Introduction to Colonist

     Hello everyone. I'm creating this blog to document my progress as an independent game designer, beginning with my first attempt at a full game, currently under the working title of "Colonist". Colonist is a 2D top-down role-playing and adventure game set far in the future. At this time, Colonist has been under sporadic work since February 2014, so under three months. I am currently a senior in high school, and have only been able to work on the game in my rare moments of free time.

    Colonist Pre_Alpha version 16 can be downloaded from my MediaFire here. As of Pre_Alpha version 16, current features include:

•  procedural terrain generation with the Diamond Square Algorithm 
• The only terrain so far is grass, light grass, and stone blocks
• Mining of the stone blocks
• Items 
• Entities have an inventory capacity of 4 items, although the player can have a theoretically infinite amount of stackable items such as ammunition and stones
• Eventually the player will be limited by the weight of the items, and more types of items will be able to be carried with an equipped backpack.
• Current implemented items include:
• Kinetic Pistol and SMG
• Ammunition
• Pickaxe
• Stone Pieces
• NPCs with incredibly simple AI. They represent a robotic race (known as Biots) whose current goal is just to hunt down the player. 
• The Biots will follow the player, shooting at him with pistols when they get within range.
• They are somewhat capable of avoiding running into blocks.
• The Biots spawn in waves of increasing number around the player.

Immediate goals for improvement are, in order of intended completion, as follows:

• Improve general movement and navigation. Right now it is difficult for the player, and nearly impossible for the AI, to traverse 1 block wide tunnels. I will need to improve how collision detection works.
• Improve the AI
• I plan on implementing a proper pathfinding algorithm so that they will be able to navigate caves.
• A common problem with the NPCs at present is that they tend to get hung up on the corners of blocks. I need to find some way of mitigating this.
• Once I am able to get the NPCs navigating properly, I will try to get them to work together. The long term goal is to have proper factions, with large groups of AI working as if in an RTS game, or in many ways as one would expect an actual colony of people to work together. This is, of course, a long way off.
• Get some proper art and animations
• I'm not the best artist, as is quite evident. For the present, I intend to hone my skills somewhat. My main concern is the actual entities and blocks/tiles. They could do with a lot of work.

Beyond this, I have many broad ranging goals, which I will continue to discuss in future posts. As an avid gamer from a young age, I have always been quite interested in games. For a long time I have been interested in designing my own games. In November of 2013 I finally took the first step, and began learning Java through online tutorials. From then until the start of my work on Colonist, I spent a large amount of time coding simple games and improving my coding ability. I also discovered LibGdx, a game engine designed to work in Eclipse. The whole experience has been a great learning process, and I am excited to finally understand enough programming to work on Colonist from my own knowledge, without needing to Google everything. I intend to continue working on Colonist for the foreseeable future. I'm making a game that I find fun to play, and I hope you will too.