Posted December 03, 2022 by Plana
Have been working on-and-off for many years on an adventure game. More recently I've decided to devote more time to it. The world that you explore is randomly generated each time. Thoroughly complex and interesting world generation is a focus here, along with challenging gameplay and exploration.
Cookie-cutter elements like inventories, health points and combat are basically implemented at this stage. Though there are many exotic complexities to these systems that I want to add.
The world is planar and "plana" means "explorer" in ancient Greek (I think). So I like the name. The world is planar because it is composed of 2D planes where each tile has a height. Objects (like our character) can still move in 3 dimensions though. Though much like for us, gravity usually consigns us to 2 dimensions of movement. Cavities like caves are instead formed by joining separate planes by those purple port bubbles. At the moment all you can do is wonder around. I have many, many things I want to put in this to make it into an actual game and more interesting world.
The graphics are a little embarrassing compared to what I see on the market. I could call them retro but that would just be a lie. Besides, if you want good graphics you should go outside and stare closely at a snail on a fence - you’ll get better texture resolution and frames per second than on any game.
Because they are raster based graphics they are very easy to improve anyway - just render a new strip and paste it straight in. Also this in theory makes it very mod-able. Most importantly though it’s super easy for me to add new stuff in, which is good because as you can plainly see I am very very lazy when it comes to graphics.
Monsters can be recoloured, resized etc. So far Plana has about 6 monsters but I have many more planned. All that monsters can do though now is wander around like idiots. Quite convincing idiots though if you ask me.
In one of the images you can see our man taking a stroll down a path. Pathways form between settlements. That’s all I have regarding civilization so far though!
The "hard" bits of this project are mostly done I think. The engine (in C) is largely fleshed out and now I just need to keep adding more world generation and game features through Lua scripts which connect to my engine. I have a huge to-do list of things I want in Plana so this could be a long, long project yet.