Hero Worship - It takes a village

I've been knocking around a game idea for a while and finally started messing around with it in prototype form.  It's a love letter to one of my favorite games from the 90s.  The genre-busting SNES classic, Actraiser.  God what a weird and wonderful game.  It took elements of city building and mixed it up with side scrolling action.

See??   City Building AND Side Scrolling action!!




In reality, the city building part, while fun was quite anemic.  All you really needed to do was hold the enemies at bay while your villagers slowly built up their town until they reached a point where you could move onto the next part of the game.  You could help them with magic spells and by loosely directing their build efforts, but it never really required much thought.

So I figured it would be fun to make the city building part a little more deep while still retaining some of the things that made the original so interesting.  More on that in a later post. For now I wanted to get some basic city building concepts up and running.  And that starts with the humble village.  I'm using Game Maker Studio because it's quick, easy, and I really like it.

I already knew this was going to be more complicated than I originally thought, but having no preconceived notions about what I would be able to accomplish has been strangely liberating.  I love city building games and have played tons of them, so I just started taking bits and pieces of different ones just to see if I could get them to work right.  Honestly?  So far, so good.

The story so far

Disclaimer.  This is all programmer art. blah blah blah.

It all begins with a Town Center.  In Actraiser there was a temple where each "sim" level in the game began.  I don't remember if you could lose it (because I don't think I even lost those levels) but in Hero Worship, losing your Town Center will mark the end of the game.  From the Town Center you can build your basic buildings, currently: houses, sawmills, and stonewerks.   Already this is a major departure from Actraiser.  You never actually built anything in your game.  You only controlled the direction of development on the map.

The blue squares are to check collision.

I was able to quickly rough up a working selection and placement system and well as push scrolling for the game map which is several times larger than the screen. I really think I want this whole thing to be playable with a game pad (even though right now it's mouse only).  I have some ideas on how it's going to work, but for now, I plan on avoiding using common control paradigms like "right-click to cancel".  This immediately presented me with a problem.  What if the player selects something accidentally and needs to back out?  For the Town Center I implemented a proximity check.  If you selected the town center by accident, once you move your cursor far enough away, it automatically deselects.  This is in line with how people generally behave when they do something wrong.  They try to move away from the problem.

So at this point I've got four buildings, a way to place them in the world, and the basic checks to make sure where you are attempting to place them is valid.  My first pass at resources goes something like this:

Currently there is population, wood, and stone.

Town Center:

• Placed automatically at the beginning of the game.
• Give a maximum population of 5.
• Population will increment slowly up to max.
• Allows building of Houses, Sawmill, and Stonewerks.

House:

• Cost 5 population.
• Increases max population by 5.
• Slight increase in population increment rate.

Sawmill:

• Cost 10 population.
• Generates 5 lumberjacks over time.

Stonewerks:

• Cost 10 population.
• Generates 5 masons over time.