Day -1:
Boilerplate is a in development steampunk robots dungeon crawler meets Pipe Mania. Shamelessly inspired by Zachtronics' The Bureau of Steam Engineering. Vaporum. and Ironcast.
Here's a summary of work so far:
- You can place pipes and other items on a grid
- They can be rotated, swapped, and even be different sizes but not sure if they will be since the grid is only 8 by 8
- Boilers produce steam which will be used for powering your bot.
- Pipes can transport steam between each other through connections
Now today's progress:
- I reworked the flow of steam to be more like Factorio's liquid system. It still is a bit wrong so may need eventual rework because it still orders everything without consideration for the next flow.
- I wrote out a script that can notice objects I place in the scene editor and registrar them properly in-game with linkage and stats. Very helpful for testing and if I have a loadouts/save system.
Things that still need work:
- Interact-able valves: Your robot is going to be a lot more modifiable even in combat than Zach's game so the ability to have more control over where the steam goes is going to be key. I wrote out a list of possible pipes that do special things:
- Shutoff Valve- closes off steam flow (can be a straight or curved)
- Switch Valve- Allows you to choose the direction of steam flow between 2-3 options. (tee or cross pipe)
- Bumper Valve- Switch which of the fourway pipe's curve into each other (cross pipe)
- Pump- Steam can only flow in one direction
- Ability to move around the dungeon. I'm trying to decide how detailed it should be between a couple different modes:
- Simple: You have one node which requires steam and if powered allows full traversal like most dungeon crawlers. (Most likely for development and very likely candidate)
- Tank controls: Both your legs have a separate toggle for backward or forward. If both go the same direction you move in that direction. If only one is powered you go in the direction of that leg (left leg for left, right leg for right). If they are going in opposite directions, you turn. (If I find movement to be too simple/not dynamic may implement this system)
- Combine: There is a left leg and right leg node as well as a toggle. If you pump into both left and right, you go the direction of the toggle. If you only do one leg you move that direction (left/right). And if you have the toggle on you turn the direction of the single leg (turning). (I confused myself trying to explain this one, bad sign)
- Split: Each movement has it's own separate node for a total of 6 nodes. (could take up a lot of internal space and maybe it's not a good idea to make movement so complex)
- Essentially there needs to be 7 possible states (left/right/forward/back/turn Clockwise/turn Counterclockwise/stand still).
- Combat system- For the moment just HP but eventually damage after you lose all your armor will be directed at the internal components. For causing damage I will be creating a placeholder weapon node that when powered deals equivalent damage.
- Loot System- I'm thinking about making the loot system conveyor-belt style like the in-development Jack and Cassie but for the moment will create a simpler (hopefully) faux-inventory in the middle of the screen. Loot will drop whenever you destroy another bot and will sometimes be found in chests or on the floor of a tile.
- Game background- I decided to make the shift to dungeon crawler instead of... I'm not sure what it was going to be but it involved turns, after reading How to make a 2D dungeon crawler in 3 days by Christina Neofotistou whose pixel art really inspired me to create bigger bots with more casual rounding. Need to implement the whole one-point perspective backgrounds thing with maps.
I'm currently debating whether to switch to a non-Pico8 palette. I love the dark red and brown and I think the warm colors work great but the dark green not sure on. Thinking about paring down to 8-12 colors total eventually. Games coming along, may have something player-testable by next week!