Time is running out, and the project is advancing nicely. I changed a few of the things I thought about the last time – the game will be a little bit simpler in mechanics to make sure it’s well balanced. There will be no special abilities or advantages to having more tiles at any given time, instead I’m going for a more complete Reversi style – tiles which you step on will change only if they haven’t already been changed – so once all tiles in the screen changed from the original terrain type to one of the two players’ types, the game is over and the winner is the one with the higher percentage of the board. To prevent developing an easy always-win strategy, the structure of the level will be randomly generated each time – in addition to ordinary tiles, there will be obstacle tiles which can’t be walked on, and can’t be part of a connecting line (so, if you have the rightmost tile and the leftmost tile in a certain row, you don’t get all tiles in the middle if there’s an obstacle somewhere in the row). Multiplayer levels will always be symmetric to prevent unfair advantages to any player.

On the single player front, the main opponent will be trees. Trees are stationary, and constantly alter the terrain immediately around them, slowly advancing outward. On each single-player level you’ll need to hurry up and get the strategically important tiles before the trees capture them. Here as well, your goal is to get a majority of tiles on the board.

Here’s what it currently looks like:

On the screenshot, the player is spreading farmland terrain and the trees are spreading volcanic terrain (the default being grassy terrain). I hope to change the trees to be more appropriate to each terrain type (also, I seem to have screwed up the shadows, I’ll fix that). The level currently has no obstacles – obstacle generation is my main challenge for tomorrow. Also, I’ll want to generate some non-obtrusive things for the level, simply to make it more interesting aesthetically.

All together – I’m feeling good about it. The game is starting to feel fun, I think it looks quite lovely (I’d love to hear what you all think), and I think I’ll be able to complete it in the remaining time.

As promised, I’m still in the Liberated Pixel Cup. After abandoning (hopefully not forever) my previous project due to lack of time, I’m now officially declaring my new one – it will be smaller in scope to allow me to finish it in the little time remaining, but I believe it has a lot of potential.

The game will be called Terramancers, and it’s based on a game idea I tried to develop a few months ago[1] with an artist I met, but it didn’t reach anything beyond basic planning. Here’s the concept:

Basically, the game is kind of a real-time action-Reversi. You and your opponent each have a character associated with a certain terrain type. You start in a grassy arena, and each of you, simply by walking, can alter the tile under you to your terrain type. Like in Reversi, if you alter a tile which has a straight line connecting it to another tile that already has your terrain type, all other tiles on that line will also be altered. The goal, of course, is to alter the entire arena to your terrain type.

Screenshot for the current build

So far it’s quite simple, but I’ll need to add a few things to make it practical and fun. First of all, the more tiles you have on your side, the more powerful you are – you move faster, you can use more special abilities. This makes sure the game won’t go on forever – once one character gets an advantage, they’ll be able to extend it more and more unless the opponent does something unexpected. I haven’t implemented special abilities yet, but I have a few planned. Not sure yet if different characters will have different abilities, I probably won’t have time for that.

Of course, the above description is for the multiplayer mode, which is where the basic idea comes from. However, being just one person it will be very hard for me to properly balance a game for multiplayer (and I won’t have time to make a proper AI). Therefore, I’m hoping to be able to produce a single player mode that works a little differently, where instead of one equally-powerful enemy, you have waves of simple monsters that alter the terrain against you, and you need to eliminate them before losing all your terrain.

That’s the basic idea. I have very little time left, so let’s hope something good comes out of it!

[1] Which actually makes it much newer than the previous project, which I actually tried to develop back in high school (that’s over 10 years ago). I had a basic engine working, but absolutely no graphics – the UI was textual menus, and the combat screen was made of ASCII visuals. I’m not even sure if it was written in C or Basic.