Corrosion has been my baby for the past four months now, starting out as an idea that was born from an evening of hanging out with my brother and mostly due to my brother’s enthusiasm and creativity has turned into a somewhat more complex game than I had initially thought it was going to be. At first I thought it was going to be a simple statistical crunch game, but then we got the idea to make the combat engine a tile-based game, which meant Line of Sight algorithms, path-finding algorithms (A*, breadth-first, etc.) and slowly but surely it’s becoming more and more complex. I’m slowly getting to the point where I start wondering if this is ever going to be finished, but then I look back at what we’ve accomplished already, and I feel better.
Currently, the game is not even close to finished. You can make a character of any race, mundane, a shaman or a mage (no adepts yet) and we have weapons, armor, drugs, spells and cyberware that you can purchase. Important things like rigging, decking and conjuring haven’t been implemented yet, but that’s a matter of time. Drone rigging is going to work similarly as conjuring, where you basically have a companion that fights along side you, or, if that turns out to be too complex, that acts as a buff to your own attacks and capabilities. Of each category (spells, weapons, armor, cyberware, etc.) we’ve only added a few items so that we can teach the overall mechanism that governs them, and we moved on. Weapon accessories are going to be important, as are various electronics that should be able to use during combat.
Just thinking about all the things that still need to happen make me go a little funny in the head, but luckily I’m having a lot of fun and I’ll keep plugging away until it stops being fun. It helps that I’m not the only one working on this, even though I have to do the majority of the work. So yeah, hopefully next week I’ll have some time to introduce path-finding and tweak the stealth/perception mechanism that currently exists (I don’t like it, it’s too crude.)
I guess one of the things that I struggle with is whether or not I’ll just be doing this as a way to keep myself occupied, or if this is actually going to be something that other people will enjoy and play. Also, what would I rather have, really?
