Dev Diary, Number 1

The game dev begins!

My immediate thoughts, when seeing this game jam was focused on Ancient, Nameless horrors, was the idea of playing as the haunted cabin from Evil Dead 2. You have to trap and kill the stupid, horny teenagers that have infested your unholy walls.

I've scribbled some initial mechanics thoughts down (in mechanics), which will likely change as development goes on. I also have a rough floorplan established for the cabin. However, before diving into the deepend, I want to build a tutorial level, which will also help me refine functionality.

Tutorial Level: The Haunted Shed!

Sometimes, eldritch horrors need to start small. The haunted shed sets up the story of the groundskeeper. The unfortunate soul has found the artifact which represents your manifestation on Earth. He puts it in his shed, and you begin to seep your corruption into what you can feel around you: the single room of the shed.

The tutorial will introduce the player to the mechanics, and introduce me to building the mechanics! It has a door, so I can build the action interaction for both opening it ominously, and slamming it shut. Doing this will allow me to build some initial AI for the groundskeeper, which will be the foundation for all other target AI. The groundskeeper is unfortunately very curious, and will investigate the shed when the player ominously opens the door. He's is also unfortunately not very brave, and so will cower in the shed when the player slams the door shut behind him. This will give the player resources to buy a hazard in the shed, which will then let them trigger that hazard to end the poor groundskeeper, and resurrect them as your new thrall.

My first objective is to build these interactions. I don't need the art to reflect it, so it'll be a lot of static things initially. The player will trigger the door open, which will trigger the groundskeeper's AI to investigate the corresponding room, due to his low psychic defense corresponding to high curiousity. The player will trigger the door to slam, which will trigger the groundskeeper's AI to cower, due to his low physical defense corresponding to high cowardice. The player will then be shown their resource pool, and shown how to add a hazard to a room. Each room will have a list of hazards specific to it, so the shed will have, like, haunted tools or something. Maybe a hanging scythe. Once purchased, the player will then trigger the hazard to kill the groundskeeper through physical means. The player will then trigger the groundskeeper's corpse, allowing the player to imbue them with eldritch essence, becoming a hazard. This will end the tutorial, but in the main game, this will run a new AI routine, where the former target will now hunt other targets based on their former strengths. If you kill and control a jock, they'll attack targets physically. If you kill and control a nerd, they'll attack targets psychically.

Technical Details

I downloaded the most recent build of DragonRuby, extracted it to a new directory, and then initialized a new Git repository in the /mygame directory. I added a few files (notably, a .gitignore), removed a bunch of the default, bundled files (notably, all the sprites), and sync'd it with a new repository on my Forge (which is where this Wiki lives!). DragonRuby makes development very easy, since it's a single file to run the engine, and the folder structure is always the same. The last thing I did was start filling out some of these wiki entries (and updated the .gitignore to ignore the wiki directory).

I have a very basic start, I've got a bunch of notes, I've had some good discussions with friends, and I drew some bad PNGs to act as temporary sprites.