Moonvale: Caravans

[Jeff]


Introduction
Moonvale: Caravans (Caravans or MVC for short) is a small and short roguelike game. It is designed so it can be played for hours on end without being dull– or it could fill in that ten minute break you have between classes. It's replayable infinite times, with thousands of character and stat combinations. It is unique in its use of a party, yet also driven by a classic theme: save the princess.

Features
**Caravans**
There are no parties per se in Moonvale: Caravans. instead there are Caravans. Caravans consist of three characters, all controlled by you. One of the character is your personal Avatar, a character that you design yourself. The other two are hired characters that can be disbanded and acquired in any of the world's many cities.

**Unique World**
The world in Caravans is generated uniquely every time you start a game. It will never be the same as another world you've played in. The world consists of terrains such as Snow, Lava, Grasslands, and Desserts. On those terrains you can find Mountains, Forests, Lakes, and more.

**A Classic Storyline**
The storyline of Caravans is very simple. The princess of Moonvale has been kidnapped, and the king has sent you to rescue her. The man that has kidnapped her is an evil king living in a castle surrounded by lava. There are a variety of evil kings and evil companions that you may end up fighting, so you can rest assured that you will have a unique last battle.

**Needs Specific to Your Caravan**
In Moonvale: Caravans you might expect to find some unique features of a Caravan. This is one of them. Every person in your caravan has needs: Hunger, Thirst, and Fatigue. Whenever you perform certain actions, some of your needs may decrease. If a need is at zero, there will be bad consequences.

**An Extremely Customizable Character**
In Caravans, you can choose your characters stats and traits. Choosing 10 of 40 trait allows for hundreds of trait combinations. You choose what weapons your character uses, and in the game you can change your stats even more, and sometimes even gain traits.

Screenshots

>! The sprite and items are placeholders, and many of the tiles may be changed. Later on I'll hopefully add some alpha blending between tiles, but if I want to make the christmas deadline I can't do it yet.
>! 
_This is a beautiful example of what the Map generator can do. A nice peninsula complete with city.
>! 
A heavily developed area, several cities and some ruins.
>! 
The main menu, currently under construction.
>! 
A shop. Ignore the thing where it says GOLD: on the left menu, I plan on putting the shop's name there but haven't gotten around to it yet.
>! 
The inventory. It's a bit outdated, but it's very similar to how it is now._

Updates will be more consistent at: http://devsnotes.com/showthread.php?tid=12&pid=187#pid187 though I will try to keep this thread pretty updated too.

Questions or suggestions? Just reply.

[Marsh]

Approved, nice to see something a bit different.

[Dark Crusade]

Looks good, love the retro appeal. I'd give it a go for sure.

[Jeff]

@Marshy:

> Approved, nice to see something a bit different.

Thanks :D
@Kreator:

> Looks good, love the retro appeal. I'd give it a go for sure.

Means a lot coming from a retro master such as yourself.

After I work on character creation a bit, I will start the long hard task of making the battle system. When it's done, the battle system should be something like Final Fantasy 10 and Pokemon combined.

[Jeff]

After three days of me coding shittily, I've finished the Character Creation Menu until I start adding more content to the game.


[JeffSventora]

This looks great!

[Jeff]

items can now be dropped, and others have special options.


Now I shall fix traits and maybe add a couple more.

[Robin]

The GUI looks like utter shite. Write your own text rendering system and stick to 8-bit graphics for everything.

[Jeff]

@Robin:

> The GUI looks like utter shite. Write your own text rendering system and stick to 8-bit graphics for everything.

I'm aware it's shit. I want to get a test done before christmas, and there are more important things to do than the GUI right now. I'll probably rework a whole ton of code after christmas. When I started this project, I knew just enough about coding to make things work. I coded the core of the game terribly, and it's pissing me off. After I get done with the first release, I'm going to optimize code and clean everything up.

[Robin]

Welcome to the programming cycle. You'll learn to deal with it eventually. ;]

[mrmiguu]

@Eckhart:

> After I get done with the first release[…]

This is the key-term to success!

[Jeff]

Well, shops now close when you leave cities, having zero fatigue/hunger/thirst now has consequences, and you can no longer spawn off of the main 'continent'. There aren't too many more things to do before I need to start the battle system.

[Sickey]

Looks awesome.
Though I was not born in the retro era, I still love old games more than new games.

[Jeff]

We're still lookin at a release date of the 25/26\. Today I got down a bunch of work for the battle system, enemies are loaded, encounters are made but sadly the battle system itself isn't made yet. That'll be tommorrow's work.

[Jeff]

I've encountered an error that I just can't solve. The release date will probably be more like the 28th now, if I can fix the bug. If I can't fix the bug, I guess I'll rewrite the battle system or maybe the whole project because the code's so shitty.

If you're a kind soul skilled with XNA/C#, then please take a look.
http://devsnotes.com/showthread.php?tid=44

Thank you.

[shadowdeath]

Interesting Project.