A long time ago (and I know somebody will find the link and share it in the comments, but not me!), I wrote a blog entry about the idea of building a game in a weird, inefficient way: just building the very beginning, then playing it, and building new parts as I ran into them. For example, say I made a beginning zone with just spider enemies, and I kill enough of them to level up. Now I need to implement a skill to purchase with my new skill point. So I'd just decide what skill I want for my character, implement that one, and play some more. Then maybe a cave I enter and enemies for that, and so on. Literally just building the game around my playthrough.
Well, I am now doing that! It's clunkier than I imagined, and very slow (initially - I think it will get MUCH faster as the groundwork is built), but I started a game of Titan Tunnels, using the default dungeon name of "Woodville" (which determines the layout), and I've been slowly implementing each bit as I come across it, which is fun because it's randomly determined.
There are about 5 collectibles on the first floor, and the most interesting is a person to rescue, so I started there. In this case, it's Mickey! Everybody loves Mickey! So I got person-rescuing working. Along with the trapped person, an Iceguard is spawned, and you just have to kill the Iceguard to get a Frozen Key to open the cage the person is in. One slight complication is that Frozen Keys melt after 30 seconds, respawning their Iceguard (on top of you). Currently the Iceguard initially spawns right next to the trapped person, so that doesn't matter unless you kite them miles away. I'd kind of like them to be randomly located in the level, to make that a little more challenging, but I feel like it might be weird if you meet the Iceguard first and get a key to rescue someone and you didn't even know they were around. Idea I just had: the radius in which the Iceguard can spawn could increase with which floor you are on. So the very first one is right there by the victim, but it goes up rapidly from there, since you now know how it works. That's such a good idea, Mike!
Opening the person's cage just instantly teleports them to town, at least in theory... they don't show up in town at all, but a new building is added to your build list - their house/shop. You need to build it to make the person appear. I'm at approximately that point in my progress now - Mickey, true to his nature, runs a shop of sorts which currently looks like this:
It's a classic bounty board! Bears are currently the only enemies in the game because I had to completely rebuild the monster definitions for all the new features, he doesn't just hate bears. You can collect up to 3 bounties at a time and then just get a little bonus stuff. It's nice to be able to choose specific rewards (the amount you get will be a lot better as you level up...) depending on what you need. And you can also upgrade the shop to introduce 2 higher tiers of bounties.
Each person will also have true quests to offer you. Mickey's first one will definitely be "do X of my bounties", of course! So anyway, I'm having fun, and it's probably gonna take forever like everything else I do!
Behind-the-scenes bonus content: When starting out this chore chart, I had an idea of an actual physical board with notes pinned to it. I popped open Blender and built such a thing:
I do really like how this looks. The reason I decided not to do it is that there will be 20+ 'shops' in this game, and if I set the precedent that they are done in this - to use a fancy term - diagetic style, that's just a ton of unique art and unique code for every menu, all dedicated to the goal of making them harder to use and more confusing since they aren't consistent. So I stuck with the standard menu style above. Most importantly, it will be quicker!
