Gianny Bunny made his first step. In the beginning there was a story to tell, a challenge maybe: take the most coward animal in the forest and make him become a hero. I outlined three chapters of the story first, and now I got my hands dirty working on the game engine. I chose C# and MonoGame, hexagonal tiles and Tiled as my initial map editor (though I had to mod it to get the hex support). Sprite rendering, movement and animation are implemented using Artemis (a pretty badass Entity-Component-System framework).
The gameplay will be mainly about eating stuff, as that is what most rabbits love the most (I own one, I know). Think of it as "Pacman meets Zelda" kind of game, where you have to eat a certain amount of food to clear the level, but also all the screens are interconnected to each other with tunnels so there is a world to explore and new areas will become accessible as you eat through the different vegetables (hay, cabbage, spinach, basil, turnip and, at the top of the pyramid, carrots). Rabbit diet needs to be balanced so there will be limitations to which vegetables you can eat (eg. 1 cabbage tile every 3 hay tiles). All of this while the evil fox is chasing you every step of the way...
At least that's the game I think I want to make. I might deviate from the original path eventually, but if I do it will be for a good reason.
My next challenges:
- Link two maps via tunnels (currently tunnels only work within the same map)
- Implement "munch hay" ability on hay tiles (and pooping too!)
- Implement "find the tunnel to a new screen in the last tile after eating all the hay"
Happy to hear any comments you may have, but also this is mainly for me to keep track of what I'm doing. Writing things down really helps!
