Heyhey,

Here is a devblog where I post updates of progress of my newest game, tentatively called Shopkeeper somethingsomething. The main idea of writing this is to keep my thoughts on track and document my progress with the game. Perhaps even some of you can pickup something useful for your own projects from my ramblings, feel free to ask! :)

The game in question is the newest prototype I've been playing around with, and is at the moment some kind of management/simulation game. At the time of writing this, it has been in development for total of 3 days.

The goal of the game is to earn money and expand your business, unlocking new items for production. You do this by creating items, which are then sold in a shop. Luring in customers, proper advertising, fast and cost efficient production and satisfying customer needs would be the main tasks in the game.

Inspirations in no particular order: Prison Architect, Recettear, my boardgame example

And mandatory screenshot:

<img src="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/19921470/shopkeeper_1.PNG" border="0">

Screenshot of gameplay as it is at the moment. I am in middle of creating prototype art assets so there are lots of placeholders.

The beginning of the development

The game started from the example that I created as answer for 'How do I?' forum question, which is linked above. I wanted to do something with simple turnbased boardgame engine, something that would be rather quick to finish. But as usual things pretty soon got out from hand...

About 3 hours later I was staring at a game where you realtime management game where you managed an office of workers; you had to keep them fed so they worked and produced money for you. You also had line of workers waiting outside your door, waiting to get hired. At 17.00 everyone went home, and came back at 8.00. It was pretty quick to do with pathfinding taking care of most of the heavy lifting, and simple logic handling the workers.

I kind of tinkered with that, added zooming, panning and some other basic stuff like that. When I went to sleep that night though, I started thinking that game really needed something extra, something to make it more fun to play. Ultimately I started thinking about adding production element to the game, where you had to manage production of your products as well. At some point I got bored of the whole office theme too.

Saturday morning I had quite clear image of what I wanted: A game where you'd handle a smithy, where a smith or two forged all kinds of stuff and sold it in a shop. It would be kind of lighthearted setting where game had lots of interacting mechanisms that player doesn't have much control over. I love creating AI based games and this was right up my alley.

I started tinkering with my office game prototype, and quite soon I had the basic elements in place: I had smithy that produced items, I had shop section that sold them and I had customers that bought them. It was great seeing it come alive; smith hammering away on new items, customers coming and going, sometimes even leaving some money behind.

Come sunday, I started tinkering with visual side of things; adding some more varied behavior for customers, creating new visual assets and generally adding small things that make the whole thing a lot more enjoyable. So this is where I am at the moment, I'll post updates as progress is made with the project! :)

vee41

Just now saw your comment about setting taken to false for the square the program is sitting on. Definitely is a hacky way to do it, but if it works then it works. Would this be a hacky way to 'reset' it?

Probably depends on whom you ask. :) I'd use a different event that resets the variable whenever token overlaps it. That way there would be no need to reset it that way, depends on your event structure and preference really.

Pleasure to help, your game is looking good!

Thank's

I did it, and still not working...

when i try to open your file, it say i cannot open cause its a r140 or later version.... maybe you made it ou a Mac? i'm windows user...

You can download the latest beta version from here if you wish to check out the new features: scirra.com/construct2/releases

So you essentially want your play tokens (programs) to block movement, or did I misunderstand? Anyways, I added that functionality to my example. :)

It seems you first pick an empty space (the top left one), then try to pick some more after that. That won't work, as you have already narrowed the selected objects to that single tile, so you can't pick outside it.

Move the loops up one level, so you won't have the top left emptyspace picked when starting the loops.

It also seems odd that you have this in a group. Function would be much more fitting and easier to use in my opinion. :)

Performance impact is non-existent like I said, would not worry about that.

Do as many prototypes as possible, little jingles and jangles that are based on one or two simple ideas and are easy to execute. Try different types of games. Don't be afraid to change and adapt your ideas radically, don't get too set on your initial vision of what you want to accomplish. Try things, and do things that are fun for YOU to do!

That's the advice I'd give to myself if I was starting out. :)

Add 'for each direction' below stop=0 condition. You should check some tutorials about picking to understand the need for 'for each' there. :)

I'm honestly still not convinced.

Your method works, and I'm not going to question that. It's also simple and easy to understand.

However, I do think it's possible to do this without making the squares be there (even if invisible). I have a screenshot on page 1 showing how I'm trying to do it, although for some odd reason it fails after a certain point and begins saying all remaining squares on the board do not exist, and I'm not quite sure why.

Another reason is because I don't want to have to populate the entire board when creating a pregenerated board state. I want to be able to place the squares (aligned to grid, of course) and not have to place invisible ones in order for the array to work.

Sure, it is possible, but it will take a whole different approach. Just making some squares invisible is the simplest way to do what you want. Don't really see why placing invisible squares is a bad thing, takes about 5 seconds. :)

Creating a level could be like this :

Create row of 20 squares

Select all, and copy paste them as 15 columns

Add walls

Make some squares invisible if necessary

But you know better yourself what you want your process to be, this is just how I would create something like your screenshots at first post suggest.

Hmm, I'm under the impression that destroying it is better for memory usage, especially since I'm testing this on my iPad. Am I wrong?

Few invisible objects (you could turn off collisions as well) won't do anything for performance. :)

vee41 this is another problem. The original version of my game used squares and walls. The latest iteration destroys the walls so the background below can be shown. This means at some points, there will be no square.

You could still have the square object, just make it invisible.

Your array population starts off by picking the square nearest to 0,0

Does the array population still work if there is no square in the top left corner?

It assumes few things:

The game board is rectangle

Each row has equal amount of squares

Each column has equal amount of squares

So you'll need to have a 'top left' square. :)