The Library of Babel is a game with very few mechanics but very complex ones. The main thing that the player will be able to do in this game is to walk around the rooms, explore the library and its multiple books and, finally, ask questions to a bird fountain. Although this may seem boring at first, we wish that by bringing smooth and intuitive gameplay we can make a game that feels amazing to watch and very interesting to play.
The first technical property we worked on was the map. This may look ugly in these screenshots but don't worry, our artist is hard at work making simple hexagons feel exciting. On these maps, you can select a door to be teleported to other hexagons (we still haven't figured this one out) and you can walk around the place.
The other main problem we've been working on is the books. The original library has every combination of characters possible so we thought that we could connect our game to the website somehow, or load the game with all the books pre-written. However, this would be very space consuming and kind of pointless so we decided to randomly generate text for every book open. We are still figuring out if we should store the books so that, if the player re-opens a book it remains the same or not but that will be a problem for a later time.
We got this mechanic running without a lot of effort (our programmer is a genius) so the next step in development should be making all the maps and the teleporting between them.
We have also decided to include the source code here in case it might help anyone.
I hope you all have been enjoying this project so far. We have been dedicating a lot of our time to this so hopefully the end result will show that.
Have a great day :)
Kai
