Not representative of gameplay
Wisest Wizard
A game of spellcraft
The Concept:
In Wisest Wizard, you will play as a hapless young wizard as they
learn how to perform the art of spellcraft in order to solve puzzles,
defeat opponents, and uncover mysteries...
The runes that spells are comprised of are my own invention. They come
together to form words, phrases, sentences, etc. Spells will take the
form of programs made up of commands that these runes can perform. The
setting is planned to be a wizard school, in order to teach players how
the ins and outs of this system work.
Milestones:
The focus thus far has been on the editor that will allow you to combine different runes into words. So far we have:
- An interactable object that opens the editor UI
- An inventory that holds "scrolls"
- A menu of available runes
- Rune combination functions, including:
- Simple overlap
- Nesting
- Raising
- Rotation
- Scaling
- Shifting context with the "Doh Stick"
- Complex Nesting (WIP)
Code exists to show the proper name of a rune if it's created. At this time, that code doesn't do anything, because I've removed all the proper names in order to refine the ID combination and JSON formatting, as well as add complex nesting.
Plans:
To consider the editor complete, I'll need to have the "Save and Load"
features finished. At the moment, they can save, but to load them requires
instantiating each rune in the combination and putting them into the
configuration previously created, which has proven difficult at a certain
point I have to make my program guess which of the instantiated runes goes where.
I can save their positions, and what type of rune it is, the operations performed,
and the position of their child runes, which is enough data to be reasonably confident,
but because I'm a silly cat there's always room for error.
Once the editor is complete, the "hard" part starts. The rune combination IDs will be
used as syntax for the "programming language" that will be used for the spells. The
reason that's so difficult is that, well, it's making a programming language. That's hard.
It's an esoteric language by necessity, the rune IDs are pretty incomprehensible but technically
when the language is finished you'd be able to program with those independantly, save for the
actual planned integrations with the game. I've been reccommended to look into
Total Functional Programming
because I'd mentioned that I want to avoid infinite recursion, among other things.
I expect that creating all the gameobjects and properties that are editable by the spells is also going to
be a real challenge. It'll require a lot of thinking and planning, but luckily at that stage it should be
possible to just modularly add in new possible spell outputs whenever I find one we're lacking.
The word for "Ghost," from my notes.
This combination literally translates to "Soul in the manner of Ground"
If constructed in Wisest Wizard, the target RuneID would be:
(e[a[a]],r~~t^1.h.e[e[a]]-.h.e[e[a]].h.d[e[a]]^o.h~m.l.k^2--,v)
Although the IDs are hidden from the player.
There's a little uncertainty in the exact construction,
because my idealized vision does not always line up with the code,
and the Complex Nesting is still a WIP.
Payphone
A game of coin-counting maids
The Concept:
In Payphone, you'll become a minimum-wage employee of a maid cafe. At the end of the day, though,
it doesn't matter how many customers there are, just that you have enough money to make a phone call.
This was inpsired on some levels by the Maroon 5 song of the same name. This is still in its earliest
stages, so a lot is still up in the air. I don't think I want it to focus on a Papa's Pizzeria style of
customer management. I've played with the idea of different types of customers having different ways of
catering to them, one might have a street-fighter style 1v1, another could be a platforming mini-game,
but I'll probably ditch that idea.
What's really important to me for this is the core concept, that the player will have to do their best to
collect enough coins over the course of the shift to make a phone call to a friend, or family, or someone.
That's a very evocative concept to me, so I'll have to see what I can do to make the mechanics cater to that.