Game Projects

Basic Stuff

2d fixed screens, using the new engine I've been developing with Alchemy.

Cave-based obviously. Pulls heavily from old shatterloop notes and some things I've wanted to do for a while with it (will be a lot easier on a new engine, particularly a fixed screens one).

A survival game, and one where you carry your base with you -- this works a bit differently in a top-down game.

Survival Basis

You need Food, Water and Sleep. Of the three, Sleep is easiest to perform -- just Camp and get in your tent. You can't camp everywhere though.

If you die by these means (or taking too much damage), you lose all items you've collected that haven't been Crystallized and will Dead Wander a few explored rooms away. These items cant be retrieved, they're just permanently gone. This doesn't affect tools or Camping supplies thankfully, just collected resources.

Consumables

Three things in Kavernz are consumables beyond food/water/wood:

Torches -- These enable you to see a circle as you move around. Ideally you're only seeing the outline of solid shapes. They can also be placed to light up the room permanently. When used in the former way, the drain and go out slowly.

Ropes -- used for ascending, descending and crossing pits/water/etc.

Gunpowder -- blasts open solid tiles. Is also a useful method of mining, but more costly than just using a pickaxe.

All three of these have to be crafted, and crafting only occurs while Camped.

You can make Shaped tools out of metal and maybe crystal and allow you to use these consumables better in various ways.

Altars

Altars are the Shop mechanic, and they work a bit differently since you're meant to keep wandering.

There are two types of Altar:

Sell altars -- these give you value on some kind of item or item class within a range. If it's better than your existing sell value, it replaces it. Otherwise you earn a small amount of money.

Buy altars -- these give you some amount of an item or item class that gets added to your Altar Network.

When you build an Altar of your own in your Camp, you can interact with the Altar Network -- sell your items for whatever values you've picked up (or the lowest possible value with a further detriment if you haven't picked up any yet). You can also buy items for their value -- the amount available is based on amounts going up via buy altars. Buying an item in this way makes it go down, and selling it back doesn't replenish the amount.

Altar buy/sell can only happen while Camped, as it's dependent on the Altar fixture.

Crystallization

Crystallization is your permanent form of storage. Crystallized items can be pulled out for free and can't be used while crystallized, but cost Fuel to put back in.

Crystallization of items requires that you be Camped. It also costs Fuel.

Your Crystallized inventory is limited, and can be upgraded indefinitely with Crystal, which is a resource extracted from Gems (which have other uses, particularly around Magic). Gems are also quite rare.

Your personal storage is also limited and can similarly be upgraded with Crystal. You can also degrade these storages if they're not filled with items and get the Crystal back.

Fuel

Fuel is tiered, with each tier requiring fuel from the previous tier as a cost + materials to upgrade the boiler made with Industry that costs fuel on the previous Tier.

Burning -- just burning organic items like wood and sticks.

Charcoal -- made from organic items. Found commonly everywhere.

Gasoline -- made from crude oil. Found rarely everywhere.

Uranium -- made from pitchblende, found in Radioactive biomes.

Neutronium -- made from Crystal. Gems are pretty rare and have a variety of uses.

Biomes, Levels and Generation

The generation is a mix of random generation and procedural generation -- room content definitely follows some kind of archetype more often than not and are stuck together in plausible ways, but there's a lot of layered variety that's improved via wilds and similar algorithms.

The map is separated into biomes -- a square of rooms with transition zones leaning one way or the other so it's more interesting. Biomes are classed and a bit different from each other with the types of rooms they spawn, their enemies, resources, lighting levels, the colors used, etc.

The level is also important -- rooms at the top will sometimes have exposure to the surface, in which case you can find plants and particularly wood -- while they're common up here they can't be found elsewhere except the occasional room with natural lighting in small quantities.

The level dictates the rooms that spawn to some extent.

The lowest level is a mix of lava seas and water seas, with obsidian rooms where they intersect. All three of these are usable resources, but the water here is too deep to swim it so you'll need a boat of some kind. Rocks and stuff still spawn occasionally.

Camping Changes

Instead of having a tent you have a kind of mobile base that you can get in on rooms where you're otherwise safe -- it basically layers the base onto the world, desatting and/or darkening the world tiles and otherwise making them inaccessible. You can build onto this base via materials and it'll just always maintain its shape as it's a layer.