Temple of The Roguelike Forums
Development => Programming => Topic started by: Slash on May 14, 2007, 01:28:24 AM
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How did you get into roguelike development?
I remember I was surfing the web for a new RPG to satisfy my needs after destroying all Final Fantasy games when I found ADOM... after playing some not very sucessful games I decided it was time to make my own... this matched with the time when I was learning Java, so it was a perfect mix up. After some failures and some rewrites I finally got into what seems to be a good path :)
What about you?
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I haven't yet, but I'm planning on doing so in the very near future. I am going to try and learn C/C++ over the summer (no easy task I know, but I'll have a lot of spare time and enthusiasm) and one of the first projects I want to attempt once I consider myself fluent enough to undertake anything would be a roguelike. (Partially because that means I don't have to focus on assets such as art and music, but more because roguelikes are awesome.)
So anyway, I'll probably be around here for a while, asking annoying questions and stuff. ;D
And hi, by the way, I'm just a wannabe game developer who happened to wander in. I'm liking the site!
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How did I get into roguelike development?
From a love of roguelikes, of course. I am a programmer that loves RLs. However, I played Moria on my Mac some 15 years ago, before I ever saw a line of code. Here I discovered that being killed over and over again with no chance of survival or winning can be incredibly time consuming and fun of course. I did however win moria with a dwarf priest, i think. It was the sheer challenge of RL games that kept me playing them.
Since then I have played every RL I could find. After years of ADOM, I got bored waiting for the next update so while surfing the net I discovered rec.games.roguelike.development. I rejoyced at the fact that people were still actively creating these games, until I realised the progress was like watching snails paint growing grass. Two games stood out for me at this time, copx's Tower of Doom (warp rogue) and Kornel's DoomRL. Reading and playing the progress of these games gave me the idea to write my own. Three months and 30000 lines of code later I was addicted to roguelike development. However about this time I realised how much time and effort went into one of these games so my development dwindled off. I still actively develop but at a much slower pace.
Roguelike development is the most fun programming experience I have ever had. Too bad you cant get paid doing it.
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Roguelike development is the most fun programming experience I have ever had. Too bad you cant get paid doing it.
yeah... I wish I could be paid for living a roguelike life, but for that to happens roguelikes would have to generate income.
Perhaps it could be done, if enough people gets to know about them the genre would make its own niche willing to pay for new games, or subscriptions, or make significative donations... but I guess only time will tell
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Quite honestly, I'd hate to see paying roguelikes. Already UnReal World annoys me to no end. Right now, it's got the kind of niche I like. Well, except for Krice...
Right now, people are playing and programming this for fun, pleasure, for a good time. If you start commercializing, I think the community wouldn't be as great as it is now, everyone willing to discuss and help a bit. Well, except for Krice.
Donations are another matter, but you can't really rely on them for much.
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Quite honestly, I'd hate to see paying roguelikes. Already UnReal World annoys me to no end. Right now, it's got the kind of niche I like. Well, except for Krice...
Right now, people are playing and programming this for fun, pleasure, for a good time. If you start commercializing, I think the community wouldn't be as great as it is now, everyone willing to discuss and help a bit. Well, except for Krice.
Donations are another matter, but you can't really rely on them for much.
A straight hit on the nail. I just think the same as you.
Including the Krice point :P.
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I haven't yet, but I'm planning on doing so in the very near future. I am going to try and learn C/C++ over the summer (no easy task I know, but I'll have a lot of spare time and enthusiasm)
I'm working on a side-project C++ tutorial site. You (or anybody else) wanting to learn C++ might be interested in checking out http://www.learncpp.com (http://www.learncpp.com). It's still in it's infancy, but I've been adding new content regularly.
I originally got into Roguelikes when I found Angband 2.4 "Frog knows". At the time I last learning Turbo Pascal in school, so I tried to write a roguelike in Turbo Pascal, not knowing that Pascal had a 64k code limit. Once I hit that limit, that was the end of those dreams. I found Nethack and ADOM mentioned on various Angband sites and got hooked on those. Eventually I learned C/C++ in college and made a few more attempts at a game, but just didn't have the experience to pull an ambitious project off. More recently, I found Crawl and it got me reinterested in the genre. Now that I've been working as a C++ programmer in industry for many years, I have the experience to write a large project, so I figured... why not? So I started writing Subterrane, which has now been in development for almost a year, even though it doesn't show. ;) There's a lot of functionality present for which only a few details have been implemented -- eg. a framework for potions, but almost no potions implemented. Once the game gets toward beta, I think it'll come together really fast. But it's not there yet.
My recommendation if you are a new programmer is start very small. Think 7DRL scope without the 7-day constraint. You can always expand your game later.
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I played ADOM and Nethack and thought "I could make a game like this. But mine will be better!" So, I learned to program my calculator, then QBASIC, then C++, then Java. My game is being written in C++ right now, and if I ever worked on it, I think it could be pretty good. >_>
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My interest was piqued when I first played 'Amulet of Yendor', Don Knellers port of hack, doing floppy swaps for saved games.
"Its ascii! It cant be that hard......"
a-huh...
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I was an old roguelike news fan back when all I knew was Delphi. That was a long, long, long time ago. Near the beginning of RLN. I did one of the first few articles. I loved roguelikes from the beginning. Alphaman I played a lot before I even knew of roguelikes. My favorite roguelike is ZAngband.
Edit; I didn't know this post was that old D: I should have set the cutoff limit to like, a day or something. Sorry for reviving.
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Worry not about thread necromancy. This post is like... immortal :)
Any roguelike project in development?
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Worry not about thread necromancy. This post is like... immortal :)
Any roguelike project in development?
I work quite a bit implementing different dungeon generation algorithms, but I've yet to work on an actual roguelike. I'm mostly a dungeon generation sortof guy I guess. Most recently I did a dungeon generator for a 2d sidescroller. That was fun. I have been debating starting some sort of roguelike project. Just not sure what.
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Well, knowledgment of environment generation is always valuable... may be you would like to write up some articles on it or produce a generic library for people to use if you can work on your own roguelike :)
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I think the community wouldn't be as great as it is now, everyone willing to discuss and help a bit. Well, except for Krice.
Well thank you.
My adventure began.. way back then. Playing Hack, Larn, Rogue etc.. and Nethack (most important) convinced me that I want to make a roguelike too.
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That was a pretty stupid comment on my part. I'm sorry. And yes, I'm being honest... I had been browsing r.g.r.d for awhile, and was a little annoyed by what I saw. Still, I should've kept my mouth shut there.
I look forward to playing Kaduria, and everyone else's roguelikes :)
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That was a pretty stupid comment on my part.
Perhaps not so stupid after all. I have been an ass in rgrd, but I hope it's now over, because I have had a personal enlightenment.. a kind of.
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Dont worry about that, everybody has its own personality..
I have seen "worse" people there, Twisted One (a.k.a. Neo) comes to mind :)
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I'm glad I've never met him ::)
Anyway, it's great to hear that :)
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Let's see... I've loved roguelikes since the first time I played them a long time ago. :-* When I was learning to code in college I started one that blew up too fast as my imagination got ahead of my ability. :o I ended up with nearly unusable code. :'( But you could push boxes around! Since then, I've learned a lot, and realized that I need to slow down to speed up. ::)
So now its a hobby, and we'll see how long it lasts!
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At the moment I'm not programming any RL because of lack of time, but I think I will go on with a 1 or 2 years old project.
What I've found annoying in the RL I've played, is the interface: I know most of the RL player love to see ASCII game and read 4 or 5 times the manual to understand the most common commands and associated keys, but I'd like a RL with nice tiles and an intuitive – all actions possible with max a few mouse clicks, shortcuts, a bar for the most used spells or objects... – interface.
I've started to build such an interface, I had time to implement the following features:
- a dungeon generator (room, corridors, doors), Nethack inspired,
- LOS and light,
- a dynamic minimap,
- a console and message manager, IVAN inspired,
- player movement (adjacent tile, or A*),
- basic monsters (walking randomly, no stats so can't die),
- graphical inventory displaying the equipment and the backpack. It is possible to equip armor parts or weapon with a click'n'slide (during the slide, authorized equipment zone become green to see what can be equipped where),
- a "goal" movement system: sliding an item somewhere on the map will cause the player moving to the target and dropping the item, attacking a remote monster with a melee weapon will cause the player follow the monster and attack it when in an adjacent tile (and the path will be re-calculated as the monster move),
- a sort of status bar, displaying what is under the mouse cursor, and what are the associated actions (eventually something like "left click to open the door, [ctrl] + left click to kick the door"),
- displaying the stats or the inventory just make the main screen smaller, so it's possible to play with the inventory screen open,
- XML-files for items and monsters (no need to compile the project again to add an item).
I hope I will have time someday to continue this project, and I will post it if I can find it again (I've changed my computer, and I can't find the CD with all my dev work :( ).
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Lets see.. I think the game that got me into Roguelikes was Castle of the Winds :) Fond memories.. There were a couple of others but I forgot their names. Personally I prefer graphical roguelikes, guess that doesn't make me as pure as some of you - I guess that also explains how my game Caverns of Underkeep has turned out.
Currently I'm playing through some of Slashie's games - I really like how some of the combat skills work in Escape from mt Drash. And the swimming, jumping thing in the Castlevania roguelike is pretty cool too.
I got started programming Caverns when I just scrapped a hobby RPG project that just became too ugly (this was before I knew about OO design) and I was looking for a smaller project to do - hence a roguelike. I also wanted to make a game I could complete over the summer (One month left)
I also decided to write it as a java applet, which would further reinforce the need for me to keep the scope of the game down.
I will probably program another roguelike or two (amongst other projects) over the years. I think theres a lot of things that can be done with procedural generation still.