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Full Version: To-do List
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Things to do, in no particular order. If it vanishes from this list, it's done.
Easy tasks are in green. 'Easy' meaning I know roughly/exactly how to do them, but they'll take a lot of effort and time...



Genetics, Breeding, Coats

- element layer should not be one fixed colour, instead have 9 pre-drawn shapes. The orbs on a Minoan griffin could be balls of fire, ice, glowy smoke, thunder...
- and maaaybe not a fixed shape but many possible shapes;  fire stripes, ice spots, glowing orbs, stuff coming from under paws/hooves, etc. For simplicity, these won't be genetic. You'll have to apply an item or sth, to make your Fire pegasus start trailing embers from his eyes.

- add at least 2 marking layers on top of all others (but below paint). Got the genes and range of markings planned out.

-  add 'shapes' for the Additional, Beak, Eye and 4 wing body parts, so they're all effectively markings on top of Base (that solid layer never changes). They may be in the normal places, simply colouring those body parts... or they could be gradients, with Outer and Inner wings fading into each other... or they could appear elsewhere on body, like Outer Flights becoming stripes on the legs... or they could be invisible.

- decide on the 6 base stats every breed will have. Strength, Agility, Damage Reduction, Damage Nullification, Magic Power, Magic Resistance.  Then each creature's individual Size/Build/Aura will shift their breed's base stats, during battles, trials and other tasks (got this bit already).

- decide if each breed will have its own lifespan, typical number(s) of eggs laid per breeding, growth rate, etc. Breeding and aging scripts are all set up to use these things, if we do add them.


Gene Lab

Working, for now. Like everything else, needs nicer layout/design.
I like to save space and promote recycling, so you can't create a new custom griff, only edit an existing one. For now, at least.

- when pixel sprites are redone, use one for the dynamic preview. You could click a button 'Update Preview' and AJAX sends back the new sprite, of the correct breed/sex/age. Then you can generate the final coat preview. I'll try to make the pixel sprites as similar as possible to the main coats - same poses etc.

- you have a row in DB that stores the details of your current 'gene experiment', but whenever visiting the genelab page fresh, none of these genes are loaded on page; all the palettes are empty etc. This is nice if you like designing from scratch, but I expect some players will want to see the last-saved stuff, to keep tweaking.
...
Alternatively, players might want to 'load' the genes of a chosen griff they want to edit. So I'll need to figure out how to do this. Use AJAX to load all the palettes/options HTML, with certain colours pre-selected for every section.


Incubation

- nest enchantments were removed completely, and stones will be simplified so they only add growth points to eggs. A small rough emerald may add 3 points to one egg. A small piece of jet adds 1 point to 4 random eggs... etc. Some stones may add a lot of points but also damage the health, while others restore health.

- the stone-effects-looping-through-eggs is done, update it when new stones are decided.
- finish editing and deletion of nests.
- allow users to instantly send eggs/chicks to other users, if don't want to abandon them.
- decide which item is used for gene editing, and edit the gene-examine script to 'pay' with that item and unlock genes.
- finish gene editing panel, and take payment for every edit.


Raising creatures

- need to get rid of manage/roost pages and use single profile for every griff, with all their info and the daily update stuff. Visitors just don't see the 'manage' tab.

Got the 'Daily Commands' system working, aimed at adults. Tell them to seek fights, food, resources or just wander. All the possible scenarios, chances and outcomes are stored in DB. Currently there's only one location and about 40 events (2 variations of 20 events).
- later, events will happen depending on the location each creature is in. Should be easy, just loooads of stuff to think up.

- need to add the hunger system. Every day it'll increase a bit. Depends on the breed's diet and what location they're in.  Fish-eaters will be fine in watery places, and herbivores will be fine in lush forests. But in deserts, snowfields or mountains...? Then they'll find little to eat, and you'll need to start teleporting food out to them, for 5 MP per item.
Feeding is free if they're at a home or city location; they can just come to the pantry.

- linked to the above, you'll be able to teleport healing and energy boost items out to distant creatures. And other peoples' creatures, from their profiles?

- finish the Pack system. Add a workshop/page where you choose the griff, type of Pack, and AJAX checks if you have the materials. That adds a Pack to them, with a time limit.
Then update Pack every day to reduce the time left.
Then update maps so griffs can actually pick up/mine items and if have space, it's added to their Pack, else lost.
Then... maybe allow Masters to send items out to griffs, again if they have space.
Then add some test NPCs on maps, who want griff to have certain items in their Packs.



Already got simple Pack management with AJAX; you click button under each item, to discard it, or teleport it home and add it to your inventory, if you have MP.

(note, wearables aren't counted as items the griff is carrying. You'll be able to update their wearables at any time.)

- not sure what to do about juveniles and adolescents. Tweak it into a Training system, to shape personality and build?
Juveniles cannot leave Home location, so your commands will have to be play/challenge/take for walk/whatever.
Adolescents can explore only around the capital city (underneath your island) so that's a bit more range, stuff to do.
So maps 2 to 49 are free, for city.  50+ are outside the city, only adult creatures can venture out there.

- need to implement the (yet another new) skills system. Griffs start at 0 for all, and learn skills by doing tasks, or training sessions. Flight, Swimming, Navigation, Culture, Hunting/Ambush, Magic, Healing, Geology/Mining... etc.
Then, having high enough skills will allow NPCs to teach battle moves, or griffs to cross certain map obstacles, or do quick tasks...


- need to add flock size limit. More perches can be built, purchased, won, gained by seniority, etc.

- (maybe?) get rid of the single Nest page, which generates random eggs for anyone to take, free.
Instead, make more random nests around the continents, where users can find pegasus and dragon eggs, and rarer breeds.
So you'd have to explore certain forests or reach mountain peaks, to find certain breeds' eggs.

- definitely get rid (or hide) the feral griff page. Like with the eggs, you should have to explore the wilderness to find ownerless griffs and have chance to claim them.
Each breed has its own favourite place; for example wingless Minoans inhabit ruined palaces, and winged ones are in the forests around them.
Aquilas and Pandions can be found in many lake or coast areas, sometimes together (like eagles and ospreys in real life).


Crafting

Lapidary workshop is working from start to finish. Turn raw bits of stone into various quantities beads/slices/cut gems, or smaller bits of stone. Small chances of getting extra items at end, and some recipes have failure chances and will give you a consolation item instead. (haven't added those yet tho)
Recipes are laid out in DB, very easy to add more and tweak. You have to choose a creature who'll oversee or help the human crafter with each job, and certain minimum skills can be required. They'll gain EXP after successes, and (later) will have chances to gain more skill points.
- need to carry on adding the full range of mineral items... and plan what kinds of jewellery, wearables, other items can be made. Zzzz. There are so many!
- for making enamelled items, will need to add metal wire, gum tragacanth, silica? and such materials. Prob need to expand the DB table for more ingredient slots.

- planning a kitchen to deal with food items (turn ingredients into meals, which give more energy/happiness/extra effects compared to feeding creatures raw food).
- a forge to handle smelting and metalwork. Different to gemstone stuff.
- some other workshops, forgot now

Garden is working from start to finish, needs more work though. Like the lapidary workshop, projects are nicely arranged in DB table; very easy to add new ones or tweak current ones.
- need to add some placeholder graphics! Just shitty scribbles to show each plant/project's growth stages.
- need to update the AJAX so it sends back not just 'you did X, plant grew Y points' messages, but also the new plant name/points/correct growth stage image etc - basically so it refreshes the visual contents of the plot.
- planning to have 10? different garden layouts to choose from, and a range of backgrounds. Should be easy to load the different CSS sheets.
- planned how decorations could work (like arches, extra flowerbeds, rocks, paths, patios). Should work with the different layouts too; have set positions for every possible item in div.
- set up public garden pages, so you can view other users' gardens and harvest the daily stuff from their plots. Yes, this may cause wars. I think it'll be entertaining. Smile

Inventory

- bloody item usage... get it finished!


- finish showcase too. It's basically a gallery, a parallel inventory where others can see the items. You can move things into Showcase from inventory, or move them back.

- get rid of single Treasure items for griffs, and let them hold 10 or so items. Yet another parallel inventory, like Packs... these items also go with them if they're sold or die.


Battle

- basic AJAX arena system is finished. Need to take away energy from griffs afterwards, so they can't keep fighting endlessly.
- should also change their happiness depending on win/loss/draw, but first need to update the 8 personality traits, to figure out what will influence their mood here.
- must automatically close any open battles after X minutes - preferably without crons. Prob include that script snippet on a busy page somewhere.

- 60 or so moves are there. Need proper formulae, and different messages for Arena vs Wild battles.
- need to plan the full  list (what each breed knows by default, and can learn by levelling up or by teaching; only horned breeds can use horn attacks, etc)

Also working on SRPG-style battlefield, with 4 griffs at a time. Movement, 'collision' and character-switching is done, in JS.  All griffs' XY co-ords and current HP are tracked, on PHP side.
- haven't started choosing attacks yet. Ideally all the same single-battle moves and spells will be usable here, but some will have different area affects, maybe.
- need to add some enemies, with their own arrays of moves to choose from, and make them do sth whenever a griff comes within their range.
- must think about simple AI. Can't do pathfinding, so... enemies just move vaguely in the direction of the nearest/weakest griff? Confused Using XY numbers etc.
If there are impassable things in the way, umm. Either loop through all the surrounding tiles and see if any others are passable, else the enemy will be forced to do sth else. They'll have buff spells etc to do.
- should design a few different battlefield layouts (fortress, ruins, river, forest, rocky desert...) with backgrounds, impassable/harmful tile arrays, lists of monsters that can be generated there, and lists of co-ords where monsters and griffs can randomly start from. And then when attacking is working, test them with different parties of griffs, to see how different the battles all are.

- after the SRPG-style battlefields are all working, then start thinking about how you can challenge other users' teams. Far away idea though...

Menagerie

- err pretty much done, just need to draw more breeds of them, and finish the sales AJAX. And nicer layout etc, as with everything else...



Other stuff

- paypaaaaal. Can't be arsed to try yet

- when have own domain, add Google Ads, it sounds pretty easy.


- 3D models for every breed (for iso sprites) and learn to render basic skies, landscapes and buildings/streets. That should help with maps and backgrounds immensely.

- random events system needs editing so it's part of template, not included on pages. And make the events appear automatically, on div in middle of page, so user can't miss them.

- achievements/avatar system is done, just need art and more variety. Should make an AJAX function to check/unlock an av, when user does various things.

- redo quick tasks system, it's broken due to using old genes etc right now. And add lots more tasks!

- shops are done, need graphics and NPC designs. Day/Night times, or seasons, may have different stock and art.
- started adding NPC locations in city, like academy/barracks/seers' laboratory. Add NPCs in them, and other things to do.

- start tracking everyone's favour with key NPCs. When you talk to one, and be rude/do a task for them/buy from them, their number changes. You may have to choose between pissing off/confronting various NPCs, in some quests...

- add shops for cashing in your Arena Points and Seniority Points (from logging in every day).


(... mmmaybe? not sure about the following idea)
- work on full employment system. You find a job a griff qualifies for, enter them. The contract will range from 1 to 30 days. Every day they'll get a salary (if you visit them that day) which could be money or an item chosen from the job's themed list. They'll gain some EXP and skills each day, and probably happiness if this job matches their personality.

- other side of employment system:  NPCs creating offers (or in some cases, having a fixed number of roles, such as military commanders' steeds, which many griffs will have to jostle for).
Users will also need to employ griffs in order to build more perches, expand their garden, build furnishings for home, etc. That will mean creating offers, and after the contract is filled and done, you'll receive the built thing.
Sometimes the salaries will be subsidised (for newbies mainly), other times you'll have to pay upfront. Like 5000 tokens to hire 2 griffs for a 2-day job, building a new perch.

- Ideally, jobs will be in groups rather than individual;  a user wanting to extend garden will require 5 griffs, for digging/fencing/guarding/watering/something. Only when all 5 jobs are filled can the project begin. And after X days, it'll be done and all 5 griffs will be jobless, with some EXP and skill gains.
- Not sure how to plan that DB table yet, though.
Have a table for 'job projects' with 5 slots for griff id/skill/requirement/salary/etc... or treat them all as single offers, linked by one job ID number?
Yeah, that's probably better. Generate the 5 (or however many) individual offers at once. Then when looking at that job's page, fetch them all, and see if they've been filled with a griff ID or are 0 still.

Your Island

- actually, islands! You can collect up to 20. They come in 5 sizes and some different terrains. You can change the terrain, upgrade the size, and add various buildings or features like forests, mines, citizen housing, roosts...
Not sure about buying/selling islands with other users... but you can find Contract items which generate a new island for you.
Need to finish all this.



- interior of your fortress will be explorable. Decorate each room with furniture, rugs, banners, whatever. Purely aesthetic...

- allow you to position your griffs around fortress, either as eye-candy (a line of grey Achaemenids looking like statues, eek) or actual guards (starting fights with any visitor who runs past them). They'll have to be at location 1, your home island.



Lore, World contents

- keep designing more NPCs, come up with their backstories and which locations they can be found in, on certain days... and what kinds of items/quests they offer...

- wooorrrlldddd maaapppssss. These PSD files of floating island layers are massive and still just basic terrain... no details, rivers, landmarks, province borders generated yet. D:
But when they are finally ready, I've already got some jQuery and image map code waiting, for a nice highlight effect when you hover over a province.
Then it will be easy to use AJAX to look up some info on the selected province, count the numbers of griffs there, etc.

- I have the idea of the maps starting off blank/dark, so you have to send explorers out there to 'fill in' each tiny province. Ofc this'll be tracked in DB and you can get achievements for getting to landmarks.

- have done some idea-writing about 12 Seasons (each one month long, with unique environment effects and events, and a special deity-ish creature that only appears that month). Haven't got round to drawing any yet. The whole site's CSS should change per season too; from icy, to stormy, to lush flowers, to bright pearly metallic...

- Day/Night cycle uses user's timezone, not server time. It should affect explore maps, and CSS/NPCs/illustrations everywhere. Locations change at night, with different NPCs unavailable.

- note to self, DON'T try a weather system. It's nice but just too much. Day/Night + 12 Seasons is already a lot of versions for each map... seasons come with weather anyway.

Player avatars

Users will be able to shapeshift between a human, griff, pegasus, dragon, centaur, etc. But it'd also be quite nice to use the creature bases, so you can shift into any breed, and customise your coat by changing genes. 1 MP per gene change, so anyone can customise whenever.
Then the same wearables, palettes etc would be useable for players and creatures. Plenty of natural colours for those who'd like to stay humanoid.

- (maybe?) allow mage to reproduce with own flock creatures. Yeah, magic, it's weird stuff lol.
This would help you with getting desired markings etc on normal creatures (if you set up your own coat to be 'perfect', and hopefully you'll pass down some good stuff).
But it's a very distant idea. Zero priority right now.

Wearables (Adornments)

- redo this so there are 10 slots, where any wearables can be placed freely, and the layers jiggled around, using jQuery drag and drop, or something.

- note, wearables will probably NOT be included in the imagick-generated pics. Only the actual creature bodies will be handled there, and wearables can be overlaid using CSS, on profile pages. That will allow you to play around with live preview, using JS to switch around layers.
I have some old JS script from my griff generators, that allows you to merge many transparent PNG images into one. So there can be a page somewhere for players to click a button and output an image of creature coat + all wearables. If they want to use that fancy image for graphics or whatever.

Other Customisation

- must redo custom coat system. Should put them in a temp folder, and then upload to Amazon S3 bucket once approved.
- need to redo the gallery browsing options, and applying coats, using AJAX.
- need to set up a moderation page where entries can be accepted, declined (including a function with auto-punishment in case of serious broken rules) or edited by mods/admin.

- think about how to handle backgrounds. Currently they're all individual items. Should there be a central gallery where you can browse the whole range, and preview any griff in them, before buying/using? ... yeah, that sounds good. If you don't have that BG item in inventory, you can also purchase it right there, for a gem or sth.


- should also have a few background (and foreground) layers, to be overlaid with CSS, on profiles. So you can put extra plants, animals, buildings, weather, spell effects etc around your creature's scene.

- (maybe?) allow 'Pattern' items that partially cover griff with a colour/texture/other design an artist painted. Like the standard paint markings, but with custom contents. Flowers or rainbows or tartan...
This layer would need to be added to the imagick script, so it's cut out in the right body shape.