Noxico

“I challenge you to name one other game where you can play a transsexual ewok jester.” — The Spoony One

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First of all, those of you playing Noxico builds from Bitbucket may notice that talking to townspeople may or may not crash your game. The error may be a little confusingly worded but it boils down to missing conversational data. This will be fixed naturally as/if/when someone writes better conversational data to replace the stupid and/or stand-in data that’s there now.

Others who played may have had a crash regarding the bodyplan data where the game couldn’t find the “felinoid” data. This is because I was overhauling the plans a little, replacing the felinoids with the species that they directly inspired; the felin. The crash was simply because not all references were adjusted yet. No, anonymous reporter, it was not a typo.

Second, I’m heavily considering to remove the introduction dream from the game. It seems a silly way to teach the player how to control the game, let alone in one or two big ol’ walls of text. So instead I’m planning to replace that with a tutorial mode, which would be enabled from the character creator. Its default state would be taken from the settings file, and basically it’d let the game teach various things as they become relevant. This is why the latest commit adds image support to MessageBox – so our lovely mascot Chelsie can “host” the tutorial and appear as a sort of part of the interface, at the player’s side of the fourth wall. I’d like your opinion on this idea.

Third, I really need to nail down the setting here. Fantasy? Sci-fi? What even is this?! Weapons, clothing and such are all over the place.

Well, that’s about it for now. See ya next year 😀

Oh dear, is that a new character creation backdrop? Yes it is, and it’s dynamic, showing a representative image of the chosen species and sex combination. If a given combination has no matching image file, it’ll try to use just the species. If that isn’t possible, it uses a generic fallback.

Not dead yet.

In Noxico right now, there are three basic kinds of man-made wall: outer wall, inner wall, and fence.

In codepage 437, which the new Noxico tileset is based on, box drawing characters are laid out like this:

Note that there are two styles – single and double – and not all combinations are represented.

In Unicode, the box drawing characters are like this:

Three styles, two of which two have all sorts of combinations, and a certain logical order.

Now, what I’m thinking of doing is to keep the actual single and double box drawing characters from codepage 437 as they are now, but move around and extend the wall characters to match Unicode’s order. Have the thin and thick lines map to outside and inside walls, and the double lines as fences.

And then, when buildings are placed or updated, have the whole map just simply brute-force it all as far as which exact character to draw where goes.

Thoughts?

Tested the new actual intercourse groundwork. My target had her underpants on so I couldn’t insert. I took off her skirt, still couldn’t insert… and before I could pick “take off her lacy panties” she pinned me.

Luckily, she took the panties off herself shortly after.

So. I just spent some time on the new sex system. I found this foxgirl and used her as a test subject.

For some reason she climaxed using the male variant. I thought it was a bug in the code or data… but it was just a trap.

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Should Noxico go graphical? If so, in what way?

• 25 of 43 responses say that it should be kept as it is now. That is, Unicode text in truecolor on a nonstandard console size. With 58% of the votes, this is the clearly winning opinion. Still, I’d like to get back to you all on that later.
• Three say that it should be 16-color ASCII like it was way back when I started.
• Eight say it should be graphical with low-detail sprites, and seven say it should be highly detailed.

Audio?

• 29 responses agree that Roguelikes shouldn’t need music. What I’d neglected to say originally (because it’d been a thing since forever) was that not installing Music.mix, hiding the FMOD DLL, and/or setting the volume to zero completely disables the music anyway if you don’t want it. Still, at 67% this opinion wins and I have to do nothing.
• Six of you think dynamic music is a good idea, despite having all of the same problems the other options have.
• On sound effects, 27 of responses, 63%, think sound doesn’t need to be in either. 11, 26%, think minor MegaZeux-style sounds would be good. If I forego music, maybe getting sound effects without FMOD would be a nice challenge on the side…

Sex systems

• 38 responses, 88%, think the new sex system should be continued on. That’s great, thanks guys.

Now, the interesting part: world map generation.

Noxico used to generate a complete world map and place towns and dungeon entrances on it. This took a fair amount of time and involved a lot of useless wandering through the wilderness to get from town A to town B. So I removed all that and added Expectations, where each town and surroundings would be generated on demand and you get from A to B through a travel screen that simply listed all known locations. If you pick a location that doesn’t exist yet, it’s expected to be visited at some time, and generated according to those expectations.

• 20 of 43 responses, 47%, say that time and file size aren’t an issue.
• 16, 37%, say Travel Mode is sufficient.
• Five agree with the 20, but with the request to speed up the initial generation.

So I pulled an old copy of the game from source control and reimplemented the old world generator, adjusted to match all these interesting changes since then. For example, there are fewer biomes and instead of a grid, boards now connect as graphs.

And then there’s this guy, who is willing to help make it better and hopefully faster.

So that’s it for the survey. Thank you for your opinions. I’ll get back to you all about that graphics thing later.