Introduction Post

Beach Biome in my game "Shopkeep"

Game Conecept

In the game you play a traveling salesman and alchemist.  There will be a procedural generated world as well as semi procedural generated items.  One of the main things you'll be doing in this game is wandering the world getting into turn-based battles and searching for herbs, leaves, rocks, or whatever you find interesting and think might be useful in alchemy. You will also be able to catch and train the animals and monsters you fight in a way similar to Pokemon.  In alchemy mode you will use quasi scientific procedures to alter the properties of items to produce new items.  You would then sell these things that you make in your shop to get money to buy more tools in which to make more things to sell or things to aid you in surviving stronger monsters, or for boosting the effectiveness of the monsters that fight for you.

What I'm Working on Now

The first thing I technically worked on was the camera placement and the movement but most of that was code that i'd already written.  The real first thing I started to work on was the procedural generation.  The first aspect of generation was getting a grid of tiles to generate which would later collectively be called a chunk.  After that I learned how to use generic dictionaries to store the chunk index of each chunk (based on its coords) so that appropriate chunks would load as the player reached the end of a chunk.

Each chunk also has an underlying piece of a Perlin noise function whose output is fed to the tiles which is what decides what texture they are (using a Perlin noise function for altitude, and one for rainfall), which is our basic biome generation.  Different biomes have different sets of sprites that spawn in them

What I'll do Next

Now I'm taking a break from world generation and trying to develop an inventory for the player.  I have yet to have an inventory but right now I'm learning how to write table-like data to and from files into some sort of array.  There's also a whole system of alchemy that I'm working out that will be based around actual science, but of course this adds a lot more confusion to everything.