Friday, September 21, 2012

I Love This Bar

Holy smokes its been a long time since my last blog post.

I've kind of switched gears in my codebase and I wanted to have something to show before I wrote up my next post. For the last year or so I've really been concentrating on getting a lot of the core components I needed to write a game at the level I'm used to from working on games professionally. After finishing most of the core front end code I finally felt like I had enough blocked out that I could start to write a game. So I pulled the trigger and got down to work.

The game I'm working on takes a lot from simulation heavy games like towns or gnomoria which both draw a lot from dwarf fortress, a game which I've read a lot about but never played. This game I'm building differs a fair bit from those games though in that I'm not trying to simulate a medieval world, what I'm hoping to simulate is a bar/night club. I spent a lot of my youth bar hopping and I feel there's a lot of material that can be pulled from that environment and translated to a really fun game.The basic premise is that you start off with 4 characters and an empty lot and you have to assign jobs to your characters, build up a bar, get patrons, build up a regular clientel and just try to have the best bar in town.

I've done some research into what's out there but most of what's already out there just feels like farmville in a bar environment. That is not what I want to build, what I want to build is something for more core gamers with lots of different jobs to master, experience building, stats to track. I want to create an environment that feels somewhat alive.

So far I have a small lot working, with characters that respond to commands. Currently the only "job" I've implemented is "The Handyman" which will be responsible for construction in the game. The characters are able to build walls and that's about it.

Over the course of the next year I'm hoping to crank out something that's a lot of fun to play and filled with lots of quirky humor. I'll try to be better about the weekly updates. In the mean time here's a few screenshots from my progress. I'm not sure where those bright spots are coming from they don't appear in game. Also all art is just placeholder.