Project "rip off spelunky"

Right, i'm starting this blog beacuse this is to much of a cool idea to put on the back burner. I have no idea if i'll be able to use it as part of a uni project but the idea may be to big for the time limits those projects have anyway. It's something that may take a while but that i'm committed to exploring.

So i'm going to start using this blog as a place to put write down my ideas and ask for help and post bits as i start messing around with things. Having something to update might help keep me on track. It will also let me copy and paste all the stuff i do write to my uni blog (i really do need to start one) if i ever do draft the idea in to a uni project

So what is project rip off spelunky? well firstly you need to know what spelunky is:
http://www.colonyofgamers.com/cogfor...ead.php?t=4585

It's in essence a game based on the procedural generation of it's levels. I'm not as highly addicted as people are but playing it started to spark off some idea in my head. I want to create an "art" game based around this kind of level creation. The game play while it will be important is not the essence of this as it's the idea of generating an interactive work of art from my drawings rules and ideas that interests me.

So how do i plan to do this? well i think i'm going to go with flash as i do know how to code a little in actionscript and it should be able to work in the way that i'm thinking.

Firstly like spelunky it will be a tile based "platformer" and that is likely where the similarity will end. Even if i'm calling this "rip off spelunky" for the moment it's rip off in the nice creative way that make sense.



.... see... told you.

Anyway what this means is that i know how to code the basics of this kind of game in flash and it is also set up in a way that will i hope help later on. Most importunately it means the level map can be held in a 2d array in flash which should help things a lot.

So my idea for how to build the level stands like this

1) Generate the level randomly but with rules to make it playable. This is where most of the game play bits will exist i think. This is where most of the heavy lifting will be in the coding for me. I have no idea where even to start with this kind of thing. The rest i have a good idea of how to do my self.

2) each tile will be effected by the tiles around it. So tile A will have some given cosmetic change if in contact with tile C. Some of these changes will effect each other. So A is next to D and C then those changes "combine" in to something different that them just added together. There can also be some level of randomness to this too. It means a lot of work in dealing with all the outcomes and having all the effect fit together in some say. Effect from tile C on tile A will simply be a "C" movie clip in tile A set to a different frame. this will need to sit with what ever else is created.

3) There is then another pass done looking at the effects on each title and if any of those effect interact with each other. What i hope this will let me do is say have a given line run through a number of tiles and so on.

4) Each title "outcome" will have different ways of interacting with the player as they move across them... "doing nothing" counts as an interaction by the way... this will be mostly cosmetic along with minor game play elements

It's highly complex really, there are 2 levels of random interaction based on the first randomly generated tile map. I have no idea if it can even work in the way that i'm thinking. What is bugging me most is that it's going to be very hard to "draw" everything so what ever the outcome of a given title it works... let alone having given pattens running along more than one tile. Some of that i can deal with by having some "drawing" handled by action script. Still it's very very scary as the only way i can deal with it is to jump in and get my hands dirty and see how things go.

If i can get it to work even slightly in the way i'm thinking about it it should be something really interesting for me to do. Once i have the basics in place i could move on to creating different effects and moods for each level and if i'm really insane look at it effecting the levels music.

Like i said i have an general idea for how i can do most of this stuff. With the tiles, since they are generated by an array, it's easy as pie to look up the tiles that are in contact with it. They will in essence be numbers which can be easily fed in to an actionscript in the generated tile MC... it gets a bit more complex when dealing with the second pass but i should be able to create a 2nd array map with the current "form" of the title listed.

Thinking about it more, after having written this, i must be crazy. The outcome if i can make it work would be amamzing. Each level an interactive work of art created by me but which i can not at all predict the look of. It's an interesting take on what "drawing" is... if i can make tile interaction interesting and divers enough it could lead to some really interesting looking stuff... Yet the basic stuff involved is crazy... i need to learn how to code the procedural generation of a "working" level and i'm going to need to deal with an insane number of outcomes for each tile and make them "work" together.

I could make this all easier by just making it an art work rather than a game but that's a bit to random for my liking... it wonders towards art and ideas that i don't really like... by forcing my self to give the thing a function it gives it a form and THAT'S is what is interesting me. It's easy to just create random pattens but to create a random work of coherent art that has a working function? that just seems very very interesting to me.

In effect you'd have emergent gameplay played out in emergent environment. If i can do it, it shall be awesome.

It's likely that i'll have to scale back on the tile interaction but i won't know until i start. I think it's also the place i will have to start. I can do the first easy thing and create a fully random tile map and simply deal with creating the outcomes for each tile based on the ones next to it... after that i can deal with creating a tile map that is playable and mixing that all together and so on.

Frankly this is going to drive me crazy and likely take years but i have to start somewhere.