Status Update
Well it has been about a month now since my last post, so I suppose I should make a record of my pernicious and insouciant behavior over the past month:
Game Making
Hard to believe, perhaps, but I am still latched on to my ideas for pot farming games. I am still working on the details of Grow Tycoon as a mod for Civ4 Colonization. I have delved into the SDK, toyed with .py files and even managed (with a lot of help) add a basic zombie into the game.
The current path of learning I am treading is to figure out how to add these zombies into a simple modcomp where they will be generated randomly and automatically at the start of a game. This behavior is very similar to how Barbarians are handled in Civ4, so I may try to re-add Barbarians into Colonization. I figure (assuming it is feasible) this will be a great way to become more familiarized with both C++, XML and graphical elements at the same time.
As I continue to get better at PHP, I am looking more seriously at my capability of producing a Browser Game. The deeper I delve into mod-making for Civ4, it almost seems like it would be easier. That is probably the me-trying-to-get-used-to-Blender talking, though. After all, you don't have to worry about site hackers or bandwidth limits with a Civ4 mod.
While my vision of a pot-farming browser game is more along the lines of Travian than an xRPG, I was hopefully in search of potential travian-like frameworks but instead found and installed World of Phaos on a test server to have a go with it. So far I am enjoying myself quite a bit with its basic setup, and it looks like it both requires the code love and has the ability to be easily modded that may make me want to stay with it. I've always wanted to do my own RPG, perhaps this can provide the basic framework for it.
But maybe not as I have been none to keen lately on making a multi-player for some reason. For an RPG I was considering adapting the Tunnels and Trolls PnP system or even Dungeons and Dragons (basic 1981 version) to a simple php single-player game system. The php would only really be used as a glorified character sheet and dice-roller, perhaps with the ability to save character and location information to a persistent cookie or as a text file. Not really sure why I'm not feeling the multi-player browser game love at the moment.
But if I decide to rework World of Phaos and get something interesting going, I'll put it on a public server so anyone can play. And did I mention something about a test server? That is right - this past month I finally got off my ass and repurposed an old computer as a web server so that I can avail myself of the joys of CLI with SSH tunnels and whatnot. Thanks go to Verizon FIOS for allowing the ability to create remote access to it as well. But if you think I'm linking it here for everyone to see, forget about it - my security skills aren't good enough yet to lead the world to my door.
Game Playing
I have been playing a lot of Lord of the Rings Online lately. I've fallen out somewhat with the MMORPG genre this past year, but still LOTRO keeps me coming back. Even with all its warts (like the dreaded pathing system) Turbine really did a quality job with this title.
I attempted to get back into World of Warcraft again, and just couldn't do it. I don't know why I even try to rekindle the passion, that game is utterly dead to me. If I were playing any other MMORPG right now, it would probably either be Dungeons and Dragons Online or Vanguard.
I have been playing a lot of Colonization and a bit of Civ4 lately, as working with the modding requires it. I have been playing mods, both official and not, a lot more and I can't believe how rich and diverse the modding scene for Civ4 is. Playing the mods made by other people as well as attempting to come up with my own has really rekindled some of the passion I have held in the past for the Civilization franchise.
Lastly, I bought Defense Grid: The Awakening on Steam a week or two ago (when it was on sale) and it was more than worth every penny. I truly enjoy this game, I only wish I had more time to really crack-out on it. I enjoy the progression also, making it a game that is easy to learn and play, but very difficult to master. I'm not really a tower defense afficianado so I can't really compare it to anything else, all I can say is I really enjoy playing it.
A fail and a couple wins
I feel I must be forthright with a recent occurrence. An occurrence of failure upon my part, borne as is so often the case out of good intentions in conception going awry in prosecution.
Basically I volunteered my time to a Colonization project of someone else's then flaked. It was more or less my responsibility to dump the Civilopedia into a spreadsheet and modify the appropriate entries for the mod. I figured this would work for me as I planned on performing this task for my own mod, Grow Tycoon.
Well, one thing leads to another as they say, and here we are more than a month later and I essentially forgot all about it. Well, not really forgot - more like I just kept putting it off. Of course the lines of communication going both ways could have been better utilized, but what is past is past.
Yes, I am an old rascal and have immense and profound powers of procrastination. But there is nothing like failing in public to better prepare oneself to succeed later on. I also feel the double burden of being a stoner who flaked as people tend to blame their predisposed prejudices and look no further rather than attempt to understand the nuances of life. I care very deeply about the issue of ending prohibition and I almost feel like I damaged it through my irresponsibility (albeit very slightly).
So in atonement I have been working extra hard on laying the foundations for the creation of Grow Tycoon. In a move that somewhat surprised me, I opted to delve into the mysterious world of the SDK first.
Following an excellent old post by Kael on Civ Fanatics, I was able to get the open source C++ IDE Code Blocks working with the Colonization SDK. I compiled a vanilla (unmodded) DLL successfully and used it within a basic test mod.
Afterward I went on to the fool-around-with stage and was able to fidget out the way to add a new Yield to the game. For those not familiar with Colonization, a Yield refers to any resource in the game whether it be Ore or Education points. The Yield I added was more in the vein of Liberty Bells or Crosses, but by following the the short guide I posted on Civ Fanatics you could come up with any sort of Yield you want.
I decided to start there first, as I want to add a viable Cultural Victory to vanilla Colonization. I am still tweaking the settings, though. My biggest problem at this point is deciding how the points should be generated in the game. At the moment I am thinking they will either need to be "built" by a unit in a building (like a Statesman in a Town Hall) - I am trying to avoid this - or they will be tacked onto Founding Fathers making collecting them more strategic (currently the player is rewarded for passing on a FF in favor of saving points for specific one - this will make grabbing all the FF you can more attractive).
The Founding Fathers option is by far the easiest option to add to the game, but I am also considering adding the ability to use colonists to work the Printing Press and Newspaper buildings for Fortuente Culture points. This would also create the need for an Expert culture unit, the Editor. I may end up adding both options, but I don't want to spend too much time on mods or modcomps other than those which directly benefit Grow Tycoon.
While I have seen some XML editors that looked pretty nice, I am currently using Adobe Dreamweaver (I know what you're thinking) and it works well enough that I have not really been looking for a replacement. I am looking for a Python IDE also, but have been procrastinating that rather much. Notepad totally sucks for editing Python, but it does work after all.
So as of right now I am working on that. I have added in my Fortuente Culture points into the Info screen (I'll probably post a guide on that too) and am playing through otherwise vanilla Colonization matches to tweak and refine my Cultural Victory option.
More Grow Tycoon Ideas
In the course of dissecting Colonization (and to a lesser extent Civ IV), I have come across a few other ideas I have for my illicit-pot-growing Colonization mod, currently code-named Grow Tycoon that I wanted to briefly write down here both for myself and for anyone else who might happen to read this and be interested.
First, I haven't mentioned it but from the beginning I have planned on morphing the Founding Father system into a plant varietal system. Meaning rather than accumulating points and spending them to have a historical figure join your cause, you will accumulate points and use them to research and/or cross breed strains of pot to come up with other strains to grow.
I would like to have a mechanic that has a more sandbox feel - similar perhaps to the way one would create new units in Alpha Centauri. The player could mix and match to create strains that have specific bonuses (easier to grow, worth more money when sold, etc.), however for this mod I want to keep it as simple as possible. So an easier alternative given the Civ 4 engine is to simply make pre-defined strains that are researchable along a "tech tree" or in the case of Colonization the "Founding Father" tree. Plus, I always have fun coming up with silly names like Spanish Trampoline and it might make a nice way to pay homage to some real-life historical strains like Maui Wowee or Northern Lights.
Another thing that I have had in mind this whole time but I believe I have not mentioned is crucial to my decision to use Colonization as a base rather than Civilization IV itself - the town and trade system. Because pot farming in real life is itself an industry I want to preserve that (Tycoon) element by using the city-building aspects of Colonization. Where it uses schools, cigar-rolling factories, stockades and the like, however, I will be using (water) wells, generators and CCTV security systems. All which, like Colonization, must be constructed over X amount of turns and be manned by a "colonist" (I still haven't come up with a generic unit name yet).
As I mentioned in an earlier post, the scale of Grow Tycoon's world is much reduced from that of the other Civ games. But I was still having a hard time working out exactly what that means to the game. The way I have decided to approach it is to leave the basic mechanic largely unchanged and chalk up the scale difference to nothing more than graphics and text.
Which means you will still be using a unit to construct farms outside of your city, but it will be presented as constructing fields outside of your base camp. The base camp (like the Civ city) houses your workers and contains all your important buildings. From the base camp management screen (city management screen) you can assign your workers to pot fields you have constructed or other duties I haven't come up with yet. An example for a potential tile assignment would be guard duty that provides a bonus to defense from the Law or criminal gangs.
I'm going to end this here for today. As I am finishing the task of fleshing out my basic concepts I am turning more an more to creating specific units. Like the wagon - a land resource transportation unit - which I want to have a few different versions of to take into account for things like SUVs with hidden compartments, tractor trailers that hall other goods to disguise your contraband or basic cars that can travel fast but have a higher chance of getting caught by the Law. Or maybe only have one basic land transport unit that takes advantage of the experience-point system (but then how will it gain xp if it is destroyed on being caught?). That's the kind of stuff I have been moving on to lately, which I suppose means development is proceeding at a fair pace.
If you are familiar with Civ 4 and/or Colonization and would like to make some suggestions, I whole-heartedly welcome them! If you aren't familiar with Sid Meier strategy games and like turn-based strategy I also recommend you give them a try. Modding in Civ 3 was good, but as you might have seen modding in Civ 4 allows you to do almost anything you want with the only real limit being your time and expertise.
Blogs I Read
- Brian Psychochild Green
- Combat Archaeology
- Elder Game
- Hardcore Casual
- Kill Ten Rats
- Killed In A Smiling Accident
- LOTRO Combo Blog
- Open Bracket
- OSG1 – Online Strategy Games
- Pumping Irony
- Ralph Koster
- Stylish Corpse
- The Core Mechanic
- Tish Tosh Tesh
- Troll in the Corner
Browser Games I Play
Fortuente Pages
Game Sites I Like
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