Oh no!

Surprisingly enough I have something that approaches core gameplay when first day is done. I wasn’t so certain about it 6 hours ago.

I started brainstorming around simplified city builder concept (inspired by the magnificent Banished), because what could be more minimalist in nature than collecting wood and food to expand your kingdom? Well, turns out coding peasant AI with no experience, minimal (there it is!) planning and non-existent road mapping isn’t simplest thing one can try their hand on.

After lots of false starts I finally had little dudes running around screen doing their thang… without any player input. Well, that has to be minimalist, right? You don’t even need to play it! It was clear I needed some kind of opposition to the plucky pioneers. Like…

…this guy? No! Don’t stare!

Horrible thing in the woods sounded interesting. Actually, it was so interesting that I dropped the city building entirely and decided to make the game about that dude. What’s his story? What does he want?

Definitely-Not-Groke is a proud humanitarian, as in “To Serve Man-is-a-cookbook”-kind of. Gameplay became about trying to snatch villagers before they managed to escape back to their huts. Resource management is still in picture: if you eat everybody, you will starve (because before pioneers you ate everything else in the woods you big oaf), and if you harass villagers in their daily routines they will eventually leave when the wood (needed to build new huts, only two villagers per hut as Dog intended!) or food (needed to, well, live) runs out. Also if you go a full day without eating you take damage.

Next milestone would probably be more offensive roles for villagers. I’m thinking about adding hunters in to mix when pioneers are succinctly terrified of continued mysterious disappearances. Maybe traps? Other monsters with different roles in the great ecosystem would be interesting to toy with, but probably outside of my ability to produce this week end.

Still thinking what’s minimalist about this. Protagonist tries to keep the human population minimal, yet sustainable? Could be worse, I guess.

Click here for a way too big gif animation of our wayward hero surfing through woods.

Tools used so far:

• Game Maker 8.0 Lite
• SXFR
• Pickle
• Adobe Photoshop CS5.5

Also a timelapse I seem to be not able to embed.

Tags: ginnungagap, journal, timelapse