RMMV Desktopia: A Desktop Village Simulator #nofreegamejam

[Mike-Turtle]

Help us out by wishlisting us on Steam!
Being created for #NoFreeGameJam
Made in MV/MZ for PC and Linux​

As idle as you want: 'Desktopia' simulates a fantasy medieval village along the bottom of your desktop, allowing you to work, watch, or play something else while your village grows. You can jump in at any time to make the big decisions, to go off to battle, to set up new constructions, or to just harvest resources - the choice is yours!

​

Features:

• A completely original approach in pc gaming: designed with functionality in mind, Desktopia allows you to use your PC for multiple purposes on a single monitor.
• Clever UI: with resizeable pop-out windows which can be arranged anywhere on your screen.
• A quirky simulation with:
  • 42 (and counting) unique constructable buildings across five technology tiers.
  • Villagers each with unique needs which change as your village grows.
  • Enemies, intent on destroying your village.
  • Soldiers, heroes, and priestesses to counter your enemies.
• A playable character which levels with your village, so you can jump into the action whenever you want.
• Detailed logs and statistics arrayed in beautiful charts and graphs.
• Spy Mode: focus the camera on any villager, any-time and watch as they live their life.

​

Gameplay:​

• From nothing: grow a series of villages along a dangerous and treacherous road: from a single house to a bustling metropolis.
• Earn money (or let your villagers do it) to construct new buildings and unlock new features.
• Recruit and upgrade soldiers to defend your village from undead, bandits, fairies, and demons.
• Hire heroes to lead the charge against your foes and destroy their strongholds.
• Decide on building low-tech villages with few needs, or risk it big by aiming for high-tech villages with needy villagers.
• Grab your sword and head off into battle alongside your warriors, or watch the action from afar!

Screenshots:

Spoiler: Screenshots

The Gamejam:​

• Being made for the 'No Free Game Jam' and following all three themes:
  • Tiny World - Yes!
  • Control is Limited - Limited, but at the users choice!
  • One tool , many uses - A desktop PC is not usually suited for idle games as they take up the full screen. Desktopia allows your computer to be used for multiple things at the same time.

About Us:

We are a team of three. Artist, coder, and writer (and we all dabble in everything) We've been working on Evergloom for over 2 years now, and are in the final stages (the last 10% that's 90% of the work), so we've decided to take a little break and use our established team to try something different!

 

[Mike-Turtle]

Devlog: User Interface

 

[Mike-Turtle]

A devlog which talks about the 'road mechanic' and shows off a little of the ABS.

 

[ShadowDragon]

it looks really cool, if the huds/window parts are made outside MV,
it's really unique.

keep up the nice work.

 

[Mike-Turtle]

Thank you! The menu windows are just HTML popups, really easy to do but not really practical for games that can go full screen. What's cool though, is they can easily read from and write to the parent window, even calling functions and common events.
It also means you can do all the text, buttons, and formatting using css. I'm currently working on upgrading the build menu, and I'm loving how smoothly it's going, and how easy it is!

 

[alice_gristle]

I gotta admit, it doesn't really sound like my type of game, BUT, y'all have a really attractive layout, super pretty li'l houses and CUTE AS A FIVE QUID BUTTON LI'L VILLAGERS like what the heck!

 

[Mike-Turtle]

Thank @alice_gristle - honestly, only one of our team is a big fan of idle games and it never would have occured to us to make one if not for this gamejam. It is nice to take some time off from our more typical RPG Making to do something a little different!!

 

[alice_gristle]

Oh ya, extra props for branchin' out and doin' stuff you wud not normally do!

 

[ShadowDragon]

some people like idle games, they start it, be afk, return, build, afk,
repeat process

but I'm also curious how some read from html files inside mv.
I dont know much html, but it's something unique, so dont give up

 

[Mike-Turtle]

@ShadowDragon - I'm starting to see the appeal. It is the easiest game I've ever worked on. I can literally have it playing while writing code or editing sprites, and I only need to look down occasionally to check enemies are not rampaging and setting fire to my village!

As for the code: I have a separate HTML file for each window (just like the one for the main window but without all the rpg maker js dependencies) - and open it using.

// Set window properties
var left = screen.width-930
var height = screen.availHeight-400
var set = "popup=yes,height="+height+",width=930,left="+left+",top=0"

// Create a new window and get it
tech = require('nw.gui');
tech = window.open('Tech.html', 'mo', set);

// Name the window
tech.onload = function () {
     tech.document.title = "Desktopia Build Menu";
}

Then the new window can access any code from the parent just by prefixing it with window.opener - so window.opener.$gameVariables.setValue(1,"Hello World) would change game variable 1, in the database, to "Hello World".
It's basically just a local webpage at that point and you can use any web design elements within it.

 

[Mike-Turtle]

It's been a crazy week in the hectic world of GameJamming Desktopia. It started well, with the inclusion of charts.js' beautiful charts...

But went quickly downhill when we realized there was a huge problem with our pathfinding scripts and... dreaded lag. You see we use large maps (our smallest is 512 tiles wide), and have removed all the default code that stops events doing stuff while off screen. This is fine (I can't even begin to imagine why the map limitation is even there?!?) - but not so fine when you add a load of complicated pathing scripts running. It took our whole team 3 DAYS, which is an age in Game Jam terms, to find a solution, but we eventually did and things are back on track. Furthermore we've managed to finish the next technology building tier (steampunky-electronica?): some of which you can see in the various screens below.

 

[Mike-Turtle]

With over a month to go on the #nofreegamejam, I'm hesitant to say this but... Everything is going great!!

This week we've added a gratitude mechanic to the game which allows the player to collect gratitude orbs dropped by villagers and throw festivals! I love these. They're so fun and cute, and bedeck the village in festive bunting! I've included a few screens below!

Spoiler: Festival Screens

We've also really beefed up how moody the villagers are by adding new modifiers... villagers getting grumpy in the rain for example.
We still have a lot to do but I'm now certain we'll have somthing to submit!