Hi, all. This is indeed my first game jam, and I'm rather new at game development/programming. My primary focus for this will be coding. I'll be using GameMaker (GML), which I've played around with a bit (enough to complete the beginner tutorials).

I'll also be posting on tumblr

Another Escort Mission

Seasoned adventurers know that not all quests are about loot and glory. Sometimes you need to accept jobs just so you can pay the bills. Take on Another Escort Mission, in which you and your party members are tasked with ensuring that your woefully defenseless clients get to their destinations safely. Roads are in various states of disrepair, and the further you get from civilization the more likely you are to run into bandits, beasts, and mysterious strangers asking for help. Deliver your ward intact to ensure that you get paid.

Gameplay

Third-person action-adventure. Tower-defense-ish? I'm not sure what genre this falls into. The object of each level is to deliver the payload to the end of the road.

The payload will move forward along the road at a fixed pace until/unless there's something blocking the way, or you tell it to stop (click on it to stop/start). Levels/obstacles will hopefully be randomly generated. Rough terrain means slowing down. Debris needs to be cleared away to progress forward.

Individual party members can be selected and told where to stand. Like turrets, they will automatically attack any enemies within their range. If near enough to a road block, they will attempt to clear it, provided they have tools necessary for doing so. Action may be paused while the player gives orders to each party member (think FTL). If necessary, I may have party members automatically trail the payload if there are no enemies in the party member's line of sight. Perhaps the player will be able to control the attacks of one party member, or any one party member at a given time.

Enemies-bandits will spawn randomly off-screen, either approaching the payload or waiting for the payload to approach them, if spawning up the road. Wildlife may be passive unless provoked. Some NPCs will block the path and ask you for assistance (resources, or to hitch a ride). They may offer rewards or just cause you trouble.

I'm hoping that rewards can also be randomly generated, scaling up with the difficulty of a level. The player is free to keep any loot acquired along the journey.

Assets

Not what I'm focusing on for this jam, so whether or not I try to create any will depend on how much time there is after I finish coding. I'll most likely use sprites, art, and music that are already available.

I dove head-first into procedural generation (and ds grids) since it's the thing I most wanted to learn about during the jam. HeartBeast has an awesome tutorial series on YouTube for exactly this, so it was easier to grasp than I thought it would be.

The result of going through the first tutorial vid.

What I want for my levels is for the path to begin in the West, allow it to meander North/South but inevitably head East. So it was a matter of setting the starting coordinate and restricting the directional movement of the controller.

These paths don't double back on themselves and they have a tendency to head Eastward.

It doesn't seem like much, but I'm very excited about this. Just needed to make a couple more tweaks. Made sure the path wouldn't make those consecutive zig-zag turns, broke the repeat function if the path approached the room width, and ensured that the end of the path would be East-facing.

This is where I am now.

What I'm looking at next is:

• Autotiling; placing road tiles, grass tiles, and partial road/grass tiles appropriately
• Populating the map with spawn points for enemies, resources, and random events
• Making sure the payload can automatically track/follow the path that's been laid down. This is a somewhat important one, and just the thought of trying to figure it out is making me sweat :')

Looks cool so far! I liked FTL and I'm a big fan of procedural generation. Good luck!

- B

Thanks!

Today I learned about motion planning grids and coding paths in GML. Most of my time was spent troubleshooting. Had some difficulty getting the path to be visible so I could see where points were being added. Novice tip: put draw functions in draw events :')

I wanted to be able to demo what I'm up to, so I'm exporting to HTML5 as I go. Yet more time troubleshooting to get the game to not crash before it even loads the room. But all is well by now. Feel free to check out the "playable" snapshot on the page that I use for testing it. Spacebar restarts the room and generates a new level. The path and grid lines are a bit distracting, they're just for my own reference. Watch that hedgehog go!