The Lush Engine

Expedition design notes

• village is a fixed map with set shops that will buy and sell the equipment.
• village has a teleport chamber which allows the player to teleport into the many dungeons local to that village
• dungeons are indeed randomly generated when the player teleports in
• when the player selects a dungeon, he is selecting the region and the difficulty. The region determines the race of the inhabitants and the difficulty determines what level of monsters are found (based on the current power of the player)
• During the teleport process, get a nice animation or special effect, just to show off whilst the dungeon is created, perhaps have the various beasties fly past like ghostly apparitions as the player makes his way there.
• all sprites are to be 2x2 tiles
• the game is to play in realtime, not turn based, as it will later allow more than one player
• the player plays an umbra (from the game Verdantia), and can therefore develop freely, and morph into other critters during the expedition providing an alternative form is known
• to make life easier for both ourselves and the player, the characters all move a single square at a time. This helps the player to move through doorways without getting frustrated and also helps the collision detection system
• the dungeon map will be stored in a very condensed way and the background is drawn by looking at this data.
• A single, random dungeon map should be stored within ram. This places a limit on the size of it. Pre-generated maps sit in rom and therefore don't have such a restriction.
• The save file should store the player, the aspects learned, and any equipment he has. It will never be possible to save the game inside a dungeon. This would mean that we need to save the dungeon and the location of everything within it as well. This is why the game can only be saved at the inns.