Cyberganked news thread

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Wed Nov 27, 2013 7:02 pm

Here is a little piece on Indie Game News.

http://www.indiegamenews.com/2013/11/ne ... anked.html

Retro · Post by **Retro** » Wed Nov 27, 2013 10:59 pm

If you wouldn't mind answering, I'm curious how far along the actual game is at this point?

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Thu Nov 28, 2013 11:44 am

You bet, buddy.

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Thu Nov 28, 2013 11:57 am

Character creation: done.

Being able to name your characters what you want, and have Hugo add those words to the dictionary: done.

Combat: done.

Running programs: done.

Day and Night cycle: done

Buying things: done.

Equipping things: done.

Quest system: done.

Treasure chests (in the form of old computers!) : done.

Street Magicians being able to break into cars, steal enemy weapons and guess passwords: done.

Level 1: done.

Level 2: About halfway done... need to put graphics and content in.

Level 3: Plotted, built with the maze generator.

The "biggies" that are left are:

- Being able to re-order the party.

- Dealing with experience points. I have a 32,767 limit for numbers in Hugo and I want to fake experience points up to the millions.

- I want enemies to be able to run programs at the party as well.

- Content and graphics for levels 3 through 25.

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Thu Nov 28, 2013 12:35 pm

Oh yeah, I also forgot - shot all the actors and actresses. Mostly set there, but would love to get Gerrit to be green-screened in as one of the actors before the game is released.

The Happiness Engine · Fri Nov 29, 2013 3:22 pm

exp concept: instead of having a monster have an integer exp and scaling them throughout the game make the exp gained be a function of character level vs monster level. That way killing something way too hard for you could reward 500xp but killing it 30 levels later rewards 1. Level gains in such a scheme wouldn't increase, but always be...32k / however many levels you want?

Alternate concept: do a find/replace in the hugo code for int/long and just make a 64bit executable already.

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Thu Dec 12, 2013 1:03 am

The Happiness Engine wrote:exp concept: instead of having a monster have an integer exp and scaling them throughout the game make the exp gained be a function of character level vs monster level. That way killing something way too hard for you could reward 500xp but killing it 30 levels later rewards 1. Level gains in such a scheme wouldn't increase, but always be...32k / however many levels you want?

Possibly. I gotta think about this. This is a perfectly good idea, I think. Why do I have a feeling that there's a pitfall here though? Let me come back to this.

Alternate concept: do a find/replace in the hugo code for int/long and just make a 64bit executable already.

Welllll we all agreed to play by Kent's rules (the guy who made Hugo) when we started coding in it. Kent is still involved with Hugo. I would bet that he probably cares less about DOS compatibility at this point than he did 10 years ago, but I still wouldn't recompile it.

Juhana · Post by **Juhana** » Sat Jan 04, 2014 9:38 am

The Happiness Engine wrote:Alternate concept: do a find/replace in the hugo code for int/long and just make a 64bit executable already.

It's not a question of bits in the interpreter or the compiler, but in the Hugo virtual machine. You'd have to change the bytecode format to store 64 or 32 bits instead of 16 bits pretty much everywhere, and that's more work than just a simple search & replace.

(Not a lot more work, but it's not trivial either and of course the game would then not work with any existing interpreters.)

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Sat Jan 04, 2014 10:31 am

The Happiness Engine wrote:exp concept: instead of having a monster have an integer exp and scaling them throughout the game make the exp gained be a function of character level vs monster level. That way killing something way too hard for you could reward 500xp but killing it 30 levels later rewards 1. Level gains in such a scheme wouldn't increase, but always be...32k / however many levels you want?

I have been playing Wasteland again this week and noticed that Wasteland never shows you how many experience points you have. Wasteland! No XP shown! Wasteland!

Wasteland!

So screw it, if Wasteland doesn't show it, then I don't need to either.

I do like stuff like character level being able to be determined by other factors. If I could store 1,000,000 points of XP and have character level be determined backwards from that, then that's the best way to do it. But that's not possible (as Juhana says, it's a lot of work to code we shouldn't be forking) so I'm OK with experience points that reset after each level.

I don't want players losing experience points when they gain levels. I'll do the best I can, but at some point if the players don't try to level themselves up, they'll have to lose XP. I can't store big ints in there.

And after meeting the guy who levels you up, I've decided that the game will let the party "dial him up" if they have an old computer that can do that. It'd be like the "radio" command to level up in Wasteland.

ICJ · Post by **ICJ** » Sat Feb 08, 2014 2:47 pm

The Twitter feed has 1974 followers. I would like to get it to 2,000. I mean, I would like to get it to 10 million, but 2,000 will do.

Won't you please follow me?

http://www.twitter.com/cyberganked

By the way, game-specific Twitter accounts. Dumb or not dumb? WHO YA GOT?

Flack · Post by **Flack** » Sat Feb 08, 2014 9:12 pm

The problem with the game-specific Twitter feed is that once the game's over there's not much left to do with it and you drop 2,000 people and then have to start over for the next game.

I made the mistake of making individual Facebook pages and URLs for my books. I should have made one author page. It would have been so much easier.

Now that you have almost 2,000 followers I wouldn't dump it but something like SherwinGames would allow you to tweet about multiple projects and maintain your following list from game to game.

Gerynar · Post by **Gerynar** » Sat Feb 15, 2014 6:46 pm

Follower # 2000 here

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Tue Apr 22, 2014 11:23 pm

Lemme write the novella. Let me write the novella, have Flack check it for jokes, use fiverr.com for proofreading and get this done. Then we can continue on the game.

I just want to write a christing novella, OK? Who's in?

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Wed Aug 20, 2014 7:38 am

Flack was in!

OK, I want to be able to sell this at OVGE next year. So I'll go ahead and say that the release date will be August, 2015.

It is now a matter of PRIDE to not slip like everyone on Kickstarter.

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Sun Aug 02, 2015 11:19 pm

I have a bit of a problem. I have 80 individual rooms left in this one level. If I do one room a day, it will take me 80 days to get this level finished.

There are like 5 levels after this. Not all of them are 100 square in size like this one, but JESUS.

Operation Two Rooms a Day begins.

Rooms To Go · Post by **Rooms To Go** » Mon Aug 03, 2015 6:42 am

I know this release is marked by high expectations all around, but should the amount of rooms be dropped to a more manageable amount? You know, to lighten the load and strain on its creator.

Flack · Post by **Flack** » Mon Aug 03, 2015 7:55 am

If only you hadn't banned the one guy who could write a program to randomly generate all those rooms for you.

In Fortran.

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Mon Aug 03, 2015 8:24 am

Rooms To Go wrote:I know this release is marked by high expectations all around, but should the amount of rooms be dropped to a more manageable amount? You know, to lighten the load and strain on its creator.

Yes! That would have been a good idea. These things really do need a project manager but that ship has sailed, unfortunately.

What I can do is take a look at the number of levels left and adjust the size of the ones I haven't worked on.

This particular level IS meant to be the wide-arching "meat" of the game. But what I can't do is have another few 10x10 levels afterwards.

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Mon Aug 03, 2015 8:26 am

Flack wrote:If only you hadn't banned the one guy who could write a program to randomly generate all those rooms for you.

In Fortran.

Haha, well, I feel bad about that but sometimes I need a break.

And Paul's room generator was clutch. We joke around and ban each other a lot ... well, I ban him but he did a knock out job with that one. The rooms are all interlinked, I just need to do the stuff by hand like make pictures for those rooms, write descriptions, add interesting things to do and advance the story. Two rooms a night will be nigh impossible, but I need a kick in the ass to get going. I watched the entirety of season two of Community this weekend. I like to think I can code with the second monitor having TV on it, but I really can't.

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Tue Aug 04, 2015 11:38 am

Yesterday I got zero rooms done. By the time we got back from the baseball game (work event) it was 10 and I was exhausted.

Hmmm.