Call of the Stones - GitHub GameOff 2022

The Jam Website: https://itch.io/jam/game-off-2022

The Concept

I would like to make a minimal, atmospheric 2D platformer directly inspired by the game Knytt.

The world will be comprised of a grid of screens, each of which having its own character and “area”. There will be occasional background music clips of 10-20 seconds as well as atmospheric noise in some areas.

The goal will be to explore and pick up a series of items you need to win the game.

Game Mechanics

You can run around around the world freely, climb up walls and jump over obstacles.

You might be able to pick up powerup items that enable you to reach new areas a la Metroid.

There might be a mechanic for helping you find your way to the next item like in Knytt.

Game Design

Cliche Ideas

He left no stone unturned
Clear the air
As old as time
Ear to the ground
Built to last
Back to square one

The concept:

You are a character who lives in a realm where there has been peace for a long time. One day, the Puria Stones that protect the realm were stolen and hidden across the land. Since then, the air has become unclean and it it is not safe to stay.

Your character must venture through the different areas of the realm to find all the missing stones and reassemble them so that the air becomes clear once again. The stones all make their own special sound, so you need to listen for them to find your way.

Once you find them, you must head back to the town square (the starting location) to reassemble the altar of the Puria Stones!

Name Ideas

The Sound of Stones
Call of the Stones

World Design

Let’s imagine that there are 4 stones to pick up. Each stone should exist in its own ideally unique area, so that means 4 zones. There would also be the starting zone that is the nexus to all the other zones.

Number of screens needed: 15 + 16 + 12 + 15 = 58

Peaceful Zone

The starting point of the game is here
Green, vegetation
Open expanses, easy to traverse, light platforming
5x3: You start in the center of the 3-wide and the adjacent screens lead you to the stone zones

Starting screen of the game is at 4x1

Cave Zone

A dark cave
Larger zone (4x4)
More like a maze than other areas

Lava Zone

Cave connects to underground magma system
Long and flat (maybe like 6x2)
Lots of platforming, jumping over obstacles

Tech Zone

Buttons and doors that have to be pressed to proceed
3x5

Screen Naming Convention

Since we know that each area will have a predetermine screen arrangement, we can name the screen based on their position in their own zone, for example:

peace-1-1.stm dark-3-2.stm

Editing Maps

The map editor will be very simple. Hit TAB to enter edit mode and then click anywhere to place a tile.

The number row keys will let you change which tile to use:

0: Empty tile
1: Block tile
2: top left corner
3: top surface
4: top right corner
5: left wall
6: right wall
7: bottom left corner
8: bottom surface
9: bottom right corner

Placing the Stones

Each zone will have a stone you need to collect to bring back to the starting screen.
Each stone will be placed a specific location, it won’t be randomly selected (for now)
The game engine knows the location of all stones regardless of which map you’re on
If you press the listen button (K) then a sound should play to direct you toward the nearest stone

Locations:

peace-5-1
cave-1-1
tech-2-3
lava-3-1

Tile Graphic Design

Tiles we need at first:

1: Internal wall/ground tile
2: Top left corner
3: Top surface for walking
4: Top right corner
5: Left wall: the wall is facing the player from the left
6: Right wall: the wall is facing the player from the right
7: Bottom left corner
8: Bottom surface: basically the ceiling
9: Bottom right corner

Tile size is 64x64 Max tile amount: 100, 10x10 in tile graphic Tile graphic is 640x640

How Editor UI Should Work

The UI library will basically create a tree of UI elements
The root element covers the whole screen but doesn’t render anything
Any real UI elements are children of that root element
Any UI element can have its own children
Game inputs events are sent to the root element
If the root element can’t handle a particular event, it sends the event to each of its children until one of them can handle it

What we need:

Text prompts entering or editing the name of screens or portals
Possibly buttons that have actions
Maybe some kind of selector element for displaying tiles to select, but at the very least something that can display the currently selected tile image/color

Things to Implement

The concept of a screen, maybe the same size as the screen itself, reasonable tile size
Transitions between screens
Basic platformer movement
Sprite animations
Collision detection against tile map
Picking up items
Providing audio cues to find items in the world
Ability to play sounds and music files (maybe using OpenAL?)
Compiling to Emscripten for playing in the browser (audio)
Loading OGG files for music and sound effects (stb_vorbis)

Tasks

Get basic player movement working (running, jumping)

State “DONE” from “TODO” [2022-11-06 Sun 15:35]

Write very basic ground collision detection

State “DONE” from “TODO” [2022-11-06 Sun 15:36]

Write the beginnings of an in-game map editor

State “DONE” from “TODO” [2022-11-06 Sun 16:22]

Make the initial screen a little more interesting

State “DONE” from “TODO” [2022-11-06 Sun 17:06]

Basic transitions between screens

State “DONE” from “TODO” [2022-11-06 Sun 17:06]

Look into hanging on CI, something with the new line number tracking I think

State “DONE” from “TODO” [2022-11-06 Sun 12:56]

Implement saving and loading of game map data

State “DONE” from “TODO” [2022-11-13 Sun 13:23]

Implement keyboard bindings for editing commands (like C-s for save, etc)

State “DONE” from “TODO” [2022-11-13 Sun 13:23]

The ability to create new screens

State “DONE” from “TODO” [2022-11-19 Sat 16:05]

Fix the behavior of navigating between screens

State “DONE” from “TODO” [2022-11-19 Sat 16:05]

The ability to change map tiles to draw

State “DONE” from “TODO” [2022-11-20 Sun 16:56]

Add a visual indicator for the K button to direct the player to nearest stone

State “DONE” from “TODO” [2022-11-27 Sun 17:09]

Track overall world position for each screen

State “DONE” from “TODO” [2022-11-27 Sun 17:09]

Dropping off stones back at the main screen

State “DONE” from “TODO” [2022-11-27 Sun 17:09]

Rendering and picking up stones on the appropriate screens

State “DONE” from “TODO” [2022-11-27 Sun 17:09]

Fix upward collision detection

Fix font rendering when we draw map tiles

Off-Stream Tasks

Reading and writing Mesche data from files

Better error handling

Mesche no longer reports when local variables don’t exist. Why does `t` and others work half the time when they don’t exist?

`equal?` does not complain when not given second param, does weird stuff

Chunk file name string is being freed before an error can be printed

Investigate issues with nested ifs:

(if (equal? state 'editing)
    (if (input-event-key-down? input-event)
        (if (and (input-event-modifier-ctrl? input-event)
                 (equal? (input-event-key-code input-event)
                         input-key-code-s))
            (save-screen current-screen
                         (string-append "assets/screens/"
                                        (screen-name current-screen)
                                        ".stm"))
            (check-tile-select-input input-event)))

    ;; If not editing, handle player input
    (handle-player-input player input-event))

Backlog

The ability to create and edit portals between screens

Enable the UI to select portals either by clicking or key binding

Find a way to make portals bigger than just one tile so you can’t jump over them

Define a portal by name and associate tile locations with it, so it can have an arbitrary position and size
However, we need to figure out how transition points map between screens
Maybe make x or y axis optional so that it triggers on the whole other axis

Files

README.org

Latest commit

History