Lunar Lander

[erico]

Questions first...

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The red lines indicate missions on the main story and their pads are always on, correct? The green lines indicate optional routes and when you land on those pads they become disabled?

Red lines are the gateways, no score when landed, you are free to move around, they are all always ON.
The green lines are the missions, with the orange pads, they are naturally OFF.
When you land on a gateway and accept a mission, its pad becomes ON.

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1) I assume red pads add more fuel, do green pads do so as well?

Red pads (gateways) each contain an amount of fuel charges, from 0-10.
Green conections indicate orange pads (mission pads) and can have a single fuel charge or none.

2) How is the amount of fuel determined? A constant depending on the pad size? Or a table with numbers for each pad?

A table is better, a pre-defined one.

3) Do red pads refuel by the same amount each time or do they have a limit?

When on a red pad, you can choose when to refuel if fuel is available. By using one, one less is available.
If you refuel, if fills your tank 100% no matter how much was there before.

4) How does the user know where they are supposed to go next? Specifically, with red pads that have multiple missions coming off them does the user somehow select from a set of options or is there a linear sequence for the entire game you want to create yourself?

On a red pad, the user selects one available mission from a menu.
The pad´s mission becomes activated until you get there or it is cancelled.

5) How do you want me to indicate to the player where their next red pad is?

Red pads don´t need indications as they are always on and work as free roaming checkpoint gas station.
Orange pads, the mission pads, needs to be indicated when, accepted from a red pad (gateway) or a continuation from another mission pad.
Currently code implementation should only display current screen coordinates on top left and the target screen coordinates on top right if you accepted one.

6) What's the incentive for going off to land on the green pads? Extra fuel? Points?

Landing on a mission pads count score. You may also get fuel to cross a difficult path or hull to help on difficult situations.

Also everything I've asked here is based on the original design where red is missions and green are optional routes, but in the post you just made you say "red are gateways, green are missions". Can you pls clarify this, and also explain what a "gateway" is?

Yep. I made a mess naming pads, let´s clarify.
Red pads are gateways, they are road in which you may refuel or fix hull or get missions. You can use them anytime.
Orange pads (shown on picture as green connections) are missions you accept from a red/gateway pad.
Some missions may have from 1 to 4 or 5 mission pads in sequence.
[edit: missions have from 1-4 mission pads in sequence now.]

I´m working on a clean game design for next post, and hopefully update the github with it, in case we need.

[erico]

Here is an updated proposed design. It is stripped of story text and story images. It is just the core and functional version.
Would be great for testing.

Here a general diagram:

plan.jpg (129.09 KiB) Viewed 6662 times

START GAME____________________________________________________________________________
You start landed on a red pad of a random satellite (4 options).

THE PLAYER´S SHIP______________________________________________________________________
Controlled as it currently is.
Apart from last discussion, I´d also add:
- landing gear dots need not collide against scenario, only with pads. Ship´s collision against
scenario is always the capsule´s central dot.
- There should be a bit stronger X movement traction. Like if you speed sideway and leave it
be, it returns to X=0 speed a bit faster.
- Ship´s fuel 100 max. When flying, landing mode spends 2x more fuel then navigating mode.
- Ship´s hull is 10 max. Each scenery bump takes hull depending on speed of shock. The smallest
touch takes 1 hull, the hardest crash takes 5 hulls, so, 5 types of damage.
A bump with 0 hull means explosion and game over.

INTERFACE_____________________________________________________________________________
We could have current screen location in numbers on top left. Target location on the top right.
Low left with a number for fuel (100) and lower right the number of hulls (0-10).

That is more for debugging, better thoughts on how to display fuel and hulls later.
No location and target coordinates get printed on actual final game.

THE WORLD____________________________________________________________________________
Suppose gravity´s current value is 10 for sea level line and below.
Each line of screens above should add a 10% increase so at satellite height the gravity is 14 and
at the line above, 15.

THE LANDING PADS_____________________________________________________________________
When landed, control menu with arrows and select with A, cancel/back with B.

GATEWAY________________________
Are the red pads, they are always ON and you can freely land on them anytime. They each may
have a fuel amount of 0-10 and a hull amount of 0-10.

When you land, a menu appears with: FUEL, HULL, ROAM, RETIRE.
-FUEL
Here you can refuel. A single fuel unit tops your ship´s fuel.
-HULL
Here you can heal, A single hull unit adds a single ship´s hull unit.
-ROAM
Here it takes you to a new menu.
-RETIRE
Quit game.

The Roam menu lists missions available. Choosing a mission sets its pad as target location.
This mission then disappears from the roam menu. The target mission pad becomes activated.
Some have time limit to reach (0 to whatever seconds).
While on a mission, you can still land on gateways, but if you pick another mission, it cancels
the past one. If a mission has a time limit, after due it gets cancelled too.
The cancelled mission´s pad is deactivated.

MISSION PAD_____________________
The orange pads linked with green lines on the image of last-last post, they are all OFF at the
beginning of the game and only come as ON when activated from a gateway or another
mission pad.

When landed, if the last pad in chain, pops a DONE message. You are free to go on.
The pad deactivates as you take off.

Some mission pads point to another mission pad, resetting the target location and activating
the new one. Again, as you take off, is deactivates itself.

Each mission pad may contain 0 to 1 fuel and hull. If you land, you automatically add the
1 hull to yours and refuel the ship.

JUMP GATES_____________________

They are the green pads at the satellites.
When you land, it pops a LAUNCH button.
If confirmed, you choose a direction (left/right), and power (1-3), then you are shot.
Each shot takes 2 hulls, if you have 0 then it takes none.
This throws you around without fuel requirements.

I haven´t decided for an interface for the shooting control, the simpler the better.

GAME END_____________________________________________________________________________
When you crash with 0 hull you explode.
When you retire on any gateway.

The objective is to do as many missions as possible until fuel runs dry, then retiring on
a satellite gateway.

In a simple version, score can be the some of mission pads landed according with their
difficulty size, which can be 1-5.
Retiring on a sattelite adds 50 pts, any gateway 25 and death 0.
______________________________________________________________________________________

Things I´d like added then:
- unique text and image stories on the intro when you start the game.
- score similar to the retiring system on the first PIRATES! game.
- unique text and image stories for when landed.
Structure example:

You land on a gateway.
Menu appears.
Choose roam.
Image and text appears.
Roam menu appears with location names.
Choose a location name.
Image and text appears.
Choose accept or not the mission.
Image and text appears.
Exit.

You land on a mission pad.
Image and text appears.
Exit.

I´m not sure yet how the text and images may work, showing a full screen then overlay text,
or split screen like the ancient graphic adventures (IF) or zelda balloons.
in total, it amounts to ~400 images and text strips.
A very fertile soil for creativity.

edit: Story wise, I already did basic writings for the ~162 text strips and am preparing how to produce the images.
Maybe at some point we should talk on how this is best done for importing/game using?
It currently is a text file with tabs separating each information.

edit: opos, I didn´t answer the million dollar question. I think when on a mission, the location of next pads is in the text description during the event, sometimes more technical description sometimes more poetic and so on.

[erico]

Graph about gateway and mission pads.
edit: the light blue parts have images and texts.

pads.jpg (181.65 KiB) Viewed 6648 times

[Myndale]

Thanks erico, that should be do-able, provided the design doesn't grow any further

I do have one issue though....I like the idea of changing gravity but shouldn't it decrease as you get higher? So it's strongest at sea level and then by the time you're up near the satellite you're effectively in orbit?

[erico]

Thanks erico, that should be do-able, provided the design doesn't grow any further

It already did too much! But I promise that is all. It should make a wonderful game me hopes.

I do have one issue though....I like the idea of changing gravity but shouldn't it decrease as you get higher? So it's strongest at sea level and then by the time you're up near the satellite you're effectively in orbit?

Your proposal makes sense, but it would make it easier for players to traverse the scenery flying high.
I´d prefer that the high the player is, the higher is fuel consumption, making it tough to even reach a satellite.
Or making it harder to cross the forest and even more hard the mounts. It adds value to using the catapult (jump gate) at the satellites.
It is a way to balance things. So I think we should consider that the fuel needs a heavy gas for combustion and this gas is more rare as you go up.

Now a bit more stats. I have created all missions now.
68 total missions comprising 32 single pad missions, 23 double pad mission, 9 triple pad mission, 4 quad pad mission.
They all involve different pad sizes.

Here an illustration showing the missions from black to white depicting 4x pad till 1x pad.

test 05.jpg (132.99 KiB) Viewed 6633 times

A single game run should be able to reach 1-45 missions at most. 5-20 for a standard player.
At the beginning it will feel there are plenty of fuel but soon enough you mature in game, you have to start managing it.

The game can be seem as 2 parts, first the flying action part and then the landed adventure part.
There isen´t much I can do for the action part anymore but testing, so I will focus on the adventure.

The adventure part is going on fine, I have done a set of interface tests.
More on this later.

edit: the adventure part is nothing new, it is as the landing-pad-diagrams I posted before. The darker blue is an on-game-screen menu, the roam menu is made of half images/half text, so are the mission description and at the mission pads, you get to see an image and text when you land.

[erico]

Here some image+text example test for the adventure part.
I think I like this old IF layout.

adv_01.png (4.8 KiB) Viewed 6633 times

Text should be primarily descriptive.
There should be a Willian Gibson visual atmosphere to this...

[Myndale]

Right then, time to finally get this show on the road! I've just finished a very busy couple of months at work which has spilled over into my free time but that's all in the past now so I'm back to coding for fun again.

I put a little coding in tonight and managed to get the old flying + collision code working with the new SD world loader so you can now finally fly around your whole world:

lr1.gif (1.7 KiB) Viewed 6604 times

All code and HEX file etc are in GitHub. For the time being I've had to draw the ship and flame outline with INVERT, which doesn't look quite as nice when the flames overlap the background but will have to do for now. I'll fix it once I have a better idea of how final memory looks. Keep in mind that if you want to compile this code yourself then you'll need the beta version of the Gamebuino library, since the old one doesn't support INVERT.

Next up will be the landing pads and their menus. I can extract the locations of the pads from the graphics but we need to figure out a way to map those to your pad numbers, we might have to wind up using a plain old hand-coded array.

[erico]

Nice!

...
I put a little coding in tonight and managed to get the old flying + collision code working with the new SD world loader so you can now finally fly around your whole world:

"Our" world.

About the menus, I can send you a mock on how they are layouted and displayed. It is very simple, similar to your own main menu.
About the images and texts that compose the mission menu background and mission information when landed, should we try to implement them too? I can create place holders for both while they are not completely done. Or we could do as the clean proposal, won´t make much sense storywise but it would be fully functional as game mechanics.

Next up will be the landing pads and their menus. I can extract the locations of the pads from the graphics but we need to figure out a way to map those to your pad numbers, we might have to wind up using a plain old hand-coded array.

I have indexed them from 001-162 in a text file, also added an organizing name (not game needed), type of pad, difficulty level and fuel amount.
I´m working adding the "connections to other pads" info, shield amount, img file name and text where needed.

Here is a pic of how it is more or less organized, reds are gateways, the other colors dictate regions.
Here I think it is better for you to tell me how to make this into usable code info.
Maybe a text file with the game-usefull info into fields separated by tabs and enter? What is better here codewise?

edit: the pads have that red or yellow or green color, those could be grey, so the pads stand a bit off the background.

list.jpg (102.58 KiB) Viewed 6600 times