InfernalKeith Posted December 15, 2010 Share Posted December 15, 2010 Okay, to take a break from my other project, and because I think I'll actually have a solid chunk of TI time this weekend, I'm gonna attempt to take a game from the planning stages to a working version between Friday evening and Sunday night. I'm gonna post updates here as I go, sort of a 'live blog' of every sleep-deprived moment, with the goal of having a working, playable game by the time I go to bed Sunday. I haven't yet sketched a graphic character, typed a line of code, or even jotted down a note -- it's all in my head so far. The game is called HIGH SEAS. It's a game of business-building and trading set in the 17th century. You start out with a certain amount of money, and must build ships, hire crew, buy and sell commodities at various ports, avoid bad weather and pirates, and amass enough wealth in a fixed amount of time to ensure your place in history. The main action of the game will take place on a map, which will contain a fictional sea ringed by land masses. There will be a number of port cities on this sea, as well as one city known for its shipbuilding. You'll have enough money to buy one new ship (or two used ones, which will have a shorter lifespan) and load up on cargo at one of the ports. Prices for different commodities will fluctuate, but you'll find which items sell best at which places, and set your ships on courses to and from these ports to buy and sell. Once you've made money, you can buy more ships, trade in more expensive goods, and possibly even buy off pirates or corrupt dock officials. Weather will be a random factor in the game, as will some non-player characters (pirate ships, perhaps a few other trader vessels). Random events (crop failures, civil wars) will affect commodity prices and, sometimes, even close ports temporarily. Also toying with the idea of adding perishable commodities to the mix -- get to the port too late with that hold full of chickens, and you'll have a ship full of dead, rotting birds. (or something like that) I'm thinking this will work in BASIC because the map will be fairly static, with single-character movements of ships. The map will not take up the full screen -- there'll be an area for ship and port stats, which can again be easily plugged into an existing "form" onscreen, requiring smaller graphical updates. I'll kick around the idea some more this week, and perhaps take notes, but I won't start designing or coding until Friday after dinner. I'll post code snippets and screen shots as I have them. Hopefully this'll be fun, and the "deadline" pressure will be a motivator. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sometimes99er Posted December 15, 2010 Share Posted December 15, 2010 Sounds very nice. Good luck ! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
unhuman Posted December 15, 2010 Share Posted December 15, 2010 Well, if you're writing this at 3 in the morning... Wonder now if you get in the required preparatory sleep. Good luck! I just have a bunch of late nights (til 12 to 2) - get way too screwed up staying up later than that. So then I just think about stuff as I attempt to fall asleep and have a plan of action for the next day. If we were all still kids in the same neighborhood, we could have a hack-fest. -H Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Opry99er Posted December 15, 2010 Share Posted December 15, 2010 Great stuff mate! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
InfernalKeith Posted December 15, 2010 Author Share Posted December 15, 2010 When I was single and self-employed, my "normal" sleep pattern seemed to find me staying up till 6am, then sleeping till 4pm or so. I would sometimes have trouble waking up "early" enough to get to the post office by 5pm. I've more or less adjusted to the world's schedule now that I'm married with kids, but for some reason, in the last week or two, I've been up all night. It catches up with me a lot sooner, and takes more of a toll, than it used to -- last night I slept hard from about 6pm to 1am on the couch, then woke up wondering what year it was. I suppose all of us sitting up posting on AA or haunting the chat room would be as close as we're gonna get to a hack party nowadays. Someone bring the Rush cassettes and 12-pack of Jolt Cola, we're pulling an all-nighter this weekend! hehe... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
unhuman Posted December 15, 2010 Share Posted December 15, 2010 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gkwVf4cHqM And, I drink this now... http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000JG3S4K?ie=UTF8&tag=atariage&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000JG3S4K When I really need to wake up, I drink this - way more powerful! http://www.rockstar69.com/zero_carb.html# If you really wanna go nuts, get this (I can't handle these at all - heart palpitations): https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Spike_Shooter I suppose all of us sitting up posting on AA or haunting the chat room would be as close as we're gonna get to a hack party nowadays. Someone bring the Rush cassettes and 12-pack of Jolt Cola, we're pulling an all-nighter this weekend! hehe... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
InfernalKeith Posted December 15, 2010 Author Share Posted December 15, 2010 Black coffee's as high-octane as I go these days -- had heart surgery in '04 due to a dissecting aorta, so I'm supposed to not zap it too badly, too often. Seriously, though, I'm hoping to be sitting here with the coffee on and the stereo cranked for a good chunk of Saturday day and night, so I'll post here regularly, and maybe join some of ya in chat as well, as I sail this particular boat out onto the sea. (insert dozens of nautical puns here) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
InfernalKeith Posted December 17, 2010 Author Share Posted December 17, 2010 (edited) And it begins........ I won't be doing a lot of work on this till later this evening, but I'm sitting here with coffee and my notebook, jotting down some notes. My plan for data handling re: the player's cargo vessels is to have a one-dimensional string array, with a maximum of ten ships allowed. Each string will be 23 characters long, for example: SHIP$(1)="XCE99999888540000000000" The first character will be the ship's condition or status. A zero will indicate that ship is inactive (hasn't been bought, or has sunk). Otherwise, the letter will indicate the ship's age, with Z being the best condition and A indicating a ship barely staying afloat. This letter will routinely be lowered as time goes by, to indicate the ship's age, and will factor into whether a ship is still afloat after a random weather event or pirate attack. The second and third characters will be the X and Y coordinates of the ships on the game map, where A=1, B=2, and so on. The other 20 characters each represent one of the ship's cargo holds. The value of that character will indicate what commodity is in that hold. In the string above, for example, the ship could have five holds of cotton (item #9), three of rum (#8 ), one of gunpowder (#5), one of spices (#4) and ten empty holds (zeroes). I thought about having global totals of all these items, to help make price fluctuations more realistic -- a player with a full fleet of ships could even corner a market, or manipulate prices through massive buying -- but I don't think that's gonna be feasible in a 16K BASIC version. The commodity prices will fluctuate based on some random events and perhaps by times of year, with certain areas more prone to buy or sell certain items at higher prices. This will give me leeway for having some products with multiple statuses. For instance, let's say salted meat is a commodity, and its letter is X. But each week, that food could become less salable -- all X's in the array could be changed to W's, then to V's, then to U's, each with correspondingly lower sales values. Finally, T could mean a totally spoiled, useless product. I could even add in a check where each hold full of "T" could increase your chances of an illness sickening your crew and leaving your ship dead in the water. Speaking of the crew, my next thing is to sort out how you pay your sailors, and whether low pay will lead to less productive work, theft of cargo, or even mutiny and the stealing of ships. More later... Edited December 17, 2010 by InfernalKeith Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+retroclouds Posted December 17, 2010 Share Posted December 17, 2010 Good luck! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
InfernalKeith Posted December 18, 2010 Author Share Posted December 18, 2010 Very rough early layout of the main game screen. There will be cities along the green shore line, and one on the island. Once you start playing, there will be boats in the water. When you get to a port, its name, and the prices for the goods listed on the right, will appear. I'm hoping I can get all the player info and prompts to fit into the last two lines of the screen below. Doing a lot of the setup, character definition, etc. now. If I have time and characters left over, I want to "sculpt" a few of the green characters to create a more natural looking shoreline, but this layout works for now. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Opry99er Posted December 18, 2010 Share Posted December 18, 2010 Sweeeeeeeeeeeet!!!!!!!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
InfernalKeith Posted December 19, 2010 Author Share Posted December 19, 2010 Not much visually has changed, but a lot of the back-end stuff has been set up, and some game conventions have been defined. Of the eight commodities listed on the right, three of them are more common in the western cities, three in the eastern cities, while the southernmost city has the lowest price on meat, and the island is where jewels are most plentiful. The market prices for all these items will fluctuate from week to week, though, and random events will change the cost of goods in various cities. You can't do much right now, but you can buy your first ship - either a new or a used one. Shipbuilding being in its infancy in these days, you can only obtain ships from the port of Northus, and their lifespan can be as short as two years. You can buy only one ship per week. New ships cost 1,000 gold, while used vessels can be had for less. The used vessels are already partially worn out, and they have crews aboard with a fixed pay rate that you are forbidden to change -- when you buy a new ship, you set the crew's pay rate. (The pay rate affects morale, which can make the difference between your crew fighting off pirates, or joining them and giving up your ship, among other things). Later, you'll have the option to sell off excess ships. I haven't quite decided how that will work yet, though. You can have a maximum of 10 ships on the seas at any time. I'm gonna take a break, then come back and work on the ship movement (you don't "steer" ships, you pick a destination port and the crews steer them for you) and the port buying-and-selling sections. Feeling good about this so far. Once I get the code for those sections done, I'll post a listing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Vorticon Posted December 19, 2010 Share Posted December 19, 2010 This is really looking great You are are actually pulling this off! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
InfernalKeith Posted December 19, 2010 Author Share Posted December 19, 2010 Oh, the irony... ran into a problem with my ships' crews not being able to navigate well around objects. It's very close to the same problem that drove me to distraction in my Crystal Garden game, and made me 'take a break' to do this project in the first place! Gonna step away for a little while, clear my head, and come back and try to get the buying and selling routine at the ports working. The movement issue isn't something that will come up often, so I can let it be a bug for now, and get the other main hunk of the game implemented before I go fix it. More later... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
InfernalKeith Posted December 20, 2010 Author Share Posted December 20, 2010 Well, I'm not gonna reach the goal. Real life intruded all over my weekend, as it tends to do, but I have a good bit of the guts of the game done. I'll probably be able to put up at least a partially-working version tomorrow night, and clean it up over the course of the week. It was a noble effort... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Vorticon Posted December 21, 2010 Share Posted December 21, 2010 Well, I'm not gonna reach the goal. Real life intruded all over my weekend, as it tends to do, but I have a good bit of the guts of the game done. I'll probably be able to put up at least a partially-working version tomorrow night, and clean it up over the course of the week. It was a noble effort... It certainly was Looking forward to playing it as it looks really interesting! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GratedTopping Posted January 11, 2011 Share Posted January 11, 2011 I hope this isn't abandoned. I'd very much like to see it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Opry99er Posted January 11, 2011 Share Posted January 11, 2011 Hey Keith--- deadline's extended a week... January 20th. Come on mon Capitan.... Let's go sailing!!!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
InfernalKeith Posted January 12, 2011 Author Share Posted January 12, 2011 Sorry guys -- I should never have started a project at Christmastime. Been buried with work, and with sick kids. I've got a good bit of Saturday set aside to make some progress on this, and hopefully put up at least a semi-working version. Haven't even been logging in here, I have a lot of catching up to do! See you guys this weekend. - K Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Opry99er Posted January 12, 2011 Share Posted January 12, 2011 Glad to see you're still working on this project. =) Very cool idea, man. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
InfernalKeith Posted January 19, 2011 Author Share Posted January 19, 2011 Hey, just checking back in to report that progress is being made, but at a snail's pace, and there's pretty much no way this'll be done by the deadline. I do plan to work on it a bunch more tomorrow, so there's always a chance... but if I don't get it in by the deadline, I still plan to finish it as soon as possible. I'd like to think I could post at least a working beta version by the end of this weekend, but we shall see. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Vorticon Posted January 19, 2011 Share Posted January 19, 2011 Hey, just checking back in to report that progress is being made, but at a snail's pace, and there's pretty much no way this'll be done by the deadline. I do plan to work on it a bunch more tomorrow, so there's always a chance... but if I don't get it in by the deadline, I still plan to finish it as soon as possible. I'd like to think I could post at least a working beta version by the end of this weekend, but we shall see. This sounds like a great program for the Gameshelf site I'm always on the hunt for good material Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
unhuman Posted February 26, 2011 Share Posted February 26, 2011 Any updates? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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