The Word
In the beginning was the Word
Procedurally generated textual game
Your experience may contain sex & violence
Made for Ludum Dare 47 Jam, the theme was "Stuck in a loop"
I was late to submit so there is not LD page, any feedback given here will be appreciated, and I will try your game and review back.
- Infinite universes
- Same seed word will recreate same worlds
- 6 basic species + variations
- 3 ages of technology
- 5 society types
- Stuck in a loop
This build was made in a short time (considering project ambition) so it is flawed and not really content rich. But if you think you saw it all and the adventuring part repeats itself (random numbers can be unruly), you probably have to give it a few more spins and try different options if you want to see more.
Updates
Update 2020-10-15:
-Locations - The glass garden is now open for visitors (electric age building)! You can find out plants' names, in some cases their origins, and get in trouble for messing with them too much.
-Languages - Each species has their specific "sounds" that compose random archaic names, currently only used for plant species and exotic location names.
Update 2020-10-12:
-Grammar - indefinite articles for nouns in generated text ("a", "an"), using js lib by @rigoneri
-Interface - Removed redundant prompt screens when about to open a cluster or galaxy that has intelligent life
-Colors - A bit more text coloring, brightness of ground color has been reduced a bit with gray gradient
-Feature - Made v1 of procedural plant generation, currently limited to flowers, shrubs and trees, all gymnosperms in a flowering phase. Each world has a number of persistent plant species, local and endemic. Individual instances of plant species can be interacted with and their state changed.
-Locations - Local plants can now be encountered in wilderness areas. You can memorize them but will not be able to see their names however, until the next update when the glass garden urban location will be open.
-Wilderness - The annoying dead end screen in wilderness area will now appear only when player gets tired of travelling
Resources made by others:
The opening sound - SLCBagpiper on freesound.org https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Development log
- Small updatesOct 16, 2020
Comments
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Wow really great idea. I love seeing ideas that are so vast in scope really come to life with such simple rng. Played for about 30 mins and got quite a few loops in. I definitely haven't seen it all so will be sure to come back and have another session!
Out of curiosity, do you have a planned end-point for this project? An amount of content where you'll call it quits? Because this really seems like the type of game you could keep adding to forever, so many possibilities for content!
Thank you very much for playing and kind words. Truth be told, with 30 minutes of gameplay you probably saw next to all, with this being a LD jam game and all. If you went through all the city locations in all the society types then that should be it, racial and supernatural ability variations just change parts of text a bit, except for the update where avians and serpentines are able to climb trees without a random outcome.
And yes, a textual procedural game can suck its developer in, as there is never a lack of details that can be added nor graphical resources to hinder you, so I do intend to keep adding stuff whenever I can, while improving the engine and interface. I guess the first goal should be to provide experience that makes each loop feel fresh. And then maybe one day even break out of the loop, and allow players to have a decent run in the alien world, hopefully I'll keep my sanity by then. Thanks again!
A pretty unique experience. To bad you didn't make it in time for LD. I like the colour indications even though i think they could be more suddle (it goes from completely black to extremely colourful) and the general text-structure for describing the species and places. Reminds me of dwarf fortress.
I think the loop sets in to quick before you can have more intersting adventures - but it would be extremely time consuming to write more activities.
Thanks for playing! Yep, if you are unlucky with rnd colors that background can be a real eyeburner, I couldn't think of a solution in time (that will also look good).
idk what I just played but it was pretty frikin sick
Thanks for playing!