Plan for John Coyne

Game in a day, impaling

blobs - http://www.thewilderzone.co.uk/gid/blobs.zip

I've been rolling the idea of a management/social structure game around my head for a long time now, and when someone pointed out an alternative interpretation of impaling, something went "ding" in my head. I admire games like populous, where you have indirect control over the people and a few simple rules, so i was going for something like that, giving the player just a few things interesting things to do.

The idea is a management wargame, you have to manage the physical attributes of your units through selected breeding (it takes place in an alpha male society), and a single food source which an opposing colony will forage for food. A huge part of the game is selecting which lucky unit gets to be the alpha male. Also important is deciding which units to turn into soldiers, as soldiers consume food and kill opposing units, but they dont gather food for your people. (i'm not sure i've explained this very well, but i have been coding for pretty much most of the day now).

The GID entry is done now, sadly incomplete, but at least it does something without crashing or throwing up errors. So far you can cycle the males and females (using the arrow keys) and set a new alpha male (space bar). I did manage to get them breeding, but I commented that code out as they dont die properly and eventually the screen gets flooded with little red blobs :o I'm sure most people will agree this is a bad thing.

I think there are 2 main reasons I didnt get finished:
1. i dont know torque 2D well enough (bought it a few weeks earlier and pretty much only went through the basic tutorial).
2. I didnt plan my design thoroughly enough, and, when that became obvious, instead of going back to doing my thinking on paper, i thought i could hack away at it on the screen.

I still want to do a social structure/management game, so I intend to take a few days rest, go back to working on this, and plan it properly this time :D