Elderlore

Source: GameSetWatch Column @Play

['@ Play' is a monthly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre. This time, he continues a length series on roguelike Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup by examining its intriguing - but complex - skill-based gameplay system.]

In Part 1 of this article series, we examined the experience and skill advancement system of that rising star of roguelikedom, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. It’s a mixture of a straight-forward level gaining mechanism and a practice system that balances out the problems with characters doing something over and over just to gain skill by requiring he kill monsters to provide the fuel for advancement.

Like how Nethack, in many ways, is best experienced playing via telnet, with a community score list to place on and player ghosts to encounter, so is Crawl (although it tends to make Crawl games harder rather than easier, due to ghosts being so much more dangerous there). The two primary places you can play Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup online is at crawl.akrasiac.org for the current stable version and crawl.develz.com for the current development version. Both versions are ASCII only, and Windows users will probably have to install PuTTY. Helpful instructions can be found on the akrasaic site.

(Warning: This is a full examination of all of Crawl's many skills. This article is quite lengthy!)

Continue reading "COLUMN: @Play: Crawlapalooza Part 2: What's With All These Skills, Anyway?" »

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Source: Umbrarum Regnum: The Codex of Eréimul blogs

Today I had a brief moment of peace and quiet at home, which I used for doing something creative. I created two video tutorials for people who would like to get serious about coding with libtcod. I managed to record two screencasts, detailing how to compile the latest SVN development version of the library and how to set up an IDE (Code::Blocks) for developing libtcod-powered applications.

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Source: The Chronicles Of Doryen

Mingos has just posted two videos on youtube that show you how to compile the latest svn libtcod on windows with MingW and how to create a basic hello world program with it in Code::Blocks. Click on the pix below to see them on youtube. You can also find the links in libtcod’s tutorial page. This is only the beginning of a bigger series that will show you how to make your project work on Windows and Linux using the same Code::Blocks project. A big thank to him. This series will be so much better than the (really poor) existing documentation…

Source: Nolithius.com » roguelike

The driving force behind the Dance of Death title and concept was a popular and often resurrected discussion on r.g.r.d.: how to make the warrior class something more interesting than a close-range mage.

In other words, is there a way to differentiate the way a fighter interacts with the world from that of a mage’s?

Traditionally in RLs, combat with a fighter consists of using a main attack and supplementing it with special attacks that use up energy. This pattern is evident, and certainly deliberate, in the Diablo series (games which, at the very least, have been largely inspired by roguelike design). In fact, many RLs take a similar route as Diablo, requiring both mages and fighters to use mana—with a somewhat notable difference being that mages often lack a basic attack and must rely solely on spells.

A solution I concocted for this trope, and one which I since have seen discussed on r.g.r.d. as well, was to have fighters play more of a spatial game, insofar as having their movement pattern implicitly affect their type of attack. Hence the name Dance of Death. I have a loose design idea for this concept noted down, and will soon be at a point in the RL’s development in which I can implement this. For the time being, however, I am concentrating on building a very basic, vanilla RL engine.

Source: Dwarf Fortress Development Log

I fixed up pack animals and an overall lack of minerals on the map, and 40d17 is alllmost ready. One of Zach's dwarves grew attached to his trousers. Then all of his military dwarves decided not to drink and died of thirst in the barracks while training. Then it crashed. The work continues!

Here are some List thread posts: 2/4/10 1/26/10

Source: Slashware Interactive - Development Log

This is probably the last development day before a week-long trip, away from civilization.

Managed to advance a lot, only minor developments and polishment left for 0.0.15

Stumbled upon yet another Internet Exploder issue, the “supersleight” script which fixed the PNG issues is now causing the table backgrounds to render up messed up. I will have to look for an alternate solution.

Pics

Done:

• Enhance appearance of all new screens (browser, work, expedition setup, expedition inventory)
• Cant create expedition, must define a default location
• Allow choosing main expedition for expedition transfer, validate location of expeditions
• Require Axes for chopping
• Auto refresh “simple job” page when a pixal finished
• Show items on the world browser

Pending

• Show other expeditions on the map
• Show items info on pickup screen

Aprox. Work Time: 683:30 (676:30 + 7:00)

Source: If Error Throw New Brick

The single largest source of comments on the tech demo II had to do with setting up keystroke bindings. Although I had setup what I through was a good default and provided a way to change it, people did not think this was adequate. It seems that other roguelike players are very particular about their keyboard settings. To address this, I've split the key bindings into two sections. The first

Source: Dwarf Fortress Development Log

All right! I am still recovering from lack of sleep, but the 14 hours I just put in should help. The site was down for many hours yesterday, due to more traffic than my current configuration could handle, so the web server software has been replaced due to the heroic efforts of Baughn and some Footkerchief with a little watching-in-awe and dictation taking by myself. I now have over 200 emails that require some action on my part, and I'd like to input existing issues/categories into the bug tracker before it becomes over-burdened. That could take a while. I also need to catch up on crayon and ASCII art rewards, some of which have been languishing for some time. Then I'll start in on crashes and the merge with the OSX/Linux/SDL/improved-OpenGL port. I'd like to thank everybody that has supported the game, in whatever way, and I'll be back on it once I unbury myself.