Game Projects

Still want to do this. Basically the same as all prior versions, except the gameplay elements (and *particularly* the combat) have been heavily refined.

Day and Night

Similar to Skygarden, the game is separated into Day phases where you're wandering around the infinite caves and Night phases where you're interacting with fixtures in your Magic House.

Both of these have action limits, known as Day Points and Night Points respectively. When you run out of Day Points you can't interact with anything else in the caves. You can still move around though.

Once you enter your house, you can do Night Points stuff.

When you run out, you need to sleep to recover both. Your Bed gives you a mix of day and night points, your Couch puts everything into night points, and your Hammock puts everything into Day Points. These can be upgraded by adding additional pillows/blankets to give you more day or night points.

If you eat a meal at your Table, you can gain additional day or night points as well as various stats and perks depending on what you eat exactly. If you don't eat, you lose all food related perks from the previous day -- these can be quite substantial.

Resources System

There are a lot of resource, item and fixture types. They have a lot of utility as well. I want to be as thorough as possible here.

Resources have to be processed via Night points unless you're lucky enough to find some that are preprocessed in a Chest or Crate or whatever.

Some require fuel to operate -- industry tends to fall into that category. Thankfully, loading burnables into the Boiler doesn't consume Night Points. Some Fuel Refinery fixtures will convert various processed or rare raw materials into potent fuels. These do require fuel to operate, but you get more out of them than you put in. Better fuels require quite a bit more processing, which generally consumes Night Points.

Plants

You find various procedural plants in the caves. When you harvest one you can take exactly one of several fixed products and have no idea what it'll do until you work with it.

That plant will not be able to be harvested again until an Area Reset -- these take a few days and the downside there is that Enemies, Traps and Obstacles will respawn.

Quartz can be processed into Magic Mirrors, which can be placed on plants (and other things, depending on how it was crafted exactly) which allows you to farm them remotely via Night Points with a specialized fixture (as well as apply magic to them). Quartz also has other uses, particularly in making Summons.

Cooking

Cooking is kind of a big system given that all of your stats are determined by what you eat at the start of the day.

Food comes from plants and fish and there are a hell of a lot of categories here. Meals contain one or zero of a food in each category. Obviously you need at least one food item to have a meal.

Plants can be processed further into things like jams, plant milk/dairy, teas, alcohol, pickled foods, etc which opens up additional categories. The food retains all its existing properties. So for example if you have a fruit that gives you 20 Mana, then you can have the fruit, its jam *and* its wine in a meal and get 60 Mana instead. This processing consumes Night points to get the process started and takes a few days. But it's well worth it.

Cooking Limits

You can't just combine ingredients in a meal willy-nilly however. They each have a characteristic (like "pungent" or "sour") and you can only combine foods if they are all the same characteristic.

You can get around this by cooking a specific ingredient with a specific oil and/or spice -- this will change its property in a procgen way. Oil and spice are both refined materials that come from specific fish and plant products respectively.

Cooking to change a property will lessen the property every time you do it, unless you add more of the material. I'm thinking that for simplicity there's a 50% reduction in magnitude or you'd need to add a second one of the item.

All of this combined forms a Recipe. Recipes can be stored in a Cookbook item which will allow you to remake them very easily. Granted you have to make Cookbooks to take full advantage of that.

Combat

Combat here is a combination of the various combat systems I've been exploring over the past few years.

Enemies are procgen and have an element, "body parts" and "attacks". A dragon for example might be fire, have wings, a torso, feet and a head. These will all deal different procgen % damage to the dragon's HP (potentially zero or even negative damage). Learning or Booking each procgen enemy is essential. Its attacks might be a fire-based fire breath attack, a stomp attack, a claw attack, and a bite attack.

Enemy attacks have dodges attached to them -- one is valid while the others are red herrings. Dodging will prevent taking damage, but you have to do it quick and the order of the dodges changes every time. They might move around or something too. The attack/dodge pairing also differs between enemies -- you might roll to avoid a dragon stomp but jump to avoid a tortoise stomp.

Your attacks are based around Action Points -- you gain a certain amount every turn (based on your daily meal) and they accumulate (but probably max out somewhere). You can do as many moves as you have AP for.

Weapons have different attacks to them -- simple ones that attack a single body part and more complex ones that hit more of them, apply status effects, etc. Better ones cost more AP and the max AP will always be at or above the highest AP attack.

If you have Arrows, you can shoot them. Each shot only uses 1AP but it permanently consumes the arrow. Arrows typically dont do much damage but they apply all kinds of nasty side effects once Imbued. More on this in the Arrows section.

You can equip a different weapon or armor but an equipment change uses up your entire turn. You can swap everything at once thankfully. A status effect prevents this.

Enemies can have special attacks that do various things to these systems, a lot like a magic system. If they choose to do a special, they do nothing the first turn and then do it on the next turn. If whatever the special accomplishes has already happened they won't do it again, unless it stacks. Can be pretty nasty.

Enemies always go first, for simplicity.

Armor gives you reduction against specific kinds of attacks and/or elemental resistance. You can mix and match pieces to have a wider set of resistances or double up for more targeted ones.

Enemies can be resistant to certain types of weapons, attacks or elemental attacks. Not arrows thankfully.

When an enemy dies, if you have Quartz you can capture its essence. You can then attempt to turn that into a Summon later, which doesn't necessarily work (wasting the quartz). Summons are identical to the enemy in question except that you control them and they attack the other enemy. Summoning requires quite a bit of Mana and there's limits on the amount of Summons you can carry and also you can only use them once per day. They're still pretty useful though.

Poison

Fish and Plant products can be Poisonous. For simplicity these just can't be used until the Poison is extracted at an Detoxer. This uses fuel and you get both the detoxed plant and that plant's poison. Poison is necessary for Imbuing Arrows.

Arrows

Arrows are made at a Fletcher. They require a stick, a fish scale and a metal lump (metal ingots are worth 10 metal lumps). On their own, arrows do 1 damage. Not great unless you can make and carry a ton of them.

The Imbuery will attach different effects (based on the Poison) to the arrow. Effects are categorized and each type of stick will allow one effect of some type (or any). Same deal with the metal lump and fish scale, but the difference there is that they may also *not* allow Imbuing. This means any particular arrow can have 1-3 effects depending on how it's made.

Industry

There are a hell of a lot of mechanics here, similar to Shatterloop.

All of these require fuel unless otherwise specified.

Resources

Different cave systems palletize rocks and metals. Rocks are CVC-ite while metals are (V)CVC-um. Elemental metals pull from a list of terms like "blaz", "salamand", "glac", etc.

Rocks contain the palletized metals in different proportions, along with some proportion of a gravel form of the rock which has its own resources. Getting rocks is easy -- just dig into the walls. This takes time and you can only do it once per room until a reset. You do know what the walls are made out of from the outset, but not necessarily how useful they are. If there's a boulder you can get more -- boulders respawn.

Rarely, there will be outcrops, in (V)CVC-ite form but the prefix there is the name of one of the metals. Outcrops contain a single metal and a pretty high proportion of it, with the dust being useless.

The Crusher

The Crusher fixture crushes rocks into ores and gravel. You don't know what a particular rock contains until you crush or book it, but the information is then available anywhere.

Rarely, a rock will contain flecks of actual metal as well. Not very many. Crushing outcrops yields more of the actual metal.

Sieve

The sieve pulls additional resources out of gravel. This is where you find gem dust and precious metals, both of which have handcrafted names and utility. You can also find pitchblende, quartz and uraninite, though cave systems will only contain one of those and it's only contained in one type of rock.

Forge

The Forge turns ores into metal. You get less metal than the ore you put in, but the ratio varies a lot depending on the metal.

The Forge will also turn precious metal ores into precious metal.

It'll also condense gem dust. This is pretty fuel-intensive.

Anvil

The Anvil lets you turn ores into weapons/armor/etc. Some metals can only become certain types of item.

Smithy

The smithy lets you tweak weapons and armor by fusing other metals to it. There's a limited amount of stuff you can do here according to the metal and you don't get as many perks as you would from making a whole weapon out of that other one. It's still useful though.

You can also separate metals back out from an item. This takes fuel though.

Blast Furnace

The Blast Furnace lets you combine items of the same type together and pick whichever properties you want. It's highly useful for making hybrid super weapons, however it consumes a lot of fuel and also permanently consumes both items. Elements can get transferred as well -- you can have a sword that's both water and earth and does mega damage against fire enemies, or just pick one or the other.

This process is mediated by (and requires) catalysts.

Catalyst Station

Every single raw resource in the game (for metals this would be the metal form, not the ore form, but rocks are okay) has a catalyst value, which is one of the properties targeted in the blast furnace.

At the catalyst station you can extract the appopriate "(property) catalyst", consuming the item in the process.

Metal Extractor

The metal extractor permanently processes metals into the homogeneous "metal" resource.

Grindstone

The Grindstone allows you to repair weapons and armor, which have durability. This uses homogeneous metal.

Magic Fixtures

Caverlasting features a robust magic system.

Altar

Every single raw resource has an "essence", which is a set of magic-based properties. The altar does this conversion. It costs Quartz, which traps the essence.

Jewelry Station

Magic spells are contained within jewelry. Every single spell is based around a handcrafted gem and a procgen combination of handcrafted precious metals. Gems are separated into different classes depending on the spell type and all of this is clearly indicated so you can make what you want as soon as you get the resources for it.

The whole thing is handcrafted -- a ruby diadem is going to do something very distinct but it'll at least be the same spell class as a ruby necklace.

The Jewelry Station allows you to craft Jewelry which has a spell contained within it.

You can also attach Essences to get more out of the spell. There are no limits here, however each Essence appends more of a mana cost to the spell. You can sort of break it if you know what you're doing, however superpowered spells will alert Deities, which will make your life harder if you're not sufficiently equipped to deal with them. I'm thinking there's a handcrafted "Awareness" stat or something that goes up with each Essence, with things like Mana reduction raising it more. When it reaches a certain level and you use the spell, the deities become aware of you. More on this in the deities/curse section.

There are limits to how many spells you can carry with you -- this is upgradeable with meals and spells can also enchant meals.

Spell effects don't stack. You can't just carry multiple "add HP" spells to get around the awareness thing. If a spell has an effect it is the sole determiner of spell-based modifiers. The other ones are all cleared out.

Resurrector

The Resurrector will take a quartz-trapped enemy and attempt to make a Summon out of it. This doesn't necessarily work, and consumes the item either way. Food/magic can improve your chances.

Power Lens

The Power Lens will upgrade Summons in various ways. They do have limits. Additionally, this consumes Jewelry, with the crystal determining which property is targeted. It's all handcrafted.

Deities

If you make spells that are too overpowered and use them, Deities will take note. Each gem has a Deity associated with it.

Using an OP spell will make the Deity Curse you. This causes very OP monsters to randomly replace conventional ones (it's procgen depending on the monster location, but maybe book() level of common). To break the Curse, you have to give them your OP spell *and* pay a penance where you sell various items to them and use that money accordingly. Their prices are at least the same as Nexus prices, and you can sell anything whatsoever. However the amounts of penance they require are high.

If you instead defeat 3 of their OP enemies, the Deity itself will start replacing them, with a 100% chance. Granted if you've pissed off multiple Deities, it'll pick between them. Deities are absurd fights that bend all the combat rules and make the OP enemies look like a joke. They're each a bit different from each other and should really be handcrafted. You can still surrender the spell and pay penance to remove the curse however.

If you somehow defeat the Deity, they'll leave you alone.

Deities and OP monsters can't be captured.

All the spell surrender / penance stuff happens from within the same screen as the fight itself.

Books and Maps

Books and Maps are both highly useful items.

Maps are crafted from paper and ink at a Catrographer, while Books also require Glue and multiple pieces of the same kind of paper. They're crafted at a Printing Press.

Cookbooks can also be crafted at a Printing Press. They're homogeneous and can be made from anything. Same deal with Ledgers.

Ink is made from Oil. Paper is made from Bark. Glue is homogeneous and made from Fish Bones. All three of these happen at a Refinery fixture.

The type of Bark dictates the type of Map or Book.

Maps

Maps have some kind of target. They're used inside a cave section and map it out for you.

In a map you can move around passageways freely without worrying about enemies/traps/obstacles and without physically going there. The Map will tell you something useful about the rooms there. The links will also be colored differently if there's something there -- a different color for each target, or a gradient if it hits multiple targets.

Maps can also be joined together into composite maps that show several things at once. This is also done at a Cartographer.

Maps can be used at any time. They also tell you if the fixture in question actually exists there.

Books

Books give you useful information without first breaking a rock down or eating food or fighting an enemy or whatever. They're consumable and teach you the information accordingly.

Ledgers

Ledgers are paired to a fixture and let you view its menu remotely. Once paired, you stick it on a Desk and can get an idea of what's happening elsewhere in your base. Each room has a Desk.

Ledgers are made at a Printing Press. Identical recipe to a book but only takes one piece of paper.

Since they can be paired to Storage they're a good way of also tracking your Inventory of certain items.

The Mirror Room

The Mirror Room lets you interact with farmable cave fixtures remotely.

The first link is the Mirrorizer. Mirrors are consumable homogeneous items made with Quartz, Glass, and any kind of Ink.

There's also a Desk. This particular Desk will always track the status of farmable fixtures that are mirrrored.

When you use a Mirror on a cave fixture, it'll be available within the appropriate type of Mirror from within a menu. There are different ones for Walls, Boulders, Pools and Plants (and whatever else the game has).

The Nexus

The Nexus is a room that's basically this game's shop mechanic. There's a shop fixture for every single item category.

In order to actually make money you have to first clear the debt by selling items in the right category to decrease it. You can't just use homogeneous money to do this.

Once that's done, you can sell items to earn money, or swap the selling mode over to a "buyable debt", where the exchange will instead buy out a slot. Each slot will offer a procgen item of the appropriate type to buy. Individual slots can also be reseeded in a similar debt based way. There's a maximum of 5 slots per Nexus fixture, and the amount of money needed to unlock each slot goes up.

Reseeding lets you choose between several possibilities. Reseeding targets are procgenned via the t2d of the existing item so it remains consistent.

Money, fortunately, can be used anywhere in The Nexus. It also isn't an item so it doesn't need to be stored or anything.

World

The world will be relatively simple in the first version of this thing. I would like to expand it later after all the systems are working.

There's an "antechamber" type region, which is an interconnected skein of various types of rooms for flavor.

Passageways split off from the antechamber. They're basically mazes. There's stuff in them that's either useful or is just a general landmark/for flavor.

Everything interesting is in the passageways; the antechamber acts more as a safe overworld. The antechamber should be handcrafted as well, though quite big all things considered. The passageways are all procedural however.

Obstacle

Passageways can be blocked by Obstacles, which take a consumable craftable item to bypass:

Ropes go up or down

Grappling ropes cross gaps of void, water or lava.

Bombs clear rubble

Torches illuminate dark areas

Doors

Locked doors are also scattered throughout. They have a color and need a key of that color to unlock it.

Keys are crafted -- each plant product or fish can be taken to a Dye Station to extract a color from it with some chance, and then that color and homogeneous metal can form the key at a Locksmith.

Traps

Traps can happen to you when you try to enter a room. They deal damage but don't trap you again until an area reset.

You can choose to disarm a trap by picking that option and then picking a passageway. Whether there's a trap or not, this will consume a Day Point, so knowing where they are is useful. It will also work 50% of the time and consume DP either way. It's upgradeable with food and magic.

Enemies

Enemies are also scattered throughout and need to be defeated before you can see a room -- anything in it and any passageways it connects to.

Sand and Glass

Sand is an extraction target of gravels. It's homogeneous.

It can be Refined into Glass at a Refinery. Glass is also homogeneous.

Glass is one of the ingredients of Bombs, which will have some more uses.

Glass is also how you make Jars. Jars are necessary items to hold refined food products like milk or pickles.

Fountains

Rarely, fountains will spawn. These contain food-related effects and have 3 uses before an area respawn. The difference is that you can drink from them at any time and the buffs accumulate with your food ones and each other.

You can also save Fountain stuff for later with Jars. Fountains can be Mirrored like everything else. They're useful but quite rare -- granted Fountain Maps help.

Another Bomb thing

In addition to clearing Rubble, Bombs can blow up boulders, walls and outcrops for faster rock collection. The bomb is consumed however.

Storage

The best storage solution for this game is to just not have any limits for it.

Therefore, your storage area is customizable -- you can add as many containers as you want, merge them, delete them, name them, etc. Containers also don't have a limited space -- having more is purely an organizational thing.

Inventory

Your inventory *is* limited however. You can go into your backpack pretty often but it can be annoying, so having a bigger inventory is still useful. Additionally, you can't enter your backpack during Combat.

You evidently can't enter it while in a passageway either.

Journals

There are various Journals that track various things that you've discovered. These are items that are available in the Library and you can bring *some* (but not all) of them with you (granted food and magic can up those limits).

Totems System

Totems are the entrances to procedural cave systems. Every region (valleys, catacombs, etc) have three animals that are representative of the area.

Rooms will contain 1-3 Totems that appear in subrooms of the room. This is probably handcrafted. Passageways between two regions contain all six on either wall.

Totems can be picked up and placed in subrooms to allow a passageway of that type within the region (seed - 1,2,3 respectively). You can also mix totems, so like you'll get a different maze if you place frog+gator or frog+crawfish+gator than you would with just frog. This allows for a hell of a lot more passageways than the system currently supports.

Additionally, there are always unused subrooms as part of the description so this will also allow for a lot more possibilities -- it's important that this game is kind of massive.

Totem combinations have names, like crawdad+frog is Clawfrog. A 3-totem mix is always a Chimera. This, plus the name of the room (one word) and the name of the detail forms the name of the maze, for example "Clawfrog of Loam's Moss".

Totems have to be placed before entering a region passageway. You also can't access your Backpack if you have Totems in your inventory.

Metroidvania mechanics and game goal

Game Start

You start out in the central mountain on the surface -- there are some wizards here that created you or whatever and they kinda helpfully explain things for you. You then pick which passageway to open -- you can only open one of the four, each of which connects to one of the four circles in the surface area part of the map. Three of those have entrances into the cave network.

The surface gives you a feel for the game -- the totem system is in play to find mazes. What you'll want to do is find the surface artifact and the game will begin properly.

All regions play out the same so this post details the process:

Runestones

Somewhere in every region is a Runestone attached to a particular Detail in a Room. One detail in one room is correct (different from playthrough to playthrough), and the Runestone won't ever be in the right spot.

You can move it around the way you move Totems (with the same cross-region limitations). If it's in the right room, it'll glow green and if it's on the right detai the lettering will glow green. So it's sort of a mastermind puzzle.

Once it's in the right spot, it'll turn into a Beacon. Beacons can also be picked up and moved around, but they're attached to the room rather than the detail. Same region limits though.

Towns

Beacons let you access the region's town. These are all quite squalid since they're gen 4 of fallen civilizations.

Each town is full of interesting characters and lore about the region and one of the 8 pieces of the puzzle on main lore. I want to build out a heck of a lot of lore here.

There will be 4 handcrafted quests available. The handcrafted per quest reward is one of the four clues on how to find the region's artifact:

Which room it's in

Which detail

Which totem combination unlocks it

What the directions are in the subsequent maze for finding the artifact (it'll always be at a terminus).

You don't need to get all the clues if you move systematically, but the quests aren't boring and they're well worth doing.

Towns serve no purpose beyond the four Quests and a lot of lore. They're heavily handcrafted though to be as interesting as possible.

Towns also have an internal beacon that can connect to other internal beacons if you feed it quartz. Connecting a town to other towns on a network has measurable effects on the town, and this improves as the number of nodes in the network goes up.

Quests

The Quests are handcrafted and have you do various things in the town and region. Thankfully, you don't interact with mazes at all. I want them to be very interesting.

On that note, they all have stories that fit into the lore of the region and you have the opportunity to make hard choices. Ideally you've learned a lot about the lore and can make more informed choices. Your choices here have an actual impact on the world -- characters will die off or things in the world will change. These effects should be region-specific for my own sanity.

Artifacts

Once you collect an artifact, you "power" it by using it on one of the barriers. All region connections have barriers that you can't bypass without an artifact. The mushroom/catacombs barrier will release all three barriers.

You can only power an artifact once. So you will need 7 of them to fully unlock the maze.

Once you have 8 powered artifacts, you can take them to one of the wizards who will convert 4 and 4 of them into specialized vehicles that allow you to reach endgame content and finish the game.

Endgame content

As mentioned, you'll need to defeat the antagonist. This involves going to the following two areas with those vehicles:

Diving below the surface of the Deeps in the Lake.

Going into the lava at the bottom of the Chasm.

These lead to more GTT-standard handcrafted mazes. These are pretty open; they don't feel claustrophobic the way regular mazes in here do but they still have the GTT kind of key-door-item-enemy thing going on.

The difference is that the enemies are hard as fuck -- you'll need to have broken the game in some capacity to get through them. Thankfully this is relatively easy to do, particularly with prodding by the wizards who created you.

There's a strategic boss in here -- I already made these, it's the Owl and the Frog, although I should really theme the Owl towards whatever the lava region is like. You can't beat these bosses conventionally even if you've broken the game, you have to use the environment strategically.

At the end of these there's more plot and difficult + highly impactful choices. The order you do them in also matters and gives you different game endings.

You can also keep playing -- it is caverlasting after all. I'm thinking you can just make your own rooms, details and totems at this point. Idk though.

World UI

Paths are GTT links, while Details are text links. I'm thinking having different color schemes and fonts (that are similar in a region) would add to the aesthetic without being distracting, particularly since I'm using complementary colors a lot.

In the overworld there is no "back" since areas are connected to each other a different way. Mazes/subspaces definitely have one though since they branch out.

Paths that go to other regions are long tunnels and look a bit different than normal paths. These have barriers that require charging an Artifact to enter. The passageways are their own rooms though, a bit distinct from each other and with six immovable totems divided on the left and right sides.

Details

If you click on a Detail, a box opens in the existing window (maybe at the top of bottom with auto-scrolling) or maybe a different window depending on what works best for UI and general aesthetic.

If there are totems in here you can remove them. You should also be able to add them easily if you have some -- and it should be indicated what you have here as well (it's also at the bottom of the screen for more general purpose exploring). If there are totems, the resulting name will be rendered as a Subspace you can enter with the appropriate name as a big link. It'll also give details on refresh rates.

The type of detail is along the top along with its name. If the name contains the detail type the type will be underlined.

If you have the Beacon or its precursor (I forget the name) you can place it here and it'll give details if it's placed. This menu appears above the cave one so you can see the room name and detail type more clearly.