as mentioned on #ludumdare I’m doing a warmup game.
it is an absolutely silly micromanagement game about trying to keep the interdimensional Sacred Library Tome Retrieval System running, which happens to be an extremely overcomplicated clockwork system that reads a database for a title entered via an oldschool typewriter, stuffs an arm into one fragment of reality in the void where the book was located in the database, pulls out the requested book, and then deposits it at the station, where the user gets their book and leaves.
originally the player was going to control the Sacred Library Tome Retrieval System directly, but I couldn’t think of anything fun, so I decided to do a plan where the player would take on one of the system’s engineers, hardworking individuals who are devoted to keeping the world’s most impractical library reference system working. Get donations from happy customers, use customers to buy metal, use metal to make parts, place parts into system when they break, and take the old parts and smelt them for even more metal!
I’m currently at the step where the inventory’s fully working, so I can start implementing stress points (each of which will have different breaking rates and durabilities. Input rods will break easily, and require swift replacement while cogs can be left to rot for a bit should you be busy elsewhere) which will eventually start working at lower efficiency and need to have parts replaced, and the basics of crafting are in, you can use your metal points to make new items, and smelt scrap metal extracted from the broken parts of TSLTRS for re-use. There are no graphics yet (aside from a font and quick bg to ensure my routines with plane drawing work), so the player is a cyan cube, the world is a set of blue walkways that are somewhat transparent. I figure I should focus first on actually making the gameplay work, as I have no idea if this idea will be fun at all.
Regardless of that, I’m having fun implementing it, and this should take me under 48 hours to complete. Only thing though is that I’d like to make complex background paintings for the environment, but that probably won’t be practical. TSLTRS might not be seen in its full glory until later. I don’t even know what its full glory is in the first place. TSLTRS is a idea I came up with at like 10:03 AM while walking out of school on Monday. I barely even know what the Sacred Library looks like in the first place, so maybe not being able to do the background paintings is a good idea, until I can look at some pictures of gigantic clock towers.
