Progress, Episode 2: Lazarus Effect

After a lengthy hiatus (not in a small way caused by my not having a desk), I've begun delving into Urban Crawl again. I've now refamiliarized myself with the code, and in the process I discovered a number of little inconsistencies and deficiencies that I am sure I would not have noticed for a long time had I not neglected this thing for 2 months. I've come across this sort of thing before, and in an attempt to be a massively cool dude I've decided to dub this phenomenon the Lazarus Effect. Because, you know. The project was dead, and now it is not, and it is almost better now for having died. Lazarus. Yup.

I finished up the whole shoreline generation and lake filling algorithm. I know now that my fortmer attempts at space filling were ridiculous and silly and filled with bugs, but I fixed them up and now you can really watch the tildes fly as your very own lake is created LIKE MAGIC. I've begun the generation of rivers, which in all likelihood will consist of boring straight lines of water instead of being all bendy and interesting. After that, my initial terrain generation will be complete and it will be on to roads.


I'm considering taking a short break from city generation to actually complete the interface and display library that I wrote. It's full-featured enough for my current uses, but I get the feeling that once I get deeper into the interesting bits of city generation I'm not going to want to take a break to go write some boring menu code. We'll see. Maybe if I complete the library I can release and become internet famous. Wouldn't that be a treat?

Urban Crawl: Big Roguelike in the City

Welcome to the Urban Crawl Developer's Log. On this site I will be documenting my adventures in creating my vision for a modern, unique (to my knowledge) roguelike. On my side I have a mild-strong determination, a medium amount of programming ability, and a somewhat fleshed out set of monstrous ideas, and it is with these tools that I plan on forging this game.

What is Urban Crawl, you ask? Put simply, Urban Crawl is a roguelike based in a giant procedurally generated city. Your ultimate goal: to rise and become mayor of your city. This game will be based in a somewhat cyberpunkesque future, all corporations and squalor and insane urbanization and degrading society and mild nuclear fallout here and there and everything. A slightly dystopian, crumbling near-future. Planned features include:

• Persistent City. Even after death, the city will remain for subsequent adventurers to explore and conquer. People you once knew will remain, and your enemies will still be around for you to exact your revenge on them.
• Dozens of square kilometers. Millions of people. Cities will be modeled on actual urban scales.
• Realistic environment, realistic needs. Heat, cold, hunger, fatigue, sickness, all will be a factor for both you and the citizens of the city. Take care of yourself, even the robust adventure type needs a place to come home to.
• People have minds, people have memories. Watch as the people around you react to what you do, or go about their own business. Gunshots will attract rubberneckers, or scare away the yellow-bellied. Footsteps will be investigated by guards and protective homeowners. Enter some dude's house? You will be yelled at. Come back later to ask for a favour? That guy might remember you and throw a lamp!
• Gangs, corporations, neighbourhoods, DJ collectives, there will be all sorts of groups and figures that people will swear allegiance to. Join up, rise the ranks. Or create your own. Or just start killing people off and watch the group lose followers and disappear. Gangs will wage wars for control of parts of the city, and corporations will buy and sell eachother on a simulated stock market, while undermining eachother's operations (perhaps with your help!)
• Information is king. Through news outlets, rumour, speculation, and word of mouth the city's happenings will become known to the general populace. Through your influence and your deeds (along with, perhaps, some carefully worded lies and fibs), mold the minds of the many to further your goals.
• Build. Create. With resources, money, and the name of a good contractor, design and build a house. Or 6. Or twenty. Construct your dream home, a planned community, a new downtown if you like. Buy land and become an influential land-developer. You know what they say about property...

This is but a small number of my ideas for the game. As you can see, I have quite the amount of work ahead of me. But with ambition comes motivation. As far as I can tell, nothing like this has been tried before.  That makes me excited. The opportunity to create something entirely unique in the game community, it's invigorating.

Subsequent posts will detail my progress on the game so far. I've been coding lightly on and off for the past month or so, and I plan on ramping up progress as the summer continues. I'm really excited about this project, and I think that while I may not end up implementing all of my grandiose ideas, just creating something will be its own reward.