Hello everyone, I waited until I had my first (buggy) release of my NDS homebrew game before posting on here. I didn't realize that I can't send links until I'm a member however, so you'll just have to look up the game if you're interested. It uses libnds, and runs on my own game engine that I've made in C.
on github: darius-grauslys/AncientsGame/
On github is the repository. It includes my discord server for the project. I plan on making the game configurable and portable. So it will run on various platforms, with some missing or extra features.
I'll be making a video to explain the game in more detail, but for now here is what's available, and then what I envision:
Game currently:
Endless procedurally generated world with "shrines" that are guarded by four skeletons. At the center of each shrine is a chest with treasure (can be opened with X.)
You need a weapon to be able to attack, luckly you start with a stick in your inventory. Tap the first wood looking button from the left to access your equipment, and drag the stick to the first potion icon on the left (not the hand, I know... a tad too burnt out to fix that LOL.) Once you have a weapon you can press A to attack.
There are a couple of armors and weapons you can find in the chests.
Game I envision:
If you know the video game Dwarf Fortress, and if you know what Adventure Mode is in that game, then you pretty much know what I want for my NDS game, with the difference being a real time game as opposed to being turn based.
Whether you do or don't here is the ambitious idea of the game:
Free roam procedurally generated world, that the player can interact with much like in Minecraft. 3D, but you view the world one 2D layer at a time, just like the game Dwarf Fortress. There will be dungeons and eventually towns in the world the player can interact with. Some dungeons will have "Ancients" which are very powerful 64x64 sprite bosses. Killing them will drop useful resources for the player to do magical rituals.
In order to cast magic, the player (or entity, such as a skeleton for that matter) must be wearing gold armor. It's a tad heavy, and offers very poor protection, but enables the user to channel magic via magical artifacts which are either found or crafted. One of the themes I want to add to the game are "rituals" which involve building structures to perform. These rituals can be done to craft exclusive items, such as rare artifacts/potions, or to transform the player's body. I'm keeping these things a secret for now... but if you look through the art assets you might be able to get an idea of what I'm hiding.
Back on the towns bit. I would love to add towns to the game with NPCs. I really don't like how villagers are done in Minecraft, and I want these town dwellers to actually be useful/interesting. That said I want to avoid making things TOO complicated. Keeping some ambitious ideas to myself, I will say that I want the town dwellers to offer crafting services as well as building services. These aren't just a convenience thing, as I plan on making some crafting very tedious, and building to be very labor demanding.
Some crafting, such as metallic works requires a forge, heating metal, putting it on an anvil, and hammering away at it. You don't have to draw anything - just specify what you want and cookie clicker away. But amassing the right amount of metal, heating/hammering/cooling the metal - the time adds up. The point is to make finding these items in dungeons to be very rewarding, but also to give a sense of accomplishment in crafting. At least, I think its fun, I intend on making the game mod friendly, so if you don't like it - you can change it.
When it comes to building, every tile is a cubic meter. A cubic meter of stone is VERY HEAVY. As a result, building one tile worth of stone takes some time. The player can work on it by themselves, or hire towns people to work on it for them.
Finally, I want to add multiplayer to the game! For local NDS gameplay, it'll be a max of 4 players, with the other 3 being forcefully teleported to the host player if they're too far. I would like to host some servers for NDS players, as well as other platforms.
I know that this game is very ambitious. I'm relying on the plan to port the game to work in my favor here. If a feature I intend to add is too much for the NDS to handle in addition to everything else, I will simply omit it and leave it as an option for other platforms.
Technical Considerations:
I would like to have the game save the world as the game runs, but I would like to know what you guys have to say about that. I imagine I will be pleasantly surprised with a problem. I do know that saving the world on the fly while the NDS is low on battery is a bad idea. So I had plans to only save the world when the NDS is above 20% in battery. As well as informing the player to not abruptly power off the game.
I was thinking of writing a custom arm7 program for saving world chunks (8x8 tiles, and eventually 8x8x8 tiles) to the SD card and reading from the SD card. I was thinking of using a sort of task switching process. A few CPU cycles to read/write to/from SD and plenty more for input/wifi/audio handling. I plan on testing the feasibility of this before spending too much time on it.
flame edit
https://github.com/darius-grauslys/AncientsGame/releases/tag/v0.0.2-alpha
on github: darius-grauslys/AncientsGame/
On github is the repository. It includes my discord server for the project. I plan on making the game configurable and portable. So it will run on various platforms, with some missing or extra features.
I'll be making a video to explain the game in more detail, but for now here is what's available, and then what I envision:
Game currently:
Endless procedurally generated world with "shrines" that are guarded by four skeletons. At the center of each shrine is a chest with treasure (can be opened with X.)
You need a weapon to be able to attack, luckly you start with a stick in your inventory. Tap the first wood looking button from the left to access your equipment, and drag the stick to the first potion icon on the left (not the hand, I know... a tad too burnt out to fix that LOL.) Once you have a weapon you can press A to attack.
There are a couple of armors and weapons you can find in the chests.
Game I envision:
If you know the video game Dwarf Fortress, and if you know what Adventure Mode is in that game, then you pretty much know what I want for my NDS game, with the difference being a real time game as opposed to being turn based.
Whether you do or don't here is the ambitious idea of the game:
Free roam procedurally generated world, that the player can interact with much like in Minecraft. 3D, but you view the world one 2D layer at a time, just like the game Dwarf Fortress. There will be dungeons and eventually towns in the world the player can interact with. Some dungeons will have "Ancients" which are very powerful 64x64 sprite bosses. Killing them will drop useful resources for the player to do magical rituals.
In order to cast magic, the player (or entity, such as a skeleton for that matter) must be wearing gold armor. It's a tad heavy, and offers very poor protection, but enables the user to channel magic via magical artifacts which are either found or crafted. One of the themes I want to add to the game are "rituals" which involve building structures to perform. These rituals can be done to craft exclusive items, such as rare artifacts/potions, or to transform the player's body. I'm keeping these things a secret for now... but if you look through the art assets you might be able to get an idea of what I'm hiding.
Back on the towns bit. I would love to add towns to the game with NPCs. I really don't like how villagers are done in Minecraft, and I want these town dwellers to actually be useful/interesting. That said I want to avoid making things TOO complicated. Keeping some ambitious ideas to myself, I will say that I want the town dwellers to offer crafting services as well as building services. These aren't just a convenience thing, as I plan on making some crafting very tedious, and building to be very labor demanding.
Some crafting, such as metallic works requires a forge, heating metal, putting it on an anvil, and hammering away at it. You don't have to draw anything - just specify what you want and cookie clicker away. But amassing the right amount of metal, heating/hammering/cooling the metal - the time adds up. The point is to make finding these items in dungeons to be very rewarding, but also to give a sense of accomplishment in crafting. At least, I think its fun, I intend on making the game mod friendly, so if you don't like it - you can change it.
When it comes to building, every tile is a cubic meter. A cubic meter of stone is VERY HEAVY. As a result, building one tile worth of stone takes some time. The player can work on it by themselves, or hire towns people to work on it for them.
Finally, I want to add multiplayer to the game! For local NDS gameplay, it'll be a max of 4 players, with the other 3 being forcefully teleported to the host player if they're too far. I would like to host some servers for NDS players, as well as other platforms.
I know that this game is very ambitious. I'm relying on the plan to port the game to work in my favor here. If a feature I intend to add is too much for the NDS to handle in addition to everything else, I will simply omit it and leave it as an option for other platforms.
Technical Considerations:
I would like to have the game save the world as the game runs, but I would like to know what you guys have to say about that. I imagine I will be pleasantly surprised with a problem. I do know that saving the world on the fly while the NDS is low on battery is a bad idea. So I had plans to only save the world when the NDS is above 20% in battery. As well as informing the player to not abruptly power off the game.
I was thinking of writing a custom arm7 program for saving world chunks (8x8 tiles, and eventually 8x8x8 tiles) to the SD card and reading from the SD card. I was thinking of using a sort of task switching process. A few CPU cycles to read/write to/from SD and plenty more for input/wifi/audio handling. I plan on testing the feasibility of this before spending too much time on it.
flame edit
https://github.com/darius-grauslys/AncientsGame/releases/tag/v0.0.2-alpha
Last edited by Flame,
