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Merchant (A loving tycoon game)

Posted: Mon Apr 19, 2010 11:32 pm
by TylertheDesigner
Merchant
Medieval Merchant is a tycoon style game being produced with the Love Engine. The game consists of a player interacting as a merchant in a fantasy realm.
Gameplay features/mechanics- The player will control a merchant that will buy and sell items to the heroes in the fantasy world. The heroes will automatically accept quests, battle monsters, and return with new loot. They also will level, join group raids, and create guilds. As the merchant, you must chose your purchases wisely, and the prices you offer will affect how well a hero does, as well as if he will even return later to trade. With the money earned, the player can upgrade their shop, hire assistants, learn new skills, and much more. The current version contains over 30,000,000 items, 12 hero classes, 5 assistant types, 15 terrain types, and a whole bunch of other numbers.


-- Picture of the map in Medieval Merchant
Image


The first playable should be available by June.
Currently working on:
NPC generation- The NPCs were previously randomly generated based off of their occupation, but in lieu of having NPCs changing their positions, I have decided to change it so they are generated based off of parents, gender, and race. The initial set of NPCs will not have parents, so their names will be generated randomly as well as their race and starting stats/occupation. If a child is born, they will gain their Father's last name and a random first name based off of their race/gender. Also, their starting stats will be based primarily off of their parents stats at birth.

Stats- Originally, I hard coded in all of the character stats (Strength, Agility, etc). I decided to make these part of the mod environment, so players can define their own set(I may change my mind on this still). These stats will of course affect the NPC's ability to do pretty much everything. If the NPC does not have a job, and one becomes available, the NPC with the highest stat for an open occupation will be selected.

Occupation system- Instead of only having Heroes and Merchants, Merchant will have a variety of occupations, ranging from politicians to craftsmen. The NPCs filling these roles will be just as important to the Player as the Heroes and the competing Merchants.
Right now, I am setting up the occupations so they will be editable and modifiable, and not a predetermined set. This will allow for people to make jobs specific to their universe. (Shipbuilder in Space, Carpenter in Fantasy, etc). The roles are split into a few major forms- Craftsman, Gatherer, Supporter, Hero, Merchant, and Politician. Each of these main types will be a subclass of job, and the specific job will be a subclass of the main occupation type.
Also, NPC occupations will have skill levels. These skill levels will increase as the NPC continues their practice. When gaining a new skill level, the NPC will also gain the ability to create new items and upgrade their facilities/work speed.

Recipes- Recipes will be specific sets of items required by craftsman to do their craft. These will also be modifiable, and will only be usable based off of the occupation level of the NPC.

Re: Merchant (A loving tycoon game)

Posted: Tue Apr 20, 2010 4:13 am
by Jasoco
I look forward to trying it out. Like the art style. Not sure about the thickness of the margins between the tiles though.

Re: Merchant (A loving tycoon game)

Posted: Tue Apr 20, 2010 5:14 am
by TylertheDesigner
The thickness was a design decision. The reason is I will be using the black for visual cues. Certain hexes will be outlined in a variety of colors to represent different statuses. Also, this terrain set is the medieval fantasy one, and some of the others like the space one will need the space so they connect to the background picture (a starfield). Also, I incorporated a zoom feature already that lets you go from as low as a 8x12 view to up to a 96x64 view with the mouse wheel

Re: Merchant (A loving tycoon game)

Posted: Tue Apr 20, 2010 7:15 am
by nevon
That's pretty darn cool! I'm not crazy about the art style, but like you said, that should be (relatively) easily replaced if you really wanted to. The gameplay seems pretty original, and I could certainly see how it would be appropriate for a super annoying social type game. I don't know how well it translates to single player offline mode, but I guess we'll see in June. I'm looking forward to seeing how this develops. :)

Re: Merchant (A loving tycoon game)

Posted: Tue Apr 20, 2010 7:24 am
by TylertheDesigner
Thanks for the support!
Right now I am working on trying to make the backend completely independent of the gameplay. This means making sure anything that is related to the specific game is not hard coded in. I previously had a "Hero" object that had attributes such as strength agility, etc. Instead, I am working it in that the mod files will declare the NPC stat types and default values. That way someone could potentially make a space version with ship stats instead of standard fantasy rpg ones. Should be fun shenanigans for all!

Re: Merchant (A loving tycoon game)

Posted: Tue Apr 20, 2010 2:10 pm
by Robin
Nice, looks like Settlers of Catan, with the hexes and types and all that.

Re: Merchant (A loving tycoon game)

Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2010 3:27 am
by treeturtle
Robin wrote:Nice, looks like Settlers of Catan, with the hexes and types and all that.
my thoughts exactly

Looking forward to this!

Re: Merchant (A loving tycoon game)

Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2010 9:03 pm
by qubodup
Jasoco wrote:Like the art style. Not sure about the thickness of the margins between the tiles though.
My words exactly!

Also I recommend #333333 instead of black for BG.

And yeah, margins should be thinner ;)

Re: Merchant (A loving tycoon game)

Posted: Thu Apr 22, 2010 2:17 am
by TylertheDesigner
Thanks for the advice qubodup! The terrain icons will be based off of the mod, so potentially I may make a background image line in the mod to allow modders to add their own background image (starfield in a space mod, etc). For now though, I will try changing the background color as you suggested.

Also, I added some more game info to the starting post...

Re: Merchant (A loving tycoon game)

Posted: Fri Apr 23, 2010 1:37 am
by appleide
appleide likes this. *thumbs up*.