I love Icelandic sagas, so I thought I would make a Norse world sim: Vangard. I am trying to avoid getting bogged down with graphics, so everything is very simple vector graphics now.
The idea of the game is that the player entity is a peer of other game entities, so all entities have the same advancement opportunities and so on. The player entity is just a blip in the world. I basically hate those RPGs where the NPCs just stand about waiting for you to interact with them. They should get a life!
The main focus has been getting the game logic fast enough. I am now handling 37,000 entities in 14ms so that is fast enough to move onto adding more content. That is, 14ms on an AMD A10 laptop APU.
Here are some screen captures of some red and black boxes chasing a brown box, and then another showing the view zoomed out to minimum zoom. Vector graphics woo!
EDIT: I started this thread 9 months ago, so it’s about time I put up a demo.
https://bitbucket.org/aclarke/headline-distribution/downloads/vangard.jar
In this version:
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A ton of user interface work, including repository views, minimap, powerbars now have rollover text, I use multiple fonts, market trading, stashing at house, collecting from unowned entities
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numerous stability fixes and resolution of multithreading issues
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many new AI behaviors like CombatBehavior, ForagingBehavior, DoRecipeBehavior…
Controls:
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to change game speed [ and ]
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to zoom in and out: - and +
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to switch between stats, combat, inventory, minimap, social and debug UIs, mouseover the runes at top left.
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put player character on autopilot (AI takes over): Shift-A
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to switch player control to a neighboring entity (you can only switch to entities that can move): Shift-S
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to view an accessible inventory (e.g. market, home or apple tree): collide with the entity, this opens a right hand view showing the inventory of the neighboring entity
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to stash at home: go to hovel, open the player inventory view and click the items to drop in the home, likewise click on the right to pick up the items again
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to collect apples: walk to apple tree, and click the apples you want to collect.
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same interaction at the market except you can get money from putting items in the market and pay (more) to get them out.