Rusted

A Rusty text-based game built from the ground-up.

Abstract

Welcome fellows 👀

I want to create a text-based game entirely from scratch. This will be both a creative and technical endeavour with a lot room for autonomy for everyone involved, think of it as a learning opportunity and something for the ol' portfolio 😉

Why have I chosen a game as a portfolio project? Game design is an endeavour that heavily leans on creativity as well as technicality, so in short: It's inclusive af. There will more than likely be a place for you in the development cycle no-matter your interests (as long as you are interested in something).

Why should it be text-based? Let's face it, we're not Bethesda. We don't have the resources to create a fully-fledged game in our free time without either killing ourselves with the workload or scoping the project down to the point it's barely an endeavour anymore. However, text-based games give us an out to this problem:

• They require little-to-no artistic contributions and the contributions that can be made are both meaningful and manageable in scope.
  • This could involve story-telling, text-art, sound design or world building.
• They are simple enough to make it feasible to build without an existing engine, but complex enough to be genuinely technically challenging.

What's my vision at the time of writing this?

I want:

• To take full advantage of the text-based medium and reimagine it for the modern world of games.
• To have some killer world building, lore, character building and storytelling.
• A game where choices are meaningful.
• A game that involves some genuinely impressive levels of background computation and simulation.
• A user-friendly interface that retains the aesthetic of Zork but is much more than a simple command line.
  • Think Undertale. Think using the style, sizing and position of text to enhance the experience. Conversations could have each speaker's contributions on different sides of the screen. Think auto-correct for available actions.
• Something that I can be proud of.

Inspirations:

• Darkwood
  • Surviving through the night in a fortified building / location
  • Scavenging a hostile terrain during the day to survive the night
  • Changing base in order to progress in the story, but each base increases difficulty
• This War of Mine
  • Recruiting people to aid in your endeavours
  • Each person comes with a backstory, traumas, skills, hopes and attachments which affects gameplay
  • Could maybe switch perspectives when accomplishing certain tasks? Combat, exploring etc.
• Dwarf Fortress
  • Designation of jobs and posts for members of the group
  • Every member of colony is a simulated entity
  • Rogue-like top-down map design could be adapted for a more modern audience?

Implementation Plans

The core of the engine should be implemented in Rust, C and C++ (with maybe some Go?). It needs to be as fast and thread-safe as possible. The user interface can be done in anything, even a Framework. (React Native, anyone?)