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[REQ] Honey

Posted: 15 Mar 2011, 17:18
by Alige
Hello all, I thought of putting Honey in the game. Yeah, yeah we already made the icon, the item, etc... but you may ask yourself : "Why isn't honey already in game?" Well, afaik, somebody was supposed to create a quest about that but it didn't came out. This is why I need all of your ideas, young fellows! :)

I thought of something fairly simple, something that will require a really small part of new pixel art but still very important. I know that pixel artist are drowning into the sea of work but this is really simple.

Ok, here is what i'm thinking about. I thought of creating a new place designed only for bees/flowers/hives... This place needs to be build with the woodland tiles however i'd need some help on the pixel art for these:
  • A 32*32 Hive that could spawn some bees while we attack it (2 frames : Alive and Dead)
  • New, fresh honey that is just caming out of the hive. Can be dropped by bees.
  • A new NPC that would create the "Bottle of Honey"
Also, using TAW's mill would be great!
About the quest, I think that a NPC could transform the new, fresh honey from bees + an empty bottle into the current Bottle of Honey made (database name is "Honey"). After that, honey can be used as a strong healing item (I'm thinking of +400/+500hp). This depends on how much money the making of this bottle of honey we need.

I hope you have ideas, please feel free to post what you got in mind about that!

Ali-G

Re: [REQ] Honey

Posted: 16 Mar 2011, 06:14
by Alige
What I need for now:
  • A new NPC (a beekeeper) that would transform the honey taken from the bees and an empty bottle into a nice Bottle of Honey
  • The NPC's script
  • The honey dropped by the bees, fresh and with little hexagonal shapes
  • A "honey spoon" (called like this in french)
  • A hive, 2 frames : living and dead
  • A moving mill, the one in TAW is good enough
  • A new map where we could see the hives on one side + the beekeeper's house + some large fields with a lot of flowers, hives, etc...
These are pixel art needed.

I think that the hive could spawn bees. The more you hit it, the more bees you get. In addition, I'd like to make the hive stationary (of course) and with a lot of hp. Having a lot of bees to kill is quite nice for high level players.

Ali-G

Re: [REQ] Honey

Posted: 16 Mar 2011, 06:33
by nmaligec
Wow, sounds great! Its simple enough that it shouldn't take too long to get the quest scripted and the art done.

I would suggest that its the dead hive that drops the honey and not the bees. Bees make the honey inside the hive, they don't carry it on them. I know its a game and liberties can be taken, but it just makes more sense to get the honey from the hive itself.

Re: [REQ] Honey

Posted: 16 Mar 2011, 06:36
by Len
Ali-G wrote:
  • A 32*32 Hive that could spawn some bees while we attack it (2 frames : Alive and Dead)
If its a monster sprite it wouldn't need to be 32 by 32

* Me being random: it might make an interesting tileset (go inside the beehive kill the queen) *

Re: [REQ] Honey

Posted: 16 Mar 2011, 06:59
by Alige
@nmaligec: indeed, lets make the hives drop the honey. Maybe we can make it drop more than 1 honey at a time if it is really hard to kill...
@Len: I thought the same thing at the beginning but now that nmaligec said that hives could drop the honey, I can't figure out how to get the honey from somewhere else. At first, I thought of making hives a tile and that bees could be automatically spawned in a large amount. However, I prefer hives as monsters.

Ok, so now I need a pixel artist, a scripter and a map worker.

Thank you for your support,
Ali-G

Re: [REQ] Honey

Posted: 16 Mar 2011, 07:56
by Len
The hive could always be a full fledged monster (maybe a honeycomb walking around on legs) or a queen caring it around on her back...

Re: [REQ] Honey

Posted: 16 Mar 2011, 08:18
by Crush
A land animal with an insect colony on its back? Why not? The insects protect the animal from predators (and maybe food by attacking and killing other animals which the animal can eat) and the animal provides the colony with mobility to reach new feeding grounds. It isn't even that far-fetched for animals to live in a symbiotic relationship like that. I've seen a documentary once about fish and jellyfish forming teams to protect each other from their respective predators.

I also like the idea of a beehive-themed dungeon, but this would of course be a larger project.

Re: [REQ] Honey

Posted: 16 Mar 2011, 12:10
by Alige
I think we could start by a simple and really large map (you will see why after). In this map we will put lots of flowers (new types are not hard to make and this could be really nice). The hives can indeed be transported by an animal. This animal will attack and spawn bees (from his back). This will make the place quite hard for the players. And of course when the big monster dies, all of his bees die too.
Now, why a big map?
1) Lots of flowers
2) A place for the Beekeeper + his house
3) A new building (a huge bee house). It will be sort of a bee "crypt" :D The inside new tileset can be made later since we are already working on the crypt... This place can be done after the crypt of the ancient desert (I heard something like that... about an old tileset)

Ok, so now all we need to do is to make the map, the items, the quest, the npc and the buildings. With some pixel artist help we can finish that quite quickly (just after the crypt I hope). Of course we can create new quests or ideas later but for now if we have the map + the big hive, etc... I think it could be cool.

Ali-G

Re: [REQ] Honey

Posted: 16 Mar 2011, 12:18
by alastrim
About the beehive spawning some bees when attacked, in Br server DiogoRBG created a script and used the graphics from this old topic to implement the idea: http://forums.themanaworld.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2619

The script to summon the bees is like this(a function called when the beehive is hit):

Code: Select all

function   script   SummonBees   {
   set @map$, getarg(0);
   set @x, getarg(1);
   set @y, getarg(2);
   set @label$, getarg(3);
   set @n, 4 - mobcount(@map$, @label$);
   if(@n<1) return;
   areamonster @map$, @x-2, @y-2, @x+2, @y+2, "", 1049, @n, @label$;
   return;
}
The beehive looks a bit small in comparison with the bees, and the difference between the bees around the beehive and the bees spawned is also a bit strange, but the concept is interesting.

Re: [REQ] Honey

Posted: 16 Mar 2011, 19:07
by nmaligec
If the hive is going to be a monster/mob there is a mob skill that can summon other mobs. The summon skill has a cooldown time between uses and can even be set to have a random chance of activating.

I used this before to have the reaper summon slaves to fight for it. It is especially useful since it summons them around the master mob, so that if it moves so does the spawn point.

On a side note, I really wanted to use a scripting approach to get more control over how the spawn would happen. Unfortunately I could not find a way to get the coordinates of a moving mob through a script command. I was wondering if anyone knows of a solution to this problem?

re beehive map: you could have stationary 'honeycomb' mobs that drop honey when killed and are spawned along the walls of the hive map. This would seem like a more humane or less destructive approach to collecting the honey for the beekeeper (if he had to keep destroying his hives or killing his bees, he would be out of a job pretty quick). This makes the quest all the more interesting. An aging beekeeper can no longer take the strain of venturing into the giant beehive to collect the honey, so he enlists adventurers to help.

Though as pointed out a whole new tilset would be needed and this means a lot more work. Maybe it can start out with simple 2 frame beehives and evolve into beehive carrying mobs (more frames) and when there is time the release of a beehive dungeon.

Re: [REQ] Honey

Posted: 16 Mar 2011, 23:06
by alastrim
Nmagilec, The choice to summon the bees by script is because once you kill the beehive, all the bees summoned by the mob skill will die too, and it woudn't make much sense. :)

I remember when you asked on the forums about the possibility to get the coordinates of a moving mob through a script command... It would be great if it was possible. Did you have a specific idea that needed the coordinates of a random mob?

Re: [REQ] Honey

Posted: 16 Mar 2011, 23:22
by Alige
We need the same thing for the Reaper since its last frame is a purple flying skull. I'd love to see the Reaper transform into a skull.

Re: [REQ] Honey

Posted: 17 Mar 2011, 00:37
by Len
buzz_buzz.png
buzz_buzz.png (2.95 KiB) Viewed 3627 times
Just throwing a concept out there..

Re: [REQ] Honey

Posted: 17 Mar 2011, 00:42
by nmaligec
alastrim wrote:Nmagilec, The choice to summon the bees by script is because once you kill the beehive, all the bees summoned by the mob skill will die too, and it woudn't make much sense. :)

I remember when you asked on the forums about the possibility to get the coordinates of a moving mob through a script command... It would be great if it was possible. Did you have a specific idea that needed the coordinates of a random mob?
bees dying with skill, ya I forgot about that side effect...

regarding mob coords: well for starters you could do the moving beehive mob and avoid the slave death problem. Without getting into the details, I ran into a whole bunch of minor problems with the skill that I would love to be get around by writing my own logic for how/when/where to spawn. Don't get me wrong, there is still a lot of potential and a lot of cool things that can be done currently. I just want to be able to be more precise about it.

edit:
Len, that looks great! Did you make it from scratch, if so how long did it take to do? Thats amazing work for such short amount of time. I really like the caps on the honeycomb and the honey dripping out. Wow now I want to go have some honey

Re: [REQ] Honey

Posted: 17 Mar 2011, 04:11
by Len
nmaligec wrote:
alastrim wrote: edit:
Len, that looks great! Did you make it from scratch, if so how long did it take to do? Thats amazing work for such short amount of time. I really like the caps on the honeycomb and the honey dripping out. Wow now I want to go have some honey
Yes it is from scratch (I did use a picture of a honey comb as a reference), It didn't take very long as I could reuse the first little section I created to make the rest.