Milestone: Level Prototype Completed

Development continues on Emergence. It's still very early on into design and development of the game and it can only loosely be referred to as a prototype at this point, but a number of key enhancements have been made this week that take the prior version and move it from a single room / single enemy endeavor to a fully-arranged sample level featuring a number of different types of actors.

The level is built using a system of a number of prefabricated rooms and corridors that are manually arranged by the game engine into a simple test level as I have not yet implemented world generation. The game will keep this same level (or something close to it) for some time from this point forward while I work on the various systems that a game needs to be fun - skills, ranged combat, line of sight checking, artificial intelligence, an environment that is a bit more alive, a character progression system, and the ability to conquer the level and lower the firewall to move on to the next level, to name a few coming features.

Additionally, combat is now possible and the AI will attack you if they find themselves next to you (though they'll not seek you out yet).  It's fairly boring at the moment, but you can attack enemies in melee combat and they can attack you.

The game currently uses an encounter-based system where each generated room will have an encounter associated with it from a predefined list of encounters ranging from a lone help system in a room to a swarm of security agents to the dreaded garbage collector. Some rooms, such as the core of the operating system's kernel or the security checkpoint area, have fixed encounters in them that will not be present in other areas.

Along with the addition of combat comes the earliest win / loss condition checking. Right now, you lose if you die, and if there are no remaining hostile actors, you will get a "You Won" message. This is unlikely with the current degree of difficulty and limited abilities, but the code supports it. You'll even get a handy game over message letting you know how long you took to win or lose.

On a side note: I want to release to itch.io roughly once a week, though maybe closer to twice a week in the near future, with features that are fairly stable and work well together.  If you want to have a more up-to-date experience, you can play the development build instead, which is usually updated at least once every evening.