Cataclysm: Fall of The Cog (WIP)

xyz

This is my "learning Godot" project. The player is an elemental god-entity on a mission to liberate entire planets from ultra-expansive mechanical invaders called The Cog. The only thing they have at their disposal are the natural disasters.

It's a light turn based strategy with puzzle and card game elements.

Couple of introductory screenshots for start:

cybereality

Looks amazing.

xyz

@cybereality Thanks. I still need to decide whether to keep the monochromatic color scheme or go with something more colorful. I personally like it this way, but people are in general more drawn towards colorful stuff.

My focus for the time being is on gameplay elements. The main mechanic is fully implemented. The gist is to combine different disasters to cause as much cumulative damage as possible. Hitting a city twice in a year with the same type of disaster has no effect while piling up different disasters "exponentially" increases the damage. There are additional secondary mechanics in the works as well (disaster card swapping, collecting tokens towards a major catastrophic event, which will probably be a meteor...)

Making things work on a sphere is somewhat challenging in contrast to a planar map. From both technical and gameplay standpoint. But I've got most of the framework in place now.

cybereality

I think monochrome is the way to go. Need a bold style not necessarily colorful.

Anyway, this was one of my favorite games, totally different but I liked the blue.

xyz

Yeah, Uplink was cool. I played the original for a while back when it was released. Haven't tried this version though. It looks very polished.

Erich_L

So this is what a math maverick does in game dev time. Monochromatic? Color me impressed.

xyz

@Erich_L said: Monochromatic? Color me impressed.

I see what you did there, you devil.

I'll try to put together a short gameplay video over the weekend. Hopefully the meteor strike will be implemented by then. No cataclysm feels quite complete without meteors falling from the sky.

Erich_L

Erich's TODO list for the weekend: 1. Build a belt that funnels oranges into a smaller belt (for launcher) 2. Build a mach 5 orange launcher 3. Share a video of it

@xyz 's TODO list for the weekend: 1. Implement meteor strike basic functionality 2. Put together video with voice over 3. refresh forum page scanning for any math question Erich might post about

Let's see who wins. (hopefully everyone)

xyz

@Erich_L Deal :) Just don't expect me to do voiceovers.

No meteors in sight yet... However, I've added some simple but essential gui elements. There's transient event announcement bar at the bottom. Top left are "meteor karma" and "transmutation stars" counters.

A meteor karma point is won for each obliterated megalopolis in a turn. When it reaches a certain amount, the player wins a meteor strike on the next turn.

Transmutation stars are sort of a currency. For now, each star can be spent to swap a disaster card from your current hand for a new one that is guaranteed to be of a different type.

I implemented a framework for geostationary satellites, although I'm not yet sure if I'll use it. Need to test them to see if they don't introduce too much confusion. The mechanic is as follows; The Cog Planetary Command may decide to launch a terraforming satellite (TFS) once in a while. TFS will completely protect its coverage area from any of the player's disasters. Each satellite has a control tower located in a remote city outside of the coverage area. To eliminate a TFS, player must destroy the control city.

xyz

The meteor is finally implemented. Its shockwave wipes out everything inside quite a large perimeter.

jbskaggs

Very unique design!

xyz

@jbskaggs said: Very unique design!

Thanks! I made a 2d javascript prototype at a jam couple of months ago. The idea was from the start to have a spherical map, but that was just too ambitious for a week long jam. So I decided to spend most of the time fleshing out and testing the key mechanic, with efforts around graphics kept at minimum. The map ended up being a simple flat square tile grid, masked with a circle and a 3d rendered globe image slapped behind it (to show the 3d ambition, lol)

Without any better ideas on how to approach the visual aspect in the 3d version, I guess I just "transposed" the look of the prototype into 3d.

Here's a screen from the prototype:

Important note, to whom it may concern: The prototype didn't feature any meteors :)

jbskaggs

How did this idea come to you?

xyz

@jbskaggs said: How did this idea come to you?

I was thinking about humanity's everlasting obsession with the "end of the world"... and how silly and deluded it is. So I figured to turn it around and imagine there's really an entity hellbent on destroying the complete population of a planet. Sounded like a fun role to play, admittedly a bit nihilistic.

Jam theme was "future". My initial idea was for player to plan disasters on an advancing timeline. Disasters placed farther into the future would be more powerful but had greater chance of getting prophesized by population's oracles situated in large cities. Migrations from that area would then ensue in subsequent years. This however proved to be somewhat clunky and complicated gameplay-wise. So I needed to simplify it. In the end, the time span was shortened to just one year (one turn), and relentless population growth proved to be challenging enough. Finally, I replaced regular population with evil invasive machines. For obvious reasons :)

Not sure how I ended up making something strategy-like. I typically do action stuff for jams and almost never play strategy games. Flowy actions is where it's at for me. But it was an interesting excursion into turn based territory. We'll see how this 3d version pans out...

xyz

Ok, here's a video as promised. The game normally plays at slower pace because you need to plan your moves. Here I was just mindlessly clicking... and deservedly lost in a dozen of turns. For some reason nvidia's capturing program displaced the mouse pointer.

! Meteor impact at 1:38 :) ! And another one at 2:00 =)

Erich_L

The meteor was soooo cool. I think the other disaster sounds need a lower pitch or else it they seem terribly weak by comparison (maybe that's intended). All in all tho I can confidently say I hate the cogs more than anything, I want to clobber'em.

xyz

@Erich_L I used "retro" sounds from the jam version that I made with a simple synth tool. I'll probably replace them with some "proper" sounds later. Or not. We'll see.

Average person simply cannot comprehend how evil the cogs are. I assure you that they deserve to be punished by every last one flood and earthquake the planet can muster.

jbskaggs

I play games like this. So this is my cup of tea. I immediately began thinking how I could win this. The game mechanics I saw in the seem pretty solid- more fantasy godlike which is fine for me. Will you have scalable meteor strikes? A mega strike once every 100 years? mini strikes early? Medium strikes in every 20 years?

Many game wip's I see dont make me want to own the game, this one does.

cybereality

OMG, this is amazing! Nice job.

xyz

@jbskaggs Glad you like it:) Currently, meteors need to be earned (I used a cheat button in the video). I think having to earn them is better than just letting them happen periodically.

It works like this - if you obliterate a size 7 city in one turn, you get one meteor point. After 7 such points, you get the meteor. Technically I could make it scalable so that you spend any number of meteor points to cast an appropriately sized meteor. But then that could encourage frequent usage of small meteors, losing the sense of specialness about the meteor. I'd also like to avoid excess clicking all over the gui to do various tasks. Currently you only need to deploy your disasters onto the planet and that's it. Everything else happens automatically. I'd like to keep this level of simplicity of interaction.

But I'll do some test so see how scalable meteors feel.