Elderlore

Source: Rogue Wombat

This thread at the FreeBasic forums managed to elude my watchful eye, as I don’t often open the Beginners forum.  However, Rick Clark (rdc), the champion of FB Roguelikes, has managed to build an impressive online tutorial walking through the creation of a Roguelike game.  I’ll be reading through his posts and can commend what I’ve seen thus far to you:

http://www.freebasic.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15821

Source: Rogue Wombat

I don’t have time to post updated screenshots or gameplay notes, but the recent release of Brogue 1.3 is phenomenal.  If you haven’t played it before, it’s now fully cross-platform and is even better than the last time I reviewed it.  There’s new terrain, monsters, leveling, visual effects, and much more.  Check out the release notes in the forum (never knew that was there : ) and then download and get to playin’.

I’ve also found a stellar RL for the iPhone called 100 Rogues that I look forward to reviewing in full.  It’s the first RL that I’ve actually found enjoyable to play on the device, even though both the original Rogue and Nethack have decent ports to the system.  I’ll say why in a review down the road…

Source: Rogue Wombat

So, this year’s 7 Day Roguelike competition has come and gone, and we’re all left playing through the dozens of awesome entries.  I’ve played several of them and have plenty more to go.  I’ll start to post reviews with links to the appropriate r.g.r.d threads of those I’ve played so others can get in on the action!

RULER by Slashie (Cross-platform, Java)

I’ll start with one of my favorites.  RULER is an empire building Roguelike with randomly generated worlds containing various terrain and resource types and inhabited by the uncivilized tribes of various peoples.  Your goal is to start settlements, recruit soldiers and construction units, and duke it out with your neighbors as you advance your civilization.  Combat takes place between armies, so you always have one unit leading the attack against an enemy.  I don’t know much more about it other than I never seem to lose a fight, but it’s a cool concept in which your point unit is the one doing the combat and leveling up while your reserve units are just there in case of loss.

This game succeeds in playability and entertainment.  The music strikes an appropriate mood, and I enjoyed watching my settlements grow over time.  The fact that this was made in 7 days shows in various minor bugs that might impede gameplay but are more likely to give you an unfair advantage (i.e. building settlements without any settlers in your army).  Still, it’s a great proof of concept that could easily become my favorite RL from Slashie with a little more polish.  For those that are familiar, I found this one much easier to get into than his Expedition.

Verdict: Very impressive for both its scope and its accessibility.  Play it a few times and encourage Slashie to give it more love in the coming months.

Math: The Roguelike (Requires Megazeux, a cross-platform game engine)

This game is impressive both as a technical achievement and a novel gameplay idea.  In Math: The Roguelike, your equipment are various bits of pseudo-code you combine to write powerful attack and healing routines.  The various items are scattered around simple, randomly generated dungeons that are populated with a single monster whose strength increases the further you descend.  With the right combination of items, you can quickly dominate your foes.

This game is an impressive technical achievement because of its platform… It was developed as a Megazeux game!  Holy cow!  I programmed little MZX games over a decade ago with my friends and never imagined someone could achieve this level of complexity in the platform.  The gameplay controls are simple, the dungeon generation is good, and the UI is actually quite attractive and useful.

Verdict: Excellent game good for at least one solid play.  Afterward, shop around for other Megazeux titles on DigitalMZX.  There are quite a few solid games there.

Earl Spork (Cross-platform, Java)

Earl Spork is the only side-scrolling Roguelike I’ve seen in the competition thus far, and along with Slashie’s MegamanRL and Spelunky is one of the few that I’ve seen.  Gameplay is very simple and involves jumping over pits and onto various pieces of food to clear the level.  You can also attack by bumping into enemies, but landing on their heads is much more powerful.  It can be a little tricky with those high flying peas, though.

The other gameplay element is glasses full of water that must be shot with fork tines before you can pass them.  Watch out for the water, though, as it will kill you.  You’ll want to reserve your tines to break glasses, as you have a limited amount and only seem to get more as you level up.

Verdict: Play it once to learn the game mechanics and again to try and beat it.  Not one of my favorites but a fun diversion nonetheless and a solid game for a 7 day competition.

Source: Rogue Wombat

Well, I’ve gotten as far as I’m really going to get this week.  I’ll be spending tomorrow making up for this evening on a term paper. Still, I at least achieved a walk-around demo and worldmap generator, but there are plenty of things yet to be done.

Download the demo. (Windows .exe + FreeBasic source)

What the demo includes:

• Walk around with the arrow keys / numpad (w/o Num Lock)
• Collect minerals from magenta % (mineral deposits)
• Deposit minerals into your Terrapack (the yellow &)
• Watch the map unveil as the Terrapack levels up

It does not include a message handler, so the flavor text that shows up when you boot is all you’ll get.  Just watch the status bar on the left to see changes as you harvest minerals and deposit them at your Terrapack.

I’m happy with the variation I’m getting as the worldmap expands, but I’m definitely going to have to work on it a bit.  You’ll notice different tiles and colors (for visited sectors) are used depending on the elevation and humidity of the sector.  However, the randomization I’m using required me to limit the ranges used for different tiles to show any variation at all.

Next on the docket, post-competition, is to clean up the code I’ve thrown together to get it to this demo state.  After that, I’ll work on changing the movement code a bit.  Right now it simply won’t do to add in monsters and their movement because of a bottleneck I created with a function that checks the tile the player is trying to move into.

I’m definitely open to ideas / feedback… I know this is pretty raw material, so no worries if nothing comes to mind.

Source: Rogue Wombat

Alrighty, the week is half way over, and I do have a little progress to report.  It turns out I had the beginnings of an engine developed for an old idea based on the Brother’s War series of Magic: The Gathering books.  (It was to be an experiment in a pure magic-user RL with an emphasis on area magic.)  This gave me a little bit of a leg up in preparing my walk-around engine, but not much more.

Since 7 days isn’t near enough for me and I have plenty of other things to do with my time, I had to intentionally narrow the focus of my RL.  I’m going for a smaller map size (25 x 25) with no dungeons.  The random map generation will be all overworld, and as long as I don’t put too many rocks on a single level, I shouldn’t have to worry about pathfinding.

Presently, I’m going to have a world map that is 21 x 21 sectors large.  You start in the center sector and will expand out from there as your Terrapack increases in power levels.  As I mentioned above, each sector will be a 25 x 25 tile map that includes terrain elements based on the elevation and humidity of the area.  These values are randomly generated as the map expands based on the elevation and humidity of surrounding tiles.  This means you could end up playing completely on mountain tops, or you might find your way into a valley full of springs and ponds.  I’d like to have unique vegetation tiles, but we’ll see how much time affords me to do.  If nothing else, I have good plans for continuing the project!

I’m going to start by simply populating maps with minerals to harvest.  I decided mining ore should wait for underground exploration in a version of Terraforma to be continued post-competition.  If I can get the distribution right, you should never get “stuck”.  There should always be enough minerals to keep your Terrapack powered up, but it could get tricky in later stages as new areas of exploration become farther and farther apart.

The game HUD is pretty simple.  I’m centering the display on a 640 x 480 screen and include three regions as pictured below, a status bar for player stats and inventory information, the main map area including your coordinates and the elevation / humidity of the current sector, and a sector map on the far right that will display a tile of all the inhabitable sectors with a different symbol for elevation and color for humidity.

I’m still excited about this project, and I’m happy mostly that I’m coming up with ideas for expansion after the competition.  That’s really what this was all about for me… preparing something I can develop over the course of the next year until the next 7DRL.  Hopefully I can still implement combat before time’s up, but I won’t hold my breath. 

Source: Rogue Wombat

I decided to throw my hat in the ring for this year’s 7DRL on a whim.  I’ve read about it in the past and played various 7DRL’s, but I’ve never considered writing one.  I have a hard enough time finishing projects when there aren’t any time limits!  As I said in my announcement post, I’m quite sure I won’t come close to finishing, but that won’t stop me from starting!

Originally, I didn’t have a name, just a vague idea that I wanted to play around with a continually expanding game map through a Terraforming theme.  I’ve scrapped the idea of a wrap-around world, as it doesn’t make sense conceptually.  Here’s the basic idea of my new work in progress, Terraforma:

Your cruiser landed on the planet Aegon weeks ago and set to terraforming almost immediately.  Within days, settlers were venturing out from the cruiser to the edges of the newly inhabitable planet surface.  They carried with them Terrapacks, experimental lightweight terraforming devices that operate remotely in tandem with a mother generator.  When placed on the edges of inhabitable land, they apply biodiversity algorithms to the forming in their particular areas.  This allows new regions to open up with unique flora and fauna.  Detached from the mother generator, Terrapacks can only operate 12 hours on battery power.  As such, they’re designed to take advantage of solar power and in the absence of light to turn the nutrient rich soil and ores of the host planet into power.

About 6 days ago, the mother generator when silent.  The Terrapacks continued in earnest but were separated from the guiding artificial and human intelligence from the cruiser.  The skies became clouded with ash, leading you to believe the worst has happened to your spaceship.  Still, you have to make your way back somehow to find out exactly what went wrong.  Unfortunately, you have to keep your Terrapack operational to stay alive and cannot venture beyond its boundary of habitable land and atmosphere.

What creatures and surprises await as you feed it the planet’s minerals and ore to stay operational?  What will an isolated Terrapack dream up to populate its new planet?  You’re about to find out…

Details on gameplay:

• You start with a single 15 x 15 map screen, your Terrapack at the center.
• You have to harvest minerals / ore and carry them to the Terrapack to keep it powered up and to expand its reach to open up new territory.  This leveling up results in new screens being opened on a random edge of the inhabitable area at the rate of one additional screen per level of your Terrapack.  (i.e. it starts at level 1, so powering it up to level 2 will result in the exposure of 2 new inhabitable areas to search.)
• Screens may include dead settlers you can loot for gear, other working Terrapacks you can network with, food and water as created by your Terrapack, and caches of minerals / ore that you have to harvest.
• The type of terrain on new screens will be random but based on the bordering screens.  I’m going to use ideas from the map generation of Realm of the Mad God and determine terrain based on elevation and humidity.
• Higher level generators populate screens with more powerful monsters. Yay!
• To that end, the gear in the game will include weapons, healing items, and technology items.  There will be nothing to wear, so I won’t have to bother with complex inventory programming or UI.
• Eventually, your cruiser will appear on a screen.  It will be randomly placed at a distance of at least 7 screens from your starting Terrapack.  I won’t give away any endings just yet, but you’ll find out what went wrong and then receive an end game score based on your performance in the game.

And now let’s see if I can’t work up a little map generation!

Source: Rogue Wombat

My first introduction to Roguelikes was ADoM, and it will always hold a special place in my heart.  I’ve played it for hours, but I’ve rarely progressed beyond one or two quests / dungeons.  It’s epic, but possibly a little too epic for players like me who can’t devote gads of time to develop a playing strategy that will get me anywhere near completion.  The problem is the lighter Roguelikes I’ve played don’t come anywhere near providing the atmosphere that ADoM does, and it’s the atmosphere that makes the game so appealing to me.  I even bore of the original Rogue after a while, with its spartan use of ASCII and super-simple feature set.

However, my estimation of other Roguelikes may have just recently changed with my discovery of Brogue thanks to a link from the Kharne blog.  Simply put, I can’t recommend this game as highly as I ought to to get you to go play it.  Unfortunately, it’s a Mac native game, and I can’t vouch for the Windows / Linux ports that the author links to.  Let me whet your appetite enough so you go through the trouble of figuring out how to play it…

Brogue.  It’s like Rogue in its simplicity, but it adds a level of visual appeal that I literally haven’t seen in any other Roguelike.  It’s like ADoM in the way it shapes the atmosphere and mood of gameplay, but it requires far less attention and time to learn all the game mechanics.  But don’t let the simplicity fool you… there are plenty of cool features to discover each play through!

For example, Brogue has a limited but fun set of monsters inhabiting its dungeons.  There’s the monkeys that steal from your inventory and run away, the toads that cause you to hallucinate (displayed through some fun visual effects), and the acid blobs that corrode any unprotected weapons and armor upon contact.  Even better, monsters will imprison their own kind and torture them.  I literally walked into a room with a kobold tied up that was getting beaten by other kobolds.  I dispatched them, freed the kobold, and gained a faithful friend.  Brogue gets monsters and allies right.

Let’s not forget the brilliant dungeons you get to crawl, too.  The use of various terrain tiles is quite fun, even if most are simply there for flavor.  Still, don’t start a fire in the swamps or you might get an explosive surprise.  Even better, in addition to terrain types, Brogue also adds cavernous pits that you can jump down to the level below and underground lakes inhabited by eels and krakens.  Get into deep water and any unequipped items in your inventory might just float away to be recovered in the shallows.  Then there are the molten lakes of lava that, well, you just don’t go there.  Brogue gets dungeons right.

What about equipment?  Well, the offering is admittedly simple, but that’s part of the appeal.  You have one stat to track, strength.  That will affect what weapons and armor you can equip.  You can also find rings, staffs, wands, scrolls, and potions to dabble in the arcane.  Everything you pick up will be unknown until it’s used or identified, so tread carefully… some potions when opened cause explosions and poisonous clouds of gas to envelop your player.  I used a wand of obstruction on accident and was stuck for dozens of turns until the affect wore off.  The localized area affect nature of these spells is pretty slick, and the visual presentation is very interesting.  Brogue gets magic right.

I could go on, but I’ll stop there.  This game is loads of fun, easy to get into, and a treat for the eyes.  I highly recommend it and would simply say… beware the monkeys.  They’re filthy pickpockets and deserve to be dispatched in their sleep.

Source: Rogue Wombat

So, I actually already keep a blog at http://www.bywombats.com that functions as more of a personal blog and point of interaction with the Drupal community.  I wanted a way to segment my roguelike brainstorming and posts, though, and needed an excuse to try out WordPress.  Thus the Rogue Wombat was born, an underground haven for me to continue my odd wombat meme and talk about anything rogueish that comes to mind.

One thing you should know about wombats… they’re lazy bloggers.  I don’t expect you’ll hear much from me, but over time I do hope to populate these pages with my roguelike reviews, thoughts, and plans for my own elusive roguelike project that can never seem to get off the ground.