Ape Apps

I've just updated the Epic Adventure beta to v0.5.0 which should be hitting all platforms soon. This release adds new capabilities to the engine, which should lead to further expansion of the games content in the coming releases. Firstly, the engine now supports random drops when breaking a terrain object. For instance, now when you chop down trees, Apples have a chance of falling.

In addition, there are now random cave formations. Caves appear randomly on maps as a hole in the ground, and if you stand on one and then click on your character, you will descend down into the cave.

This is important because it now allows the "z" dimension to the world. In theory, subterranean levels can extend down infinitely. As of now, the only subterranean biome type is the cave that is totally filled with stone which you can hollow out, but now that the capability is there, more stuff will be on the way. I am thinking dungeons, underground lakes, underground lava (when you get deeper in levels), etc.

To go along with the new engine changes, this update introduces Stone, Apples, the Stone Axe, and the Stone Pickaxe. I didn't make a wooden pickaxe yet, but I probably will in the next update.

Here is a quick gameplay video of some of the new features added to v0.5.0.

For the next update, I want to build in a "room" generation engine. This will be used to create random buildings that appear on the surface, eventually leading to NPC filled towns where you can trade and do business. The room creation will also lead to random castles on the surface with staircases leading down to multilevel subterranean dungeons that you can loot and explore.

Of course dungeons means there will need to be enemies. I am going to start with basic RPG fare, such as rats and skeletons. This also means combat and health will need to be implemented, along with weapons crafting.

Once these things are implemented, we start to have the workings of an actual adventure game on our hands! If you can't see where this is going, I am basically working towards an open world multiplayer 2d zelda-type RPG with procedural world generation and crafting. So stay tuned, because there is a lot more to come!

Ooh, this sounds promising @basteklein. How deep into crafting are you hoping to go? Will you be adding ways to automate some things? Will there be a leveling and class system? If this game becomes popular, do you think you would go as far as giving us the ability to travel to other planets/dimensions?

Speaking of infinite lower levels, you could also have infinite higher levels as well . Would be cool if the first floor of a building can be a part of the world map so you can pass right through the first floor of a building without having to go to another map, while upper and lower levels would have to be in separate maps. Instead of adding a map for every single staircase that a map has, just have each staircase or hole lead to the same level. for example, If you are building multiple two story houses on one map and you climb up to the second floor of one house, you should be able to see the second floor of the other houses, since they are all in the same level. This keeps all of the levels going up uniformely, creating a "column" of maps that exist one on top of the other and with the same amount of space.

I also like the fact that you can move into a new room when you get to the edge of a room, that could make different biome generation easy because you just need to designate the biome for each room and generate different things based on each biome. We could also do with a chunk map that shows all of the rooms/chunks that we've been in and the biome types of each. The map should focus the room that the player is in at the center so that you always know what's around you, but sooner or later we will want to be able to zoom out further and pan around the map, especially if we've done a lot of exploring. If you are planning to add at least a minimal amount of automation, I recommend being able to keep a number of rooms loaded(but not visible) in a radius around you so you have room to move while your automations do their thing, or what if only the column that you are in was loaded, so that automations above and below you can operate.

What are the texture specs so we can contribute to decorations? Would be neat to work on floor and wall types, resource images, plants, and other terrain types. I especially want to work on resources, I have many ideas for them.

I have an idea for a resource chain that you might like below. The chain leads you through the main crafting materials of the game, and some of the main buildings and furnature that could be added.

flooring: plank floor
flooring: cobble floor
wall: plank wall
wall: log wall
wall: cobble wall
furniture: wooden chair - should be able to sit in the chair, food grants bonus hunger points when eaten whilst sitting in a chair and health regeneration should slightly increase while sitting. Food should grant even more bonus hunger points if you sit in a chair that's facing a table while eating it.
furniture: wooden table
furniture: torch - crafted from sticks and coal. obviously spreads light in the darkness. that's if you are planning on adding light.

overworld structure - gravel pile - mined to obtain gravel, and sometimes flint
cave block: gravel - mined to obtain gravel, and drops flint more often.
item: gravel - used mainly for pathing
flooring: gravel path
item: - flint - used in many crafting recipes

furniture: furnace - basic cooking and smelting - requires stone and flint

cave block: coal ore - mined to obtain coal
item: coal: 1 coal can smelt 4(?) items. can be obtained by smelting wood in a furnace or mining coal ore in caves

cave block: copper ore - can be mined to obtain copper ore
item: copper ore - smelt in a furnace to obtain copper
item: copper - used in many crafting recipes.

cave block: iron ore - can be mined to obtain iron ore
item: iron ore - smelt in a furnace to obtain iron
item: iron- used in many crafting recipes.

cave block: gold ore - can be mined to obtain gold ore
item: gold ore - smelt in a furnace to obtain gold
item: gold- used in many crafting recipes .
item: gold coin - the main game currency, one gold ingot crafts into multiple coins.

furniture: forge - tier 2 smelting, only accepts coke for fuel - requires 1 furnace, lots of iron
item: coke - 1 coal refines into 1 coak in a furnace, used for forging steel from iron and iron ore, and 1 coke item smelts 1 item in the forge, this is to make steel a bit harder to obtain at first.
item: steel - used in many crafting recipes

furniture: alloy forge: a more efficient smelter with 2 inputs and 2 output slots. made with a forge and lots of steel. 1 coke smelts 2 items. If the right combination of 2 items are inserted and smelted, a new material is created, but if two items that won't mix are inserted, the alloy forge will act like a double furnace, smelting both items at once into their normal products.

item: antanium - a mixture of steel and gold, a very durable material. used in many crafting recipes

That's as far as I've gotten Obviously, each metal should have it's own set of tools and armor built from it, and each tier of tools are faster and more durable that the others. You can mix this up and complicate the process as much as you want, I was just trying to provide a skeleton plan for you to build off of in case you didn't have one yet.

Anyway, hope you like at least some of these ideas, let us know about the texture specs.

@Amorphus thank you for the epic post. I have been away for a few days and will not be able to fully get back to work until later this week, but it would be amazing to get help on the textures for this game. It took me so long to draw the wooden walls that I am dreading adding other materials, lol.

World textures are just simple 64xsomething png images. This means that the frame width has to be 64px, but the height can be anything. The texture is anchored to the bottom of the tile. Here are some examples:


For textures that can "connect" together like walls, there are 16 frames per sprite, organized like this:


Items that can be held in the hand can have an additional hand texture that is super-imposed on the player sprite. Here is an example of the axe:


A notch is cut out where the sprite's hand or body would naturally cover it up. To clip this out, I draw it in a layer against the default character sprite:


I actually create all graphics in .svg format using Inkscape and then export them to .png, that way if I want to up the resolution in the future it is no problem. So if you did want to contribute, ideally an .svg file would be best.

The engine supports other biomes, but I do not have graphics for them yet. How it works is that each biome can "connect" to certain other biomes. This way if I was making a desert biome, I would also make a "half way" biome that served as a transition between the two.

For the crafting, I am willing to go as far as anybody wants it to go. So, all out. On a technical level, any object that can be added to the game also has the ability to be crafted.

Questing and RPG elements will also be added. For the next update I was planning on auto-generated dungeons with basic enemies (probably rats to start out with) so that I can start working out the combat. This includes leveling up and character progression. I also want NPC's that you can interact, trade with, and get auto-generated quests from.

Anyway, hope this info helps. There is actually a ton of work to do on this game, but I think with the crafting, RPG and multiplayer elements fleshed out, it can be pretty fun. So if you or anybody wants to help with design and ideas, that would be awesome! Like I said I wont be able to get back to the apps for a few more days, but I'm just glad somebody took notice to Epic Adventure, lol!

Wow, thanks for this info. Those wall layouts look intimidating since I don't have much drawing experience. I have done some 3D drawings before though, mainly for building ideas for mc. And I've also done a lot of 2D sprites regarding resources to one of my games several years ago.

I'll put my ideas for each biome in another post, but as for the halfway biomes, I like it. would be neat if you could make it so that large clusters of rooms are the same biome and that a transition biome occurs on all maps at the edges of those clusters. Instead of having transition biomes that connect two different biomes though , what if you made each transition biome it's own unique biome. Here's what I mean:

- dry grasslands/savannah: connects grasslands and desert, this map could have some grassy parts, and some clusters of sandy tiles with cacti and other arid plants. Acacia trees could dot the landscape.
- mesa: doesn't really connect anything, but where clusters of deserts are generated, there could be a random chance that each room that would become a dessert would actually become a mesa. You most likely know what a mesa looks like so I won't describe it. I have some ideas of how you can pull this off, but I'll include it in that post I was going to make about biomes, and it'll be under the mountainous biome.
- taiga: connects tundra and forest, spruce or pine trees abound here, and some of the trees that you have shown above could be dotted around the map, and some splotches of snow can be seen all around the map. Would be a good place to get spruce wood. If you plan to add some complex food recipes, one of the ingregients could be maple syrup, which could be gathered from spruce trees using a treee tap.

- shrublands: connects grasslands and forest and grassland and jungle. Berry bushes are dotted across the map along with trees.
wet forest: connects either forest and jungle or forest and swamp, or grasslands and swamp. more water than normal would occur on the map, but shouldn't be more abundant than in swamp biome, still, trees should abound here. It's here where you can find larger amounts of mud and clay and yet still have room to build a house. A swamp should have little room to build anything, which means you would have to leave at night and come back.

but those are just examples of sub-biomes that could exist between your main, garden variety biomes like desert, grassland, forest, tundra, ocean, swamp, etc. I personally think that each of these sub-biomes should give players reasons to visit them just like the main biomes would. I don't think it should be hard to get the items that you need to craft things, other than the items that only drop from bosses and stuff, but I do think that finding the items to progress should take time and lot's of exploration.

Everything you said regarding rpg is good. especially if the enemies get harder the further down you go. I wonder though, most games make you farm enemies until you find armor and weapons that work for your class/combat stats. If we can just mine for materials and make our armor, where's the challenge? I think that maybe we should be able to easily craft each armor set as long as you have the materials, but I think that each tool, armor piece and weapon should have a random number of slots for gems or essences that add stats to it, and enemies can drop these instead of weapons and armor. then the higher your crafting level, the more chances of you crafting an armor or weapon that has more sockets. And maybe you could have a way to craft these gems/essences yourself later in the game, albeit with some challenge and resource hunting.

I think it would be cool to take a page out of starbound's book and build your own settlements. Then as inhabitants start to come in, they'll randomly start to give you random quests that direct you to other rooms to fight mini-bosses, precure items, and rescue npc's. You could probably assign them to specific jobs based on what their personality is like, and based on what profession you give them, they may generate certain types of quests and be open to buy and sell specific items. Rimworld also uses good settlement features, especially being a top-down kind of game just like this one, but I wouldn't get nearly as in-depth into colony building in this game as rimworld is. This is an rpg adventure game, not a city builder.

But anyway, that's what I think. I'll be sure to post my biome ideas soon.