Well, Wikiwiki was not what I was wanting to do since the beginning.
In face, it was just a small game I was making while waiting the inspiration to make what I really wanted: a thing that mixes RPG and space shooter and collectible stuff and procedural generation - TONS of procedural generation!

This post is to describe what I made so far:

The idea is to make a game that requires minimal player input during action - to make things more… different.

I made only the battle system, no menus, no selectable ships, no perks, nothing yet. The game itself is totally undone, but the skeleton of everything is already coded.

Well, let us go to what is more interesting: what is done so far and a brief explanation of everything I made and how it works:

1. Procedural ships that mimick okd Space Invaders ships, but totally procedural using an algorithm I invented just for this purpose. They are visually 2D, but are applied to 3D planes to allow cool stuff to happen. They are random and you probably won’t see the same ship twice - even if two ships are similar in appearance, their internal stats are always different!

2. Motion patterns and my “onboard computer” system:
   Since the player doesn’t input commands directly to their ships, they need to be controlled somehow. How? Every ship has an internal “computer” that runs a program - yes, a program - very simple, but yet a program.
   Every ship has internally informations about their movement pattern and all regarded to their weapon systems and general control stuff.
   During battle, this computer is always on, reading the internal program to determine the flight pattern and which weapon is optimal to be used - based in the range of the weapon and the distance between both ships in battlefield.
   The ships aren’t smart. They just move the way the program tells them to - and every ship has an static motion pattern that runs ignoring whatever the other ship is doing, and this is where strategy comes into play, because choosing the best motion pattern for every battle means the difference between a fast win or an astounding defeat.

3. Weapons are procedurally generated, too. All of them, and there are BILLIONS of possible weapons, and every ship has 1 to 5 different weapons with different ranges - the maximum distance the shots can travel before vanish - speeds, angles, amounts - from 1 to 10 projectiles per shot - and different elements to add a little Pokémon-esque strategy to the battles.

4. 2-D wrapped arena. In fact, the game occurs in 3D space, but everything moves in 2D. Since the ships have no AI and just execute endlessly their motion patterns, the space wherein they are dueling is wrapped in the two axes. This means that if a ship flies up and go out of the screen, it shall go all the way down and reappear in the bottom of the screen. The same happens with the left and right sides. This is also a small tribute to old Atari games, where the playfield was limited to one screen and the only way to provide freedom of movement was to wrap the sides - like in the game Combat, that was one of my inspirations for this change of paradigm.

5. What isn’t done, but shall be:

Well, the game will focus on duels between the player and the game opponents, a set of virtual entities that will roam through a humongous universe with TRILLIONS of worlds. The player will be able to duel with them, and many players will have different ships and different amounts of ships to fight you.

There will be a system of badges (Pok´émon again?) to reward the player for achieving supremacy in a certain planet or sector, and maybe tournaments with prizes that may vary from simple medals to perks to improve the players ships.

There will be PERMADEATH in this game - yeah, it was made to be UNBEATABLE and INFINITE, with no real sense of progression aside from the amount of wins a player can achieve before all his or her ships are all destroyed. Every perk and upgrade a player manage to add to a ship will be permanently lost as nothing can be transferred from a ship to another, adding a sense of loss that is a constant in real world.

The player will be able to go down to planets and walk through them - they will present the mazes and backgrounds you could see in the first Wikiwiki alpha, but now, instead of trying to avoid walls, the player will just wander around searching for perks and money to buy new ships or improving existing ones.

Since I am too n00b to produce a real online experience, I am planning to add a system of IGC (interchangeable generative codes) - strings of text a player will be able to share with others outside of the game to share ships, weapons or items. I am still unsure about the viability of that or if this is the best way to add real life interaction, but for now it is something I am thinking seriously about.

Saving is not present yet, but I’ll try to implement a system to record player progression - but it will probably be composed of various files, each one will be a copy of an ingame data array - ships you have, badges you’ve got, inventory and money - and probably will be something anyone will be able to hack, since I am quite unexperienced with file creation in this level of complexity.

WHAT YOU MAY NEED TO RUN THE DEMO AND THE PREVIOUS WIKIWIKI ALPHA - I forgot to add the information before, and I am quite unsure of what are the real requirements to play, because people that have the DarkBASIC Professional application installed and some more hardcore gamers experienced no problems running it.

Things you may need are:

Directx 9c runtime libraries and C Framework (a couple of DLLs that you’ll need to copy to your System32 folder).

I’ll not post the links to download these things, because I believe a search on Google may solve them, but I strongly recommend to check at the forums of TheGameCreators, the enterprise that produced DBPro, because I got my copies of these items in there. Google it, don’t be lazy, I am having trouble enough coding, be nice to me and do the work yourselves. Thank you for the comprehension, folks.