Engines NIFE Roadmap Shatterloop Game Projects
Deprecated Saepes Mundi Other Projects Blog

Shatterloop

shatterloop game progression

Posted March 28, 2020 by Xhin

Going to go ahead and finalize this since 90% of the systems are also finalized. This might change subtly as I build out more of the game, but the main overarching structure isn't going to change.

Game Start

You start out with nothing but the main screen. You get to pick a control scheme, assuming I have multiple ones (would like to have a mouseless mode and also a keyboardless mode in addition to the normal one, but we'll see). You get a short bit of text explaining how to move / interact with stuff and that various menus will appear as you interact with more stuff.

All of the menus are context-specific -- the Inventory and Discovery menu for example only appear once you've picked up resources. I'm not yet sure what the final menu will look like, but it definitely won't be a bunch of links stacked together like bricks. You'll also get some useful short help when you interact with brand new systems. Beyond that though I'm just going to heavily polish the UI.

Beginning Steps

  • Your first step is collecting surface-based resources -- Tree Brush, Tree Trunks, Plants, Bait and Rocks.

  • You can use your Leaping Latch to move between dimensions. The only thing this affects is the actual terrain that generates and what resources are visible. It doesn't affect anything else. It does at least make it possible to climb over procedurally generated barriers.

  • You extract Brush, Trunks, and Plants to get various types of resources. You might be getting hungry, and you might want to eat some of them.

  • In your crafting menu (also context-based), you can take these resources and craft some basic tools: weapons, armor and a fishing pole.

    Animal Resources

  • With your Fishing Pole and some Bait you can start catching Fish, which can be Extracted for additional resources. Do enough fishing and you unlock the ability to craft Lures as well as other menus/options (Fast fishing will probably be a Perk, though an early one).

  • With your weapons and armor, you can venture out past safety and encounter various groups of enemies. Fight them and gain additional resources from the corpse drops.

  • If you die, you respawn at the origin and the corpses that have dropped will disappear. You'll also acquire a bit of Decoherence every time you die which without a cure will make life difficult, so try to avoid dying!

    With these resources, you can craft better weapons and a fishing rod, but you can also do two very important things with these new resources:

  • Bypass your extractor's Atomizer to harvest Aether from anything in your inventory.

  • Use this Aether to place tiles to build a Base.

    Building a Base

  • To build a base, you have to have a valid Room -- placed or natural solid tiles and at least one door bordering placed floor tiles. Placing tiles requires Aether and it costs a lot more to place solids on floor tiles and vice-versa so it's beneficial to use your environment. It also costs a lot to place a Door. Right now the colors you can place are similar (but distinct from) the natural generation. This will be upgradeable and I'm not quite sure what that system is yet.

  • Once you have a Base, place an Atomizer. Use it to disintegrate some of your resources to give the Base Aether.

    Your next step is to place a Research Station to begin researching different technology. It also has several "Survival Packages" which can be obtained very cheaply:

    Survival Packages

  • The Explorer package will allow you to make Ropes, Bombs and Torches. It will also give you a Portal Gun, which in addition to its other uses can allow you to reach Civilization easily. This package is heavily pushed in some way.

  • The Alchemy package will make ingredients start randomly going into your inventory every so often when you collect a resource -- ie collecting a shortpig corpse might put a shortpig heart into your inventory instead. This will also let you place Alchemy stations in your base or make potions via Camping.

  • The Agriculture package will make Seeds, Spawn and Eggs start spawning from resources the same way ingredients are.

    All of these packages are optional, and some of them might make their way back into the game prior to base building depending on how I want to prioritize those mechanics (this already happend with Camping).

    These packages open up a lot of new systems, but the main one is the Explorer package, which opens up Civilization and the next level of progression.

    Civilization

    I'm not sure how yet, but something at this stage directs you towards the Spelunker Guild -- maybe the package was made by them or something. Regardless there's a lot of systems in Civlization that get introduced as you encounter them, but your main quest here is to get to the Spelunker Guild.

    Unfortunately, the Spelunker Guild isn't in the first civilization you warp to (unless you've explored reaaaaaally far and get lucky) -- you have to travel to their town first. Worse though, you don't have any money to actually travel.

  • So this is probably the point where you're leveraging shopkeepers to sell your resources, or get involved with the Thief mechanic to make some quick money. Or maybe you're doing Quests.

  • When you have enough money to travel, you'll also gain a map of the entire Province.

  • You can then travel to the town where the Spelunker Guild is located. They will give you a map of the cave holes in the Province.

    A lot of this section is still up in the air and I can't quite finalize it yet.

  • You also at the very least need a Rope to enter the cave layer, but a Torches are a good idea, as are Bombs, Grappling Ropes, more Ropes. And some better weapons/armor since the enemies are quite hard.

    Caves

  • In Caves, you're placing Ropes to descend down cave holes, using Bombs and Rope/Grappling Rope abilities to get past barriers and using Torches to actually be able to see.

  • The enemies down here are way harder. Their extractor drops might be somewhat different.

  • Your goal in the Cave layer is to collect Metals Ores, Precious Metal Ores, and Gashrooms. Also Magic Crystals if you can find them (they're quite rare). Further down you'll run into Altars and Aether Lenses, which have their own uses, but can also be destroyed for Quartzshards.

  • Metals will give you much better weapons and armor, which you'll definitely need moving forward. Precious Metals will give you Jewelry which have useful permanent effects while equipped. They will both contribute to upgrades for other items as well (lockpicks and fishing hooks for example). Both Metals and Precious Metals have to be processed into their non-ore forms -- so you either need a base Forge or you need to pay some money at a shop service.

  • Gashrooms are used in making Gashroom Bombs, which will create arbitrary Cave Holes, but are also used to blow up Altars and Aether Lenses. Doing this will give you Quartzshards, which can be crafted into Quartz or used in a Base to make Altar and Aether Lens fixtures there.

  • Magic Crystals are probably your first interaction with Magic unless you were really really lucky. Magic ties into absolutely everything but is rare and temperamental. Also quite overpowered when used well.

  • With enough Quartz, Metal and Precious Metal, you can create a Quartzlens.

    Dungeons

  • The Quartzlens is a key item that helps you find Dungeons/Shrines (collectively known as Ruins, and all of these names are pending) and also helps you interact with them, provided you occasionally feed it more Quartzshards.

  • In any case when you first activate it you should get a good idea of where the located Ruin is. You can use the town travel service to teleport near there.

  • Ruins have to be "Activated" -- this process requires finding the tile that activates it and feeding it Quartz via the Quartzlens in some way. Not sure what this looks like yet. Once Activated, the Ruin can be explored.

  • In general, Ruins are a collection of rooms which are progressively locked from each other -- you need to get keys from one room to access other rooms. Each room has some fairly nasty enemies and also a good possibility of useful Loot. I'm not 100% sure how the systems here work because I haven't finished that feature yet.

  • The end goal with all of this is collecting Mana Shards. There's one in each Ruin.

    Opening up the world

    With a single Mana Shard and some rare ingredients (feathers, leaves, precious metal) you can craft something known as a Manaflute, which will come with exactly one of the following single-use abilities:

  • Rebind -- This ability will open the current province up to other provinces -- you'll be able to get there with town transport systems as well as by walking there manually from one of the edges. Once you acquire this ability, you can also unlock the other four Manaflute abilities.

  • Water -- This causes whirlpools to rarely form in large bodies of water (oceans potentially if I get to that update). These whirlpools connect to the Water Plane.

  • Quantum -- This will turn a rope in your inventory (you get to pick which one) into a Quantum Rope, which will work as a normal rope with infinite durability but also lets you access Quantum Holes in level 10 of the cave layer to enter the Quantum Plane.

  • Entropic -- This will create a Mana Crack to the Entropic Dimension near a Ruin. I'm not sure what the exact conditions here are yet; it'll depend on how the Ruins development goes.

  • Fire -- This will create a Mana Crack to the Fire Plane near Lava.

    By going through additional dungeons, you'll gain additional Mana Shards, which will add additional random single-use abilities to your Manaflute. Once you've unlocked the Rebind ability, you can start working towards four additional abilities:

  • Wood
  • Wind
  • Earth
  • Ice

    These will all open their respective Planes, however they can't be done in the starting Province. I'm not sure what the conditions are for them either -- not sure either if you need just one extra province or several.

    Mana Cracks

  • At a Mana Crack, you'll interact with it using the Manaflute -- both to activate it and also to alter the terrain generation so you can actually get to the centerpoint of the crack. Not sure what this looks like yet.

  • Entering the centerpoint will transport you into its respective mana dimension (also known as a Plane). You can also enter Planes through Quantum holes or Water whirlpools.

    Exploring Planes

  • Each plane is based on one of the eight elements -- fire, water, ice, earth, wind, wood, quantum and entropic. It has terrain generation and hazards related to that. All the enemies here are that element. You can also find Magic Crystals of that particular element at a much higher frequency than elsewhere. Possibly some other resource types as well.

  • Each plane has some distinct materials that can be crafted into stuff that helps with the plane of its opposing elements. So for example, the Wood dimension will allow you to build a Boat that helps you navigate the Water dimension, while the Ice dimension will instead give you a pair of Boots that will help you walk on water.

  • Your overarching goal here is to collect a distinct Loop Shard from each mana plane. I'm not sure what the progression of that goal looks like. There should be *some* kind of civilization down here and also maybe some kind of structure generation, though I'm not sure what you're actually doing to collect Loop Shards. It should be fairly straightforward though -- you should be spending more time visiting each plane rather than grinding away in the plane itself.

  • If you collect all eight types of Loop Shard, you can then craft them all together into a Looplens. A Looplens is a massive upgrade to your Portal gun, allowing you to move to arbitrary coordinates (within reason) and also significantly improving the amount of Aether everything costs.

    The badlands

    With this upgrade, you can go well outside the bounds of civilization (which would take weeks of real-world time to use their travel systems) and start exploring an area known as the badlands (name pending).

    Here things are more chaotic than usual -- terrain palettes, resources, enemies, etc slip outside of the handcrafted bounds. Things will also change completely randomly (probably from the game seed itself changing, since it's hooked into everything). There's some minor bits of civilization down here but definitely no towns or anything.

    Your Looplens is effective at traveling huge distances in Shatterloop's world, but this effect is exponentially reduced the closer you get to the "edge" -- a region known as The Overflow because it literally hits the boundaries of javascript integers (there's also Lore explanations too though). In order to reach the overflow, you have to deactivate the Pivots guarding it, which is probably a lore-centric quest and/or ties into the main story in some way. I'm not quite sure what this looks like yet.

    The final culmination of all of this is an item known as the Soul's Pivot, which persists across replays and basically gives you the tools to heavily alter the game to your liking while playing. I'm not sure how much this item ties into yet or what it does exactly -- the game's systems are getting quite complex.

    • There are 1 Replies

    extensionEnable Post Pagination

    I need to update this post, but the new game progression looks like this:

    1. Collect Surface Resources --> Craft a fishing rod and weapon -- Done

    2. Collect animal resources and fish --> Craft an Atomizer Bypass -- Done

    3. Atomize items to place tiles down and create a base. Inside it, place research station --> Get your survival packages, which includes a portal gun. -- Done

    4. Use your portal gun to go to civilization. Sell or steal stuff or do quests to earn money to travel around. Do a bunch of NPC mechanics in order to find out where the Caves Ruin is. -- Soon

    5. Craft some Ropes, Torches, Bombs and Grappling Hooks and then enter the cave holes. Explore the cave to collect Metal ores, precious metal ores and gashroom bombs (which lead to quartzshards). -- Done

    6. Create a fuel refinery/forge in your base to turn ores into ingots, or use the shop service for that. Craft metals, precious metals and quartz into a Manaflute, gaining the Finder and Rune-Seek songs. -- Done

    7. Use your Manaflute's Finder songs to find Dungeons. -- Done

    8. Use Rune-Seek and Runestone mechanics to get Runecores and activate the dungeon. -- In Progress

    9. Go to all six dungeons, activate them, and get the six elemental mana songs from within. -- Done

    10. Use the mana songs to create mana cracks in the five colors of water and lava. Travel through those mana cracks to the appropriate mana plane. Go to at least three mana planes in a Triad to collect the appropriate shards to craft a Platonic Bypass. -- Mostly Done

    11. The Platonic Bypass will allow you to use the Unfurl song, which opens up quantum holes at the bottom of the cave layer and entropic holes on the outer edge of the world. Go to those dimensions and collect Virtual Bosons and Solid Light to craft a Shatterlens, which gives you the Chimera song . -- Done

    12. Use the Chimera song to go to different provinces, and create an Aether Loop between three of them at Aleph Conduits revealing the name of a Pivot Dimension. -- Nope

    13. Travel to the Pivot Dimension, learning the Uncouple song. -- Nope

    14. Use the uncouple song to turn Aleph structures and fixtures into Aleph Cores. -- Nope

    15. Craft Aleph Cores into various high-level items and also the Aleph Naught, which gives you the Zilchify song. -- Nope

    16. Use the Zilchify song to erase various things from reality, gaining various type of Soulshard in the process. -- Nope

    17. Craft the Soulshards into the Soul's Pivot. -- Nope

    May 11, 2020
    Quote Edit
    Xhin
    Sky's the limit

    Reply to: shatterloop game progression

    Username
    Password