Game Projects

Basic Stuff

Simpler, and much tighter gameplay loops

The game goal is still the same -- collect one of each item type (category + color).

World

The world is subdivided into infinite regions on a grid. Starting out, you only have access to the origin, which has handcrafted properties which suck.

The world has the following tiles:

Clear -- just a blank tile

Obstacle -- you can't walk through this and have to route around it.

Lake -- for Fishing purposes.

Town -- sell items, navigate to other towns and buy access to other regions.

Dungeon -- collect items

Items

Items have a category and a color. Your Collector base fixture allows you to "collect" an item and try to complete your list of every single type.

Since there aren't properties, the names of items are *literally* color + category, like "green sand". For UX purposes this would appear as Sand that's colored green, or numbers within blocks of the color within a category.

A lot of item categories are created from low-tier ones or crafted from several. It's possible to find these in dungeons but they're rarer (more likely though as the number of Locks increases). More on this mechanic in the Crafting section.

Dungeon Mechanics

Dungeons are a straight import from Skygarden. The parameters of their size, likelihood of locked doors and the proportion of the colors of those doors varies depending on the region.

Once a dungeon is fully cleared, that tile becomes blank, for UX purposes.

Locks can be one of the six colors -- green, blue, purple, red, orange, yellow. Keys are Consumables so run on all of those mechanics.

Dungeon rooms can either be blank, or be loot rooms. The more doors a room is behind, the more likely it is to be a loot room.

Loot Rooms

Loot rooms have several pieces of furniture, with the amount dictated by how many doors it's behind.

Furniture has a number/color combination (the colors as mentioned and 0-5) and the name of the furniture, for flavor and memorization purposes.

When entering a room you get to pick which furniture survives. The mechanic here is that picking a piece of furniture will remove furniture of the colors near it and the numbers near it, which wraps around. A red-3 for example will kill orange, purple, 2 and 4. A blue-0 will kill green, purple, 1 and 5.

You get to sequence this as much as you like, seeing changes made, before finalizing it.

Consumables will alter this puzzle in various ways.

Furniture Stuff

Each region palettizes maybe 6 pieces of furniture in each level, with distinct names (for the region anyway). Each dungeon has its own palette of the probabilities of each type of furniture appearing, which is visible before entering the dungeon.

Each type of furniture (set by the region here, and visible on the region investment screen) has a probability matrix of various types of category+color combinations. This is completely random, outside of the origin where more valuable items are rarer.

There are three levels of furniture, corresponding to the number of locked doors they're behind:

Level 1 -- only raw resources

Level 2 -- a mix of raw and crafted resources, behind 2 doors.

Level 3 -- only crafted resources, behind 4 doors.

Each two locked doors also adds 1 to the base value of furniture in a room. So a dungeon with 3 as the base will be at 4 after 2 locked doors, 5 when it's at 4, 6 at 6, etc.

Furniture Combining

Before opening furniture, you can choose to combine them. This will kill one piece of furniture and improve another. You can do this as many times as you like, in two ways:

Amount -- this just adds 0.5x one piece of furniture's amount to another, rounded down. A piece of furniture with 4 slots added to one with 2 will add +2, making the new one 4.

Probability -- 0.5x a chosen probability will be added to the receiver furniture, rounded down. If furniture A has 6% gems, and furniture B has 10% gems, then adding A to B makes it become 13%.

Some consumables will alter the mechanics here.

Actual Looting

Once you open a piece of furniture it's locked in, and you can pull out whatever items it contains. If you clear out a piece of furniture, it disappears for UX purposes.

Similarly, you get a readout of how many rooms have yet to be cleared of all furniture, visible at all times somewhere. When you clear everything out, the dungeon is erased and you get kicked out.

Inventory / Storage

You have two parts to your Inventory: an "Items" slot and a "Consumables" slot. I'm not sure how these are organized, it'll be whatever makes the most sense for UX.

These both have limits and can be augmented without end by the appropriate type of consumable.

More storage is done in your Base -- more on this in the next section, but essentially it's easy to increase the storage space of your base because of how the Prismizer/building works.

Base Mechanics

You can access your base at any time in the Overworld -- you can't be in a dungeon or town. It's a magic backpack kind of thing -- off in its own dimension.

Your base is a collection of built rooms on an infinite grid. You start out with a couple for essential fixtures. The Prismizer is at [0,0] and can't be removed because that could cause a softlock.

Rooms have a Volume=3, and each fixture takes up 1 space. A consumable will expand a room to Volume=6, which is the maximum (all numbers subject to change for balance purposes).

You start with the following four fixtures in three rooms:

Collector -- destroys an item and improves your collection. Worth 1 raw.

Lab -- unlocks upgrades and additional Labs with Blueprints. Worth 1 raw.

Prismizer -- turns items into essences of their specific color and turn essences into raw.

Chromer -- Allows you to make Prisms, Polychromes and Kaleidos. Prisms are reversible, the others aren't. Probably a lab unlock realistically. These advanced materials are important for advanced features and renewable consumables.

Prismizer

The Prismizer turns 5 items of one color into 1 essence of that color, or 1 essence into 1 raw. This isn't reversible.

Essence and raw is just always available in whatever contexts require it -- it isn't an item or anything and acts more like a stat.

Expansion

You can build a new room adjacent to an existing one. This costs |x|+|y| raw, maybe with some kind of multiplier for balance purposes. Slowly expanding outwards is the best strategy obviously.

Fixtures

Fixtures can be placed in free slots. They aren't items, they're just constructed from whatever their costs are, or can be atomized back into them reversibly if they don't have any items in them.

You start with the following fixtures:

Prismizer -- 1 raw

Collector -- 1 raw

Lab -- 1 raw

Crate -- 1 raw. Stores 5 items.

More can be unlocked in Lab(s). There's beefier storage and color or cat specific storage unlocks for example.

Fishing

I'll probably rename this to something else when the lore/whatever gets built out more, but it is essentially just a fishing engine.

Fishing is the main source of consumables. An attempt costs 1 raw.

Regions assign which items can be fished up, and each lake sets the probability matrix there (though there's a range set by the region).

Lakes have a limited amount of items that can be fished up. The Lake doesn't disappear though, it just gets marked as depleted on your Map.

Fishing doesn't take time. That seems like it would be annoying in this game.

*which* item you have a chance of getting is random, but can be improved with Consumables.

Money Stuff

For money, you can connect a lake to the closest town (the amount is based on distance and the D multiplier of the region).

You can also invest in a Restock, which does exactly what you'd expect. This is endless.

Actual Mechanics

Each consumable globally has a kind of "Simon says" mechanic associated with it -- you have to input the right combination of moves to catch it, which you learn by trying and failing. For UX, the actual set of words are assigned based on the consumable and handcrafted. The solutions are procgen by game seed and there might be more than one.

Consumables will give you more tries.

Towns

For simplicity, Towns are chunked out -- one per chunk somewhere. Not necessarily accessible from the overworld if the obstacles are bad enough.

Towns have the following sublocs:

Library -- gives basic information, like a map of all towns, how many of each type of POI are within a town's domain, etc. Whatever makes sense for balance reasons where I don't want to delegate to scanning. This information is all free.

Market -- Sell items for whatever their value are. It sort of makes sense for this to be all one location, despite which cats are actually available changing from town to town.

Junker -- Sell any item whatsoever for a lot less value (20% maybe). Also a source of consumables, with limited stock. Junker items that are actually available, the probatrix, the chance of a Junker having items, the range of amts, etc are all set on a region basis. Also sells Cartographic stuff sometimes.

Travel -- unlock routes to other towns for money. Cost is based on distance with a regional multiplier. Reversible to get your money back. You can also make composite routes -- costs whatever the combined amount is, plus an extra 10%. If you clear these you get all your money back. Definitely good for getting around easier.

Portal -- unlock portals to known POIs in a town's domain. Cost is like the above and similarly reversible.

Nexus -- not all towns have one of these, but it allows you access to different regions. More on this in the Nexus section. Whether a town has a Nexus or not is purely based on the coord, not the region (because they need to be able to connect together vertically). Composite Nexus jumps are also possible in the same way as town routes.

Entrance stuff

At the town entrance you can see a readout of whatever stuff would be good to know -- how many items the junker has in stock, which cats are present in the market, etc. Based on UX here.

Market Stuff

You can only sell things in the market if the town allows for that kind of cat. You do get the full value of the item though. The distribution of shops is a global thing based on general game balance.

Travel / Portals

You can only Portal to Known POIs (either you visit it, scan it or get it as part of a Cartographic thing). With towns meanwhile you can teleport to anything in an orth adjacent way, discovering the town in the process. More on this in Mapping/Discovery.

The cost is based on polar distance, and it has to be either an orth adjacent town or something within a town's "domain" (basically the chunk it's in). The multiplier is set by the region and can be better or worse, with the range a game balance thing.

Nexus Stuff

Regions are a numeric seed and towns that have a Nexus seed region:x:y to get several Nexus connections.

Opening a Nexus route sends you to whatever town is in the same chunk over there, and costs a bunch of money.

You get a readout of what the new region is like in every way that matters before you commit to a purchase.

Nexus routes are two-way, and since you're going to another Nexus, there are automatically additional routes available. It's possible to get to a region by multiple routes -- since the connection point gets stored this isn't a big deal.

Lab Stuff

Labs let you unlock various fixtures and upgrades. You choose what you're unlocking, outside of prerequisite issues. These cost a PGCS of essences, and depending on what it is it might require chromed materials instead.

The main Lab fixture unlocks other Lab fixtures, which is where features are concentrated. The diaspora is large -- like category-specific containers are separate unlocks and they're all grouped together in the Storage Lab. It can potentially be recursive if the game ends up being complicated enough -- probably won't be though.

Consumables

Keys -- unlock doors

Furniture -- impact the furniture puzzle mechanic in various ways

Furniture Combining -- impact that mechanic

Fishing attempts -- give you more attempts while fishing

Lures -- impact what you catch (out of the palettized list)

Items augment -- increase your personal storage space

Consumable augment -- same as the above but affects the consumables slot of your inventory.

Room augment -- makes a room have 6 volume instead of 3.

Scanners -- all scanning functions belong to consumables. The more advanced functions have to be crafted from the other types + exotic materials most likely.

Mattock -- digs through an obstacle tile

Fixtures

Some fixtures will let you transform consumables + essences into other ones. Advanced scanning consumables that you can't get any other way are included in here.

For sanity, there's one fixture per consumable category (ie -- lures) and multiple recipes available. You can spend exotics to get additional recipes that you can choose between, or reseed old ones for less.

Obtaining

Consumables can be obtained via Fishing or bought at Junkers.

Dupers

Dupers are based on the consumable category (one unlock each) and hold a consumable of that type. You can then get more of that type by paying the pgcs amount of essences.

Renewables

The Renewer fixture (an unlock) will allow you to turn consumables into single items that you can pay exotics (usually just prisms, except for the really good ones) to reuse. It's more expensive than using a duper, but there are some advantages:

These items take up a single consumable slot.

You don't have to go back to your base to restock -- particularly important in dungeons since you *can't* easily go back to your base.

An unlock here will conveniently allow you to Prismize and Chrome on the go.

Farmers

Farmers are an item category specific unlock, and will allow you to passively collect whatever raw material is in them over time. It doesn't work with refined or composite items.

They have two properties, which are global for farmers in general:

Time -- how much real time it takes before the item duplicates. n=600 seconds.

Storage -- the cap on how many items get stored. n=1.

These can both be upgraded in the farmer lab, which gets increasingly expensive over time and does eventually have hard caps.

Chromer Stuff

The Chromer is an unlockable fixture that lets you make advanced essences, which ties into the pgcs and *particularly* renewables. You can make:

Prisms -- one of all six essences.

Polychromes -- Made from six items that share neither a color nor a category.

Kaleidos -- Made from 5 items in each color that don't share a category. It's okay if there are duplicates elsewhere though -- like you can use bone+wood+sap+bark+leaves all 5 times.

I'm thinking there should be one that's exclusive to crafted items as well.

The Chromer can be fed whatever the cost of crates are so that you can store items in there up to the 30-item limit. It needs to be balanced in such a way that you can't just use them as a storage hack though. But this will allow you to keep partial Polychromes and Kaleidos in there.

Refiners

Refiners are fixtures that turn one item category into a refined form (for example, sand into glass). Refined forms can also be found in dungeons behind at least two locked doors.

Refining an item costs Fuel, which is thankfully a global stat. Your fuel targets are handled by the Fuel Lab -- unlocking raw material fuel is easy, while refined or composite forms cost more pgcs, but put out more fuel than the individual items do by a pretty considerable margin.

The Boiler fixture will turn fuel targets into fuel. This is instant, and Fuel is just a global stat that's accessible anywhere -- no need to move items around.

Refining takes some amount of time, which is upgradeable at the Refinery Lab, based on the item cat, and up to some maximum.

Different materials (cat+color) have randomly better fuel or time base values.

Like Farmers, Refiners can have optional storage -- both input and output.

Crafters

Crafters are fixtures that turn several items into composite items. This process isn't reversible.

You have one fixture per recipe as an unlock target.

Crafting doesn't take time fortunately. Unfortunately though, each craft requires an essence. This dictates the color of the resultant item from whatever is available. So for example, an axe made from green leather + blue metal you can use a green essence to make a green axe or a blue one to make a blue axe, but nothing else.

Crafting can be done automatically with Automation, but it's a bit more convoluted (more on this in the Automation section).

Automation

Automation works a bit differently in this game.

This unlock (which will definitely cost exotics) gives you the Automator fixture.

The Automator fixture can interact with fixtures in the room it's in, as well as other Automators that are in orth adjacent rooms.

Basically what it does is shuttles items from storage area to storage area and sets parameters on how, say, crafters work so they don't just eat through all your essences by default.

Chain Example

Here's an example of using automation:

Room A has an Automator, two green metal farms, a blue leather farm, a Prismizer and an Axe Crafter.

Room B has an Automator and 5 Axe Containers.

Automator A has the following settings:

The first green metal output gets Prismized, and that essence output is stored within its own internal "factory".

The other green metal output and the blue leather output, plus the green essence in its factory gets forwarded to the Axe Crafter, which is stored within its internal factory.

Axes get forwarded to Automator B.

Automator B takes axes and puts them in each storage container until full.

If you wanted to expand your axe operation, you could create a similar room adjacent to room B, and forward "axe overflow" to Automator C, which has the same settings as Automator B.

Routing

Since you have to route items around, routing commands for Automators are stored separately for UX purposes.

Map Stuff

As mentioned, each region is chunked out depending on the town there.

You can open a 2D map and move around it at any time (as well as select different regions). Only tiles you've actually visited will be visible.

Dungeons, lakes, towns, etc are color coded along with obstacles.

Cleared dungeons are removed so they also aren't rendered in the map.

Cartography

Cartography Consumables (fishable or buyable at a junker) can target the map in various ways. For storage and UX sanity they're stored by what they do and this is rendered alongside organic discoveries.

Reveal obstacles in a chunk.

Reveal POIs of various types.

Scanners

Scanners are the bread and butter of the game. They're usable on the Map, and the scanned flag they set means that the scanned information is always shown. Visiting a Market, Junker, Lake or Nexus will reveal that information in your map without scanning it.

Dungeon Layout -- this tells you the total number of rooms, the number of loot rooms and the furniture in each one, as well as aggregating everything for UX purposes. Furniture probabilities and number/color coding are also given. And you even get a readout of Doors somehow. You don't see how things are connected together, but you do get a lot of useful information for deciding whether a dungeon is worth it and how best to plan.

Dungeon Sweep -- a rare type that targets a dungeon and that'll tell you where to find a specific item based on native furniture probabilities. It won't tell you what doors are in your way but it will give you dungeon directions and which piece of furniture it is. If one isn't present then you wasted it. Also there can be more than one target present, so it'll just pick one.

Market -- scans a chunk and lets you know what you can sell in the town's market.

Junker -- same but gives you a list of junker items.

Nexus -- same but gives Nexus information.

Lake -- scans a lake and tells you how many consumables are present and what the probability matrix is.