Awesome, and thank you. I saw a post of yours a while back mentioning you were going to maybe start working on a random maze and that gave me a bit of the idea to get going with it.Nezhul wrote:I'll share my thoughts on the matter, because I spend some time theorycrafting about mazes, but I don't know if I'll actually ever find the time to sit down and make one with GuideMe.
The algorithm I have making the maze is pretty much the one I have in the first couple posts, but I did modify it to have a chance of punching out holes in the dead ends. This opens the map up a bit to give it a lot of multiple paths so it isn't just a long snake. From here what I'm doing is hoping to use triggers and events to make the players want to walk from here to there in the maze doing 'stuff' besides finding the exit.
I haven't gotten to a chance to play test it, but based on how fun the other maze teases have been, I think that format should be enough to start.
For picking the exit node, I just picked a random spot that is 'far' far from the start. Far being like 70% of the width of the maze. I used as the crow flies, so it doesn't respect the layout, and may be closer or farther in actual walking distance. So far it seems ok with the mazes I've generated.
For Biomes, I haven't done anything yet to change the biome of areas of the maze (would like to do this) but what I did do was make 'themes' for a maze. Basically a new theme is just a directory of pictures like n.jpg, ns.jpg , nsew.jpg , representing each of the possible configurations of exits of a room. If i'm in a dead end with an exit on the north only, it picks n.jpg.
In one theme directory it's a hedge maze, in another I'm going to make it a mansion, in another it can be, well, whatever, the beach, in space, inside a whale, etc. It doesn't take too long to make a theme, just about 11 pictures or so from google and done. I think I have a random overview picture to pick from and a random exit picture to pick from when you first pick a theme.
I have a map in game. It's just a flag, when it's set, you will start recording spaces you've been in, then you can go off the navigation page and look at your map, it is basically the html used to display the examples in the first post I have.
Random encounters are triggered via an rpg like encounter chance, each step increasing your chance to bump into a random tease. There are also triggers that can be set via scripts, the triggers can get you into any other script based on you doing 'stuff' while in the maze or stepping on certain squares. Going to add a few more hooks but right now have a good amount.
As an example you can set a script to trigger randomly in 3, 4, or 5 encounters from now, then when leaving that script you can tell it to drop another trigger at your current location, so when you leave and come back, you would enter that new script. So for example you could make sure the 10th encounter is someone's house, then when you leave it, you can always go back to it by exiting the square you are on and going back to it.
I'm in full on story mode, I guess I like writing characters, or at least trying to. I have a lot of story stuff done, am debugging a few more encounters, then have, lets see, about 3 'story' encounters left, the standard ending(s), and the 'special' ending. I'm leaving the endings to do till last until I have more writing under my belt to make sure they come out good.
I'm going to start bulking up on the regular random teases you get as you walk now. But, I keep thinking about what you said in the denial mistress thread about playing your own teases and randomness. I'm trying to have every random tease I put in there at least remember that you've been back, but don't want to do fully random since I would like the text to match the pictures a bit, and to control the pacing more than a random script would.
What I think I'm trying to do is kind of psudo random it a bit, like you have 3 sections to the tease, start, mid, end, and you might have 3 options for the start, 1 for the mid, and 2 for the end, or something like that. That way you probably won't get the exact same tease each time, but as usual that is work. I am also thinking of having some that your actions the first time through affect your second time, so even if it is the same every time after that, you can feel like it's your fault the first time around.
Going to take a while. I'm making good progress but thinking I'll be ready ready in months rather than weeks. I want to get through it all solo first because I've already through I was done with the 'engine' part of the code but have been changing things around still as I need to actually make things work as planned.
I hope that it will be real friendly to add content to when I'm done, I feel like it is nice now, there are a lot of simple hooks in there and places where you just need to drop in more images and the like, and the guideme script engine just has so much flexability, you can really just think of the maze a place to walk around while you trigger the scripts.
