After two weeks of designing and prototyping, I finally got the basics of a new terrain system up and running. It’s still horribly ugly, bugged, and limited, but I’m quite excited about it regardless. Why? Because of mining. You can create and destroy terrain on the fly with it, freely in all three dimensions, so things like mining, terrain-destroying explosions, and collaborative map editing are all doable.
How will this make the game fun, you may as. True to the traditions of roguelikes, we could hide gems, crafting materials, and secret rooms here and there in the terrain for players to find. Some monsters could be made able dig so that they could attack from below or drop from the ceiling unexpectedly. Players could dig pits and moats to defend towns against attacking quest monsters. Even voxel-based water and lava streams might be possible.
The most valuable feature of the new terrain system, however, is that editing the map is much more intuitive than it was before. Instead of having to create and align tons of wall or corridor pieces just to create a few rooms, you can simply choose a material and paint the walls and corridors with the new system. When it’s all implemented, I’m hoping that map editing will finally be easy enough for almost anyone to do.
An ugly screenshot is unfortunately all that I can showcase for now. The code only exists in my local repository because it breaks too many existing features and, honestly, there has basically been zero interest for the project so far. However, it shouldn’t take long for the code to stabilize enough to be pushed to the central Git repository. Furthermore, I think I’m going to make this the last feature for 0.0.2 so expect a new release in a month or two if everything goes well.
By the way, if someone actually read this post, or at least glanced at it, be aware that no one has suffered a painful death or anything yet for contacting me. I’m a nice and calm guy, after all. Point-blank. The lack of casualties has absolutely nothing to do with you being the first one to ever try so feel free to give commenting or email feedback a shot.
Really interesting. Keep up the good work.
Saw this on planet.freegamedev.net. Looks like an interesting project. This post reminds me of Voxelstein 3D. Also in the project page, the description of characters being able to develop without being slowed by game mechanisms seems like an interesting concept and I’m curious to see how it will take shape.