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Gamedev update.

  1. Iron ore, iron bars, and iron pickaxes were added. I did this as a way to test what happens if I add one stage deeper into mining skill progression.
  2. Lead ore and lead bars were also technically added, but they don't do anything yet.
  3. Woodcutting was added, with basic wood to farm and basic wood boards and dowels to craft.
  4. Fishing was added, in the form of active and idle fishing.
    • Idle fishing is the same as other idle farming.
    • Active fishing was inspired by onio.club's fishing game, where it's a minimal reeling in and timing game.
    • Active fishing was interesting to implement because I needed to figure out how to have the process simulated entirely server-side. The client starts and active fishing moment, and whenever they press to "reel in", the client just sends the action intention to the server and it's validated there.
  5. Idle resource cooldowns were added per resource node. This was built to mimic OSRS where a given resource instance has a cooldown before the resource replenishes.
    • I basically realized I needed to add in friction for idle farming. Otherwise a single iron ore vein in the starter location makes it totally worthless to go find any other ore vein anywhere in the entire game. Now, with cooldowns, I can make finer adjustments on how valuable clusters of nodes are.
    • The upside is that now all idle farming can be done actively at a faster rate than passive farming...provided that a map has enough nodes and the player enough patience.
  6. A carpenter's table and anvil were added.
  7. NPCs were "abstracted" into entities, so now they can appear on different maps at different times. The javascript loads whatever is the current state according to the system clock.
  8. The codebase was centralized to the idle game local to my computer. The neocities site was adjusted to be a side branch which uses the same data schema for maps and entities. This way I can just drag and drop the data into neocities and the code handles actually figuring out what assets should be displayed when the user loads the page.
  9. A debug console was added, so now I can test game states.

A lot of the actual numbers are really off still, but the systems are coming together. I've put in a lot of time making game assets (like item icons), and I'm sad that those aren't visible to people in their full glory yet.

The thing is that I am DESPERATE to write some actual characters and scenes, and not just one-off bits. So I'm trying to work on how to do that. I scripted out a basic premise for the game, a basic main character, and an intro scene. But I wanna figure out how to handle a basic scene script, and I'll have to draw my vision for the early game.

I'm still trying to figure out how to do combat, since I think that's a bit part of not just OSRS but farming games. Crafting cool armor and getting utility out of it is an "out" for the resources you grind for. I have design notes on how to make active and idle combat work.

Right now my plan is to keep fleshing out the basic necessary game mechanics, and work on populating more skill depth for the skills I have so far. I've been learning how to set the project up on a server with Supabase. Once I have up to lv30 worth in skills and craftables set up, and some way to introduce new players to the game's story, then I'll probably start sharing that around.