WIP: B-Movie Monster Madness

[jjsonick]

I'd like to encourage anyone working on an ACK game to start a WIP thread in this forum and post screenshots and periodic updates to their progress.

Currently I'm working on something that attempts to recreate some of the gameplay of the 80's EPYX classic Crush, Crumble and Chomp.



Right now I have the PC as "Gohzilla", who can breathe fire, both to destroy buildings (they become rubble) and smite his pesky human enemies. He can also directly attack structures and enemies with his claws. Gohzilla can pick up fleeing human civilians and eat them (chomp! chomp!) to restore health. Tanks are the only enemy currently.

Things to do:
-- More terrain types (more varities of house and skyscraper, maybe a power station, landmarks)
-- Have terrain catch on fire if attacked with fire breath
-- More enemies (add cop cars, troops, jets, helicopters, SAMS)
-- Laser eyes weapon for Gohzilla (zap!)
-- Build out the city
-- More PC monster types? (not sure this is worth it - might be better to just focus on making a fun game for playing as Gohzilla)

The trickiest part so far is having the civilians both move and be able to be grabbed - in ACK a thing can be a NPC/creature that moves, or an item that can be picked up, but not both. So what I've been doing is hiding successions of 'civilian items' in rows under special road squares. Each turn a macro removes any previously revealed civilians and removes the 'next in the series' set of road squares -- which reveals the 'new' civilian underneath, hence creating an illusion of movement. I still need to set up something that will turn off the 'reveals' on a specific street when a civilian is actually picked up - might be too tricky.

JJ

[Roody_Yogurt]

Thank you, Wikipedia, for explaining the difference to me between "Crush, Crumble, and Chomp" and "The Movie Monster Game." I only owned the latter but I sure did like it. The rescue missions were the best.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Haha, JJ, that is brilliant! That seems like a really fun use of ACK. A fun game in general!

[jjsonick]

ICJ: Thanks! I hope to make it a fun, city-bashing time.

Roody: I never played The Movie Monster Game back in my Apple II youth, but I did play it several years back via emulator. I didn't play in depth, but the main difference seemed to be that TMMG was real-time and a bit more arcade-y in feel. CCC was turn-based so a bit more strategic, though the turn-based nature was sluggish at times (I hated having to take a turn to manually swivel your head 45 degrees - fortunately that questionable feature would be too tricky to replicate in ACK anyway).

It looks like TMMG had more scenarios if it had rescue missions - CCC was pretty much 'destroy and survive'' in whichever of the four cities you chose -- but you could choose different ways your final score would be determined -- for instance, getting more points for destroying buildings, or setting it so you get more points for surviving a long time, so that was almost like different scenarios since it could change your strategy.

Hmm, I probably should look at TMMG again to see if there's ideas from it to try to put in this ACK game.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Implementing something different than the typical CRPG that systems like ACK and ACS support is also exhiliarating and fun to observe. Plus, I love me a good monster-destruction game!

[Roody_Yogurt]

TMMG had three scenarios that I recall, and I might be remembering things wrong. The game definitely wasn't perfect, but I would buy or download a remake of it just because I thought it did take Rampage up a notch or two.

There was a scenario where you were rescuing your monster offspring that was stolen from you by evil scientists. I believe there was some sort of super sonic cry that you could do that would help you locate it, and destroying the building that it was in would free it and you would win the game.

There was another one where you had to eat enough humans to satisfy your hunger, and lastly, there was just a "rack up damage" one.

[jjsonick]

OK, this has been on the backburner since I last posted about it, but yesterday I took another crack at it. I figured out a good way to "turn off" a "fleeing people" path once the monster grabs a person from that path.

Also made it so houses can be either attacked by smashing claws or set on fire by fiery monster breath (previously it was one or the other). Added a cop-car, properly tweaked to be the wimpiest foe of Gohzilla. Added lazer eyes (ZAP!) for Gohzilla.

Limitations:
- There's no way to have fire spread - ACK has no way to test 'adjacent objects'. I might have fires die out after a random # of turns, though.

- There seems to be a bug with spells that 'allow the player to fire a weapon'. I was using that for both fire breath and laser eyes, and sometimes the spell just did nothing, besides deducting the expected number of MP. I don't think ACK has any 'spell failure' modeling, so I'll be sending a bug report to Chris. So now, Gohzilla has claws / fire breath/ zap eyes all as direct weapons -- you must READY one of them to switch between them, which is kinda clumsy, but it's working.

- There's no ACK trigger for when an object is destroyed, so there's no way for Gohzilla to rack up points for demolishing private & public property like the monsters in C, C & C did. Only killing/eating annoying human foes can gain points.

Given some of these limitations, I don't think it will be possible to do a full C,C&C-like game in ACK, but I think I can still make a fun demo that shows how to do non-typical scenarios in ACK.

[Chris H]

I'll check out that spell bug -- if you can bundle up the demo and tell me how to reproduce it, that would be great.

There are ACK triggers for when terrain objects are destroyed -- at least there should be. It should be able to run a macro as an action, with the action triggered by being destroyed. Correct me if that doesn't appear as an option and I'll fix it.

[jjsonick]

Thanks, Chris, just emailed you a copy of this project that shows the spell problem, and another possible bug I just discovered.

No, there doesn't seem to be a trigger available for when terrain is destroyed -- only 'if attacked' as a action trigger, and the 'replaced' field for putting a different object there once the terrain's destroyed. It'd be great to have a separate 'when destroyed' field (like the npc death one) that could call a macro.

[jjsonick]

The stall in this project (outside of obsessing over non-ACK projects) is that I really want to have fire that spreads, like in the original CC&C. I see a way to do it, but it will require some gnarly, lengthy macro-ing, and will have to be done for each screen (room) differently. It might also just be too slow, even if it works. But I'll attempt to get up the gumption to try it with one screen, and see how/if it works.

[Chris H]

Contact me offline about this -- I'm curious what you're trying to do, if there's some way to do this via new macro commands that would have general usefulness, we can approach it from that direction.

[Blacklight]

I actually DID this back in the 80's with the old ACS ! I made a whole bunch of non moving creatures that looked like buildings. Army squads, tanks, helicopters, and even the Mad Scientist were in there. Not to mention I also created traps that triggered air strikes and nuclear blasts.

I remember that I made the world map an actual map of the world and it was full of cities (those were the doorways from the world map to the individual city maps). I set up random military attacks on the world map.

When you started up, your monster was in his "dressing room" that had like 5-6 one way doors, each taking you to a room where you would pick up your starting powers. Then you were deposited on the world map in some area.

I also set up areas in cities that would give you extra powers and bonuses as well.

This was a LOT of fun with multiple players as we would fight through cities, grabbing power ups and then we'd hunt each other and meet for a giant monster showdown.

I also made a sequel based on "Monster Island" with the military surrounding the island and the monsters having to fight each other and find their way off the island.

I wish I still had my old C64 and disks.

[andrea38]

Wow,

Thanks you so much for inviting us...
I really hope i feel free in there..
Thanks a lot.. :smile: :razz: :wink: :mrgreen:

[Flack]

Wow. I guess the only good thing about spam is that it bumped an old thread that I missed the first time around. :)

Not only do I still have my old Commodore and all my old disks, I also have all my old game manuals and stuff, which I have been slowly scanning in. If you want to check them out or reference them, here are the scanned in manuals for both The Movie Monster Game and Mail Order Monsters.

http://www.robohara.com/scans/index.php?file=software

[Guest]

Of all the projects that were started for ACK, THIS is the one I REALLY want to see completed !!!

[jjsonick]

If the step-macro for creatures gets added to the Mega-patch - I think I could continue in earnest. I could use it to more easily deal with the things that were bogging me down (people movement & fire movement).

[jjsonick]

I actually DID this back in the 80's with the old ACS ! I made a whole bunch of non moving creatures that looked like buildings. Army squads, tanks, helicopters, and even the Mad Scientist were in there. Not to mention I also created traps that triggered air strikes and nuclear blasts.

I remember that I made the world map an actual map of the world and it was full of cities (those were the doorways from the world map to the individual city maps). I set up random military attacks on the world map.

When you started up, your monster was in his "dressing room" that had like 5-6 one way doors, each taking you to a room where you would pick up your starting powers. Then you were deposited on the world map in some area.

I also set up areas in cities that would give you extra powers and bonuses as well.

This was a LOT of fun with multiple players as we would fight through cities, grabbing power ups and then we'd hunt each other and meet for a giant monster showdown.

I also made a sequel based on "Monster Island" with the military surrounding the island and the monsters having to fight each other and find their way off the island.

I wish I still had my old C64 and disks.

That all sounds great, Blacklight! It's a shame those disks are lost. I agree that multiple party members in ACK would open up a lot of possibilities, but when I discussed it with Chris previously he wasn't excited about it design-wise *and* I think it would require an immense overhaul of many aspects of the ACK engine.

[Garth's Equipment Shop]

Oh man, jj you gotta finish this!!!

[Blacklight]

I agree !! This needs to be finished !!!!

[rld]

A couple thoughts on the things you are trying to do in this game...

For the fleeing civilians, you should just be able to use creatures for this. The latest patch (v0.7) lets you fetch a creature's type value from the map, so you should be able to implement an 'Eat' macro like:

GETADJ X Y
get creature's type from map location x,y
is it a 'fleeing human'?
No - exit macro
Yes - remove creature from map and add to HP

For the fires, you could try doing this with a step macro that runs as follows each turn:

pick random location on map
is it a 'fire' tile?
No - exit
Yes - pick an adjacent location at random; if it is a tree or building tile, replace it with a fire tile