[Design] Divine Moments of Flow

[Arcane Wizard]

Game Idea
You travel to hidden mystical places in a fantasy world where there's a lot of nature to find a number of divine artifacts. In these mystical places that you enter you must match the flow (movement, rythm) of the present (animated) plants and animals by singing, dancing, or making music with an instrument. This will cause visual changes to the plants and animals. Patterns will emerge, and the visual aspects of the flow will become more obvious and graphical. Of course, it will be harder to tune into a fast changing flow than a flow that is changing slowly or not at all.

The better you tune into the environment, the more the visual aspects of the environment changes and the more patterns emerge. At a certain moment you are completely in tune with the (present) environment and these patterns and other visual changes will stay. Then you can draw an item from the changed environment (new instrument, new clothing, something awesome I'm not going to tell yet , etc) by drawing your (character's) finger over any pattern and equip or wear it.

These items will influence (improve!) your capability to tune into places.

You will have to find a way to access and find a number of divine places in the world where you can tune in and find the special, divine, artifacts you seek. Once you combine all the artifacts something nice and secret will happen.

Game Flow Design
This lays out the theoretical flow of the game. Menu's do not need to be words on the screen, but may let you choose between options in a different way, or maybe they will just be nicely drawn words on a screen. We'll see.


Main Menu

• Play
  
  
  • New Game
    
    
    • Type your character's name.
      
    • Choose your character's gender.
      A girl and a boy are drawn on the screen, you choose which you want to be.
      
    • Customise character.
      You get to change the appearance of your character by selecting a body part and moving or adding x pixels. This is saved then saved.
      
    • Choose your style, dancing, singing, or playing an isntrument.
      This determines what item(s) you start with and what skill will be high when you start. You develop skills by using them and you can always use all skills, so you can always change to a new style if you want to, or eventually even combine styles.
      
    • Confirmation menu: confirm / start over / back to step x.
      
    • A nice intro scene that can be skipped.
      
    
    
  • Continue Game
    
    
    • Travel
      
    • The basic map outlines and known places are drawn when this state of the game is entered.
      
    • More details are drawn on the map while the character travels (walks around on the screen).
      
    • Enter Area
      
      
      • Draw basic area. Water, plants, animals, etc.
        
      • Draw character. (big enough to show items and stuff)
        
      
      
    • Gameplay
      
      
      • Get player input.
        
      • Animate environment according to "flow."
        
      
      
    • Reward Sequence
      
      
      • Nice Animation
        
      • Get Reward
        A hand cursor is shown on the screen, you draw a pattern on some of the patterns and other graphical changes in the environment. The game analyses what you selected and turns it into an item. Select a triangle and it could be a hat. Select a line and it could be a flute. etc. This "could be" checking won't be done untill you try to equip it as something, you can wear anything shaped like a hat as a hat, but you can also end up playing a fantasy instrument that looks like a shoe. Fun.
        
      
      
    • Back to travel.
      
    
    
  
  
• Character Overview
  Stats (skill levels) and what she looks like.
  Worn Equipment.
  Found items.
  etc.
  
• Credits
  
• Quit
  

Pause menu

• Character Overview
  
  
  • View
    
  • Equip
    
  
  
• Save
  
• Load
  
• Quit
  

It will be written in basic but use an assembly library. Currently I'm looking at codex, but I may change to xlib, or a custom library.


Discuss.

[axcho]

Wait, this is for the calculator?!

Wow, well I was going to suggest something, but I assumed it would have colors and a high screen resolution. This sounds like a very interesting project and if you need any help with it I'll see what I can do.

How are you generating the patterns? Maybe you could use CATs for the overworld map? I'll try and get the CAT Lab out soon so you can see what it would look like with random CATs.

I was going to suggest using some sort of L-systems for the patterns and plants. Here is an introduction to it if you are not familiar with them:
http://algorithmicbotany.org/vmm-deluxe/

Do you know much about Aikido? The "ai" in Aikido means harmony or blending, and it goes well with your theme. If you want a Japanese title, you can use that word! It also has a homophone meaning love, which is drawn with a different character.

I'd be interested in seeing some concept art for this game!

Is there an element of exploration in this game, or is it purely a rhythm game? I think that exploration would be an important feature. Different places could have different types of environments - all algorithmically generated, of course.

[elfprince13]

holy smokes Arcane! It would take me a while to program this on the computer.

[Arcane Wizard]

Yes, this is for the calculator. I'll make a Java version some time though, maybe as a concept or maybe after the calc game.

Forgive my ignorance, but what's a CAT?

That link is very interesting, but I don't believe the calc is capable of generating the places so they will probably be manually designed and stored in the game. Even just drawing them will be hard enough for the calc. Maybe without TiBasic though.. hmm..

I'm making some concept calc art right now.

[Arcane Wizard]

Concept animation (don't panic if it's down, working on uploading it here on uti)

[attachment=863:attachment]

edit:
/giggle :ninja:

[Weregoose]

Has there been anything like this before (not just in calculators)? I'm excited
about the concept—It looks like something I could really get addicted to... 8)

What other scenery should be included? I'm thinking the base of a waterfall.

[Arcane Wizard]

It'll definately have some african- and south american (aztec) jungle themes, maybe australian bush, new zealand mountains, and of course a special beach and 1 to 3 special fantasy theme's I'm not going to post yet. :)

Stuff like:
various rocks (these may be possible to generate randomly)
normal and jungle trees and plants
those silly australian trees
cacti (sp?)
aztec fountains, waterfalls, piramids, etc
some wierd fantasy stuff (secret for now )

Of course you start at an "ordinary" forest, or a plain like in the animation above.

[axcho]

Thanks for posting the concept art. So the environment grows over time. I hope it can be algorithmically generated. Otherwise it would get boring pretty easily, depending on how the gameplay works. There have to be varying environments to respond to, otherwise the game becomes like Galaxian.

For a simple example of algorithmically generated graphics, you could take a look at my mandala generator.

I am very curious of how the controls will work. And how is the "flow" represented?

Why do you want to program this in basic? I would do it in assembly if it were my project. If you end up doing it in basic I can try to make a CAT routine that interfaces with basic. Maybe give it a few numbers in Ans, and call the program? And there are probably other algorithmic ways of generating graphics.

CAT stands for Cellular Automata Tile. I guess I'm the only one who uses that term.

[elfprince13]

Im loving this project already.

is it just me or does that guy look swedish?

[leofox]

Heh, sounds like a fun game . Timing/Music games combined with an RPG into an all original new concept

[DJ Omnimaga]

wow sound nice and original, I cant wait to see what you will co0me up with

[Arcane Wizard]

[axcho]

I guess I'll back off then, and let you do this. I'll concentrate my energies on a "random RPG" with CATs and perhaps your people sprites if you don't mind?

[DJ Omnimaga]

hmm axcho plz dont start BASIC vs asm wars on UTI, I though we were trying to support both basic and asm here and arcane is free of making this project in basic if he wish, asm is not done for everyone you know

[Arcane Wizard]

[axcho]