The Volcano Game

You are on a mission to explore the volcano.  As you leave the open skies behind, you crawl into a lava cave and descend into a series of underground tunnels.  You bring a paper and pencil with you to map out your explorations, but your compass doesn’t work down here.

You soon discover that some tunnels lead back to same rooms.  You are constantly redrawing your map, linking together connected rooms in an attempt to make sense of the tunnels.

The Volcano is an experimental prototype, and an attempt to portray the idea.

The Game

• At its core, the Volcano Game is an adventure game in a Graph-based game world.
• At its mantle, the player has 1 life, and survives through turn-based combat.
• At its crust, it has a web interface that works nicely on both mobile and desktop.

How it was made

• The interface and game logic is written in plain HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
• The graph is rendered with help from vis.js  http://visjs.org/
• It began with experiments for making random graphs, written in Python.
• Source code available at https://github.com/fractalbach/volcano

Future Development

• Infinite Levels
  • The current level is already randomly generated, but has fixed seed values.
  • Extending it to infinite levels won’t be difficult, but will requires some balancing so that it feels like a natural progression.
• Different Types of Rooms
  • Standalone puzzles
  • Mini-games
  • Treasure rooms
  • Items and materials

Another Idea: Adventure through the Game Jam

The main feature of the volcano game is the graph-based tunneling, which is built off the fact that each room is in 1 of 3 different states from the perspective of the player:  undiscovered, unsolved, or solved.  The mechanism that solves a room could be anything.  There could be an entire game of its own in there!  In this prototype, I added combat to convey the concept of solving a room.

One possible version of this game could have scripts for rooms.  Or be based on itch.io games. When you discover the game for the first time, it starts.  If the game enters the state of solved,  then it unlocks links to other games!  In a way, we traverse the web like this through links.  The only difference is that we don’t need to “solve” a webpage.

Imagine if each game in an itch.io Game Jam is a node.  If each game had a way of declaring its state as “solved”, then you could make a graph-based adventure game using all of the Game Jam’s games!  All you would need is a set of solvable games.  These could be labeled manually by human players, and then fed into a program that randomly generates graphs and paths through the games!

If nothing else, it might create a fun way to navigate through and play tons of new itch.io games!

Feedback plz =) 

I like getting any kind of feedback or criticism.  So, if you are reading this right now, please feel free to comment!