TL;DR

  • Made a generator that creates the encounters, loot, crafting, puzzle & “rare” islands

  • For now, I’ve decided to stop with streaming the gamedev

  • Made a bunch of small tweaks to docking

  • Made a road map towards the first few public builds!

So first off, last week was the beginning of making an “adventure generator”. This is the system that is responsible for bringing together most of the gameplay systems together in Clarice Clairvoyage. The purpose of this system is to generate the function of each island on the map making sure that the gameplay experience from island to island is consistent in difficulty. If there are any dependencies for particular bosses or puzzles, those are made available for the player through this system as well.

This is basically a small layer on top of the island generator, also made with RNG that gives islands a function and makes them interact differently when you dock with them. For now, I’ve decided on several types of islands (which are color coded in the gifs):

  • Combat

  • Crafting

  • Puzzle

  • Story/Choice

Combat

This type functions a little bit differently than other islands: it isn’t an island! The way that this island works is that it actually changes itself into an enemy ship and starts patrolling nearby islands. When Clarice gets too close, these ships will engage her and start jumping ship to attack her! So try to either stay away, trick them or be ready to fight!

Crafting

While the scroll/spell stacking works temporarily in combat, you can use a crafting island to permanently craft a resulting spell out of two scrolls! You can also choose to make a temporary spell a permanent one! You can only craft once per island, so make your choice carefully!

Puzzle

The puzzle island is a way to blow off some steam and get to do something else than fight. I need to invent a whole lot to make this work, but the idea for now is to make a small machine out of scrolls that have a part missing or is broken in a way that the player needs to fix. Kinda like a broken magic driven Rube Goldberg machine!

Story/Choice

As another option that isn’t combat, sometimes you’ll get a little text prompt with a little narrative and a decision that needs to be made. Depending on your (previous) answer(s) you might have a different outcome! Different loot, perhaps a sneaky way not to fight the boss? Who knows?

I haven’t implemented most of these systems listed above, so for now it’s more of an overview of what I plan to put in. I’ll get to balancing the system that assigns these adventures to these islands!

Maybe some of you have checked out a past VOD of my stream or maybe even watched live at some point. If not, I streamed some gamedev of Clarice Clairvoyage every 2 weeks on Saturday. However, mostly due to the tiring effects of the stream, but also due to lack of interest from people, I’ve decided to discontinue it for now. I might switch over to videos instead, like Alain is doing (great videos, btw!), or get back to streaming, if there is at least some demand for it.

I also ran into some problems with docking, so I made a little debugger for it. Turns out I had the non-scaled/non-zoomed coordinate system mixed with the scaled/zoomed coordinate system. My bad!

In the previous gifs you also saw some grey outlines: this is because I experimented with some fog of war mechanics! Don’t have anything to share on that yet. In the next couple of weeks I’ll get to making some big steps toward a build that you guys can try out! So stay tuned!

A big thanks to all the people on TIGSource that have left nice comments and having read it. At the time of writing I’m at 923 views on TIGSource, so thanks! Also, if you’re a casual dweller or lurker that has checked in multiple times, let me know what you think!