T-3 remains, but I’m losing steam. If I had the game framework all in place and working fine, then I might think there was a chance and I would keep going. But I’m still struggling with basic camera and animation systems. I didn’t THINK this was a complicated game when I started it, but I guess that’s often the case.

I learned a lot about MOAI, so that’s good. I can’t say I’m going to stick with this framework — the accuracy/lack of documentation was quite frustrating at times. I liked that I could drop to C++ if I needed to, and I didn’t like that I had to drop to C++ just to add arrow key support. I like how easy it is to do threads and action blocking, but dislike the lack of type safety in Lua. I would prefer a solution with better browser support, and the Chrome examples that come with MOAI are uselessly out-of-date. I clearly need to study more best practices in game development (my knowledge of the subject is rusty by 15 years), and do a better job of examining other people’s games with a developer’s eye.

I’m leaving off with a scrolling map full of procedural Abbey rooms. Although there’s some variation in the doorways I didn’t get to implement more interesting room types. There are monks who move around on their own, but without pathfinding they look silly. Monks experience hunger, fatigue, and guilt. When any value is sufficiently high enough they have a chance to seek food, a bed, or do work. Here’s a monk chowing down in the middle of nowhere with little “num num num” messages popping over his head:

The monks have four sides to them, and that’s call. I didn’t get to animating their movement or any other actions:

Here’s the dust monster (that’s you) in native form. The camera was not cooperating. Sometimes I could get it to smooth scroll and follow you about and sometimes not.

In native form, you can sneak behind a monk and possess them. Well, that’s the theory, that’s where I left off. The notion was you’d have a timer before the mythical underworld sucks you back in, so you’re hopping from body to body trying to forestall that. Here’s a possessed monk:

Little blue swirlies about his head. You would then control the monk, be able to pick up items (such as knives), and then kill other monks with it. Possessing monks provides a kind of nourishment that resets your meter, and also causes it to drain slower. The ultimate goal (because you are a villain, by the way) would be to kill all the monks in the abbey. Monks were built with an alarm level that would determine how suspicious they are, which makes it harder to kill them.

I cut the idea of a snake form, but apparently that wasn’t enough to get this completed in time. Snake-thing would have been your true physical shape, birthed out of a possessed monk. As the snake, your timer would become a health meter, you could kill monks by biting them, but they could fight back. If you died as a snake you’d go back to dust form. The snake could also merge flesh with a freshly-killed monk. This is better than being stuck in dust form but it really freaks out the friars, not to mention the blood trail it leaves when you walk… No matter.

I had fun and I’m glad I did this. If I do it again, I will definitely do some warm up and get together a better personal library. Hopefully by then I’ll also be more adept at MOAI, or something else. I was on my way to trying out Haxe/NME when the contest came up. I will likely continue this game in my spare (and spread-out) time. Good luck to everyone else!