Introductions and plans for the next month

Hello to anyone bothering to read my first foray in to game development and a devlog of a likely,  overly ambitious project for a lone dev. Currently the game has two different portions more or less functioning, i.e. they work and build with assets behaving properly but it is not usefully functional.

This particular develog will serve as an introduction to the project, what's been implemented so far, and what my goals are by October 17th. This Devlog will also serve as my accountability buddy that holds to me accomplishing something everyday and completing goals in a timely fashion.

My game, Village Pillage (It's a working title but I'm rather fond of it because it's fun to say), is about a guy in a viking village that is chosen as a raiding party leader for his previous accomplishments on other raids (sorry no real power fantasy backstory here besides viking warrior). The Jarl of the region summons you and gives you some options of villages to pillage with some cursory info on them. From there it's up to the player to gather a raiding party of shieldbrothers, rowers, and, of course, boats. Taking inspiration from Sea of Theives, there is some ship management for traversal and will act as the core of the game and where most of the fun will, hopefully, be. Lastly, when you arrive at the village you wish to pillage you will be greeted by warriors ready to defend their village resources. No unfortunately combat will not be as simple as skyrim button mashing in first person. I'm a fan of tactical turn-based combat, like Divinity, and the hope of putting in place the ability to switch to a combat system like Baldur's Gate in order to accomodate player choice. 

Starting with what the game is currently. The image is from a Perlin based generator that needs to be tweaked to fit the aesthetic of the game. As a solo dev, hand making a world, even with some tricks of the trade to simulate size is a bit of a pain when the world design isn't my main concern; gameplay systemsand story are at at the moment. Onmcce the gameplay is solid I may decide to change how the procedural engine works or remove it entirely and hand make the world to fit my vision, but having the code texture the world is something else for ease of creation. What isn't pictured at the moment is the water navigation portion. I have a floating boat that interacts with water meshes in a fairly realistic manner that I'm thus far pleased with. The system of having the player walk around on the boat works in the sense that I can switch between controlling the boat  and the PC and move both independent of one another but the player can walk off the boat and the boat leaves the PC behind. Both scenes are "playable" but not usefully playable.

My goals this month are to get a sample village created to test the interaction system and village portion of the gameplay. The village will be populated with a fully fleshed out villager, warrior, Jarl, and Shaman. The village itself will also be completely implemented with dynamic stats and with the press of a button will have it's stats able to be displayed to the screen. While no one will be animated, voiced, or have any proper lines of dialogue, the player will be able to interact with them and bring up the various stats that I want the player to be aware of when gathering their shieldbearers and rowing crew. The Jarl will have village name options with some delightful lorem ipsum descriptor text that the player can see that will later evolve in to part of the UI. Lastly, in order to test player interactivity methods, the play will be able to pick things up around the village and that might extend to opening doors without animations. For the time being the water scene will not be touched as water is hard and that whole core aspect of the game needs to be broken down futher in to smaller steps that can be accomplished within a month.