not work well as dropped items or placed in inventory.

The building tool was another thing that I was thinking about, a tool that you would build and would be used to place blocks at the cost of resources, which was pretty nice in theory, but I started getting a headache on how AI would use it and some other small issues that wasn’t fun dealing with.

So I ended up with the Construction mode which is essentially not a mode, but more like a big slot and a permanent “item” that exists to the left of the inventory, which would change your left click to a placement mode.

You wouldn’t place a block, you place a constructionblock, a sort of scaffold at the cost of what it takes to build the tile you intend to, from there on you have a builders tool that you bang on the scaffold with and see it go from unfinished to finished and the proper tile pops up.

The reason behind this was so that I could combine tile construction and tile constuction orders (such as a build-designation in dwarf fortress) into one thing, and that meaning; if you place a bunch of construction blocks your minions or friends would wield their building hammer and start finishing it up. It also means you could help Ai finish up their constructions.

And then something I actually got done recently.

Being a fan of the dota type games and liking the way most of them handle the importance of visually displaying how much damage you did directly on the healthbar. So I implemented a short white segment on the healthbar that represent the damage you just did which then quickly goes away.

So I’ve mostly been busy building systems, or rather, a bunch of code that could support the different things I wanted to get done for the game. Most recently it was a piece of code that enables the functionality to spawn any entity (or random entity from category) when a block is destroyed.

The first thing I would do with it was to make regular cave walls spawn a stone:

The game will first look to see if it’s a category with that name, for example if you have a type of block that you want to spawn a random entity from a list of different ones, and you could point it towards a category you’ve put stuff in called “random_gems” and it would pick a random one from it.

If it doesn’t find a category with that name it’ll look through the entire library looking for an entry with that specific name, such as “effect_stonebreak” which is a specific particle-effect entity.

In this case I made it spawn both the effect and a stone item that can be used for further crafting:

Maybe you want to explore this and do some crazy stuff, maybe you’re in some special cave somewhere in the world where some event has caused monsters to get trapped in a special kind of stone, and when breaking this, a monster appears:

Maybe that monster isn’t a normal monster, maybe you’ve made this variant of the blob called “frozen blob”, and for a very good reason:

Every world entity in the game is capable of “emitting” heat and cold if you so wish to, with interesting effects, the only notable now being that trees will enter a frozen state and won’t grow (and wont die either), and lakes will freeze over and become walkable, these effects are reversed if the temperature goes up again, such as the frozen blob moving across the landscape, the coming of a warmer season, or a volcanic vent suddenly opening up in the ground.

Thought I should upload a new video showing off some additional gameplay:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_uGNpIxddA

Decided to start up this blog on my game project since it was severely lacking a place where I could talk about it properly beyond the limited tiny texts of twitter.

So here is my introduction on it, and also serving as a text for those who wondered what it actually is.

  Project eldgame

I’ve always have been very much into roguelikes, and games that give you a fresh experience every time you start a new game, like xcom, dwarf fortress and the likes, there’s a random element to it that affects the path you take even if the outcome in the end is the same.

So It started back when I was playing a lot of Minecraft, one of my favorite games so far. I was making a texture replacement pack for it bringing my own art into the game, which can be found at www.eldpack.com

I reach this point of feeling like I was just updating someone elses work, and while I enjoyed it (and still do) I felt like doing something that was different and my own, so with my slightly limited experience with coding I started work on a project that took from what I enjoyed from these kind of games.

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  Starting out

It started by taking the elements I enjoyed the most from these games, the simplicity and ease of use of Minecraft, the depth and expandable world of dwarf fortress, the living world, interactions and nest-building from something like the sims, but I guess more games affects me in what I choose to do.

The basic core elements of the game revolves around exploration, crafting and building.

•   Exploration is about moving around the world and finding resources for crafting, and finding new recipes to add to your collection. Many of these recipes will be gained through just improving your skills, as getting a higher skill will reward you with a greater selection of recipes, but to craft rare items or gadgets involves actually finding recipes from events, monsters, or trading them from creatures you meet, this is the part most resembling the classic rpg.

•   Crafting involves creating items, and tools, and improving on these to create better ones, including higher quality versions of the same basic items you just made through improved skills. It is done from having a collection of recipes in the form of a crafting-bag, where you can easily scroll through your entire collection of recipes, and collapse or expand any new category of item you’ve found. The interface will tell you if a particular item is craftable at that moment, and what is needed for it.

•   Building is the part thar resembles the minecraft/dwarf fortress style of building your home, houses, mechanical contraptions, a town or city. It also involves befriending the people of the world, and having them move into the buildings you build, by giving them away or letting those same npc’s rent them. It might very well also involve you buying or earning the land in a town not owned by you, so you can build your home there or cultivate the land through farming or some kind of mineral-prospecting.

  Modularity

One thing I really enjoyed with dwarf fortress was the way every game was built up using a collection of data, That is something I’m working to follow, and so far every entity, recipe, skill and such is defined via xml and is easily expanded upon.

Currently every entity is based on different core types but I have plans to expand on that in the future so that you can script behaviour via a scripting language.

So what is the game all about?

I’ve gotten that question quite a few times, and it’s a good one, since I’ve never been able to show any proper gameplay so far.

But in short, it’s a graphical roguelike, with a fully dynamic world, with the focus on you doing whatever you wish, be it going on adventures, building your own house and farm, or opening up a shop.

  More soon…

And that is pretty much it for now, I’ll try to post more information here, and eventually post some more youtube videos.

My twitter can be found at http://twitter.com/#!/eldrone

and youtube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/eldrony