Why Re-Write?
There are a lot of contributing factors to this, I'll go on to list some;
This started out as a test, for me to see how I could create this sort of game, therefore it wasn't very well optimised or organised from the outset.
As stated in the above point, the game isn't optimised, the generation is carried out in the crudest way, and for me to implement biome-type gameplay would require so much change to the code, its more efficient to restart.
I'm at a point in the project where I can decide to re-write, because it would only take a few days of coding, granted it would be flat out coding, and I most likely won't do that, it will take a very little amount of time. Whereas if I waited for another few weeks, it would require way more work!
Due to an error on my part, I accidentally "lost" the terrain code, the code for each actual block, which made things very annoying, I managed to salvage a bit from a earlier backup, but looking back over it fixing errors, I realised it was both horribly organised and not commented AT ALL.
Due to the above reasons and some others, I'm very optimistic about re-writing it.
Future possibilities:
Biomes & Story
I hope that biomes will be centrical to gameplay, and may be the main storyline of the game. I've gone into very little detail on my ideas for story, but here goes:
This robot was once a mining bot for a colony set up on the planet, the surface has no atmosphere so its uninhabitable, underground however had possibilities for terraformation (terraforming is the process of making a planet habitable) so terraformation machines were setup underground, using a mining bot, but when the caves collapsed and the connection to the robot was severed, the colony had to move on to a new planet.
Now the robot has woken up! but there's no people left, so you take control of the robot!
While the user doesn't need to follow the storyline, you can mine, explore, find items and what not, but by following the storyline and finding new biomes, you get a better experience.
The biomes will be created around a center, they will have a circle bounding box, any block inside will be transformed into its biome-specific counterpart, some biomes will be natural, but some will have a machine in the middle, that when activated, will start to expand the biome, this makes possibilities of having to stop biome spread from already-activated machines, because they contain difficult enemies or some danger to the player, and give incentive to expand other biomes that may contain good minerals or mobs etc. Its a possibility that these machines should have a power-source, such as a basic-biome material that you put in to power it.
This is an example of biomes & centers:
Can flash handle this?
This is the question I'm asking myself, its a lot of content for basic mechanics of storyline etc, I'll try my best to code it in flash, because that's the platform I wanted to develop it on, because I love its flexibility in terms of multi-platform, but if it turns out to be too laggy, I may have to swap languages, which could set the project back a lot.
Last words for now
Well, I've got around 30 followers now, thanks so much for following me, I love to see interest in this project, and really hope that I can get a new development build up ASAP! Terraria just released an update, a massive one, so I've been playing tons of it, during which no coding has been done :P I also have A-Level coursework, so I'll be trying my best to get a few hours of coding in a day, or at least story development, or idea planning. Anyway, thanks for following!
I say rewrite the code. It will be a real painful few weeks, but it is completely worth it.
I had to rewrite almost 9 months of code, switching from Java Swing, to openGL. One of the greatest decisions I've made.
The game looks good, keep at it!