Temple of The Roguelike Forums
Game Discussion => Early Dev => Topic started by: st33d on September 04, 2011, 12:25:25 PM
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I've a dev-log for this over at TIGSource (http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=8467.0) but I thought I'd let rogue-likers know about this as well.
Red Rogue is an attempt at a platformer-roguelike. It's written in Flash/Flex and it's open source.
This is a link to the latest in-progress build (http://www.robotacid.com/flash/red_rogue)
This is a link to the source code on GitHub (http://github.com/st33d/red-rogue)
Please bear in mind that this is a work in progress and I'm currently doing a massive overhaul of the physics engine and will be dropping the crush-insta-kill mechanic in favour of a knockback-stomp. I'm also working on the AI, which is why the monsters are funny colours (to communicate their AI state).
How to Play
Use cursor keys to move and space to open the menu. There is no jump.
Use cursor keys to control the menu.
You and your skeletal minion kill things by walking into them (just like Rogue). Press up to collect items. Using stairways is accessed via Actions in the menu.
Equipment: Manage your weapons and armour from Inventory in the menu.
Spell casting: Runes can be eaten, thrown or used to enchant armour or weapons. Each use does a different thing, but enchanting items always confers a permanent effect.
Hope you have fun with what's in there so far. I'm currently slaving away at lot of improvements like a new renderer, a new - seedable random number generator (share dungeons!) and more stable physics. Not to mention that I want 20 monsters, 20 weapons, 20 armour and 20 spells over 20 levels in the final game and there's only 6 levels of content so far.
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Charming! There's a lot of love in this game. The "Quickening" thing made me grin every time, and the characters were adorable. The fact that your pet is a skeleton and that everything but blood is in black and white made me feel like I was a cute little gothic villain, so I enjoyed hunting down the baddies mercilessly. And the dagger gouging into your menu selections is awesome.
The head-squish mechanic I have mixed feelings about. On the one hand, it does allow you to really strategize (something that might otherwise be difficult given the layout of your game), but it's also kinda stressful that you're always one randomly dropped goblin away from instadeath. I might rather see instadeath turn into a critical hit, there. Might also consider auto-binding search and disarm.
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Cheers.
Stomp-stun is in the current build now. Currently improving the AI, will then get on to adding more content.
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Oh wow this is lovely <3
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Woo, sprites!
(http://www.robotacid.com/flash/red_rogue/images/rogue-sprite-sheet-1.png)
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Screen shot of the overworld:
(http://www.robotacid.com/flash/red_rogue/images/overworld.png)
Finished a shit load of artwork and animations. Just about ready to jump back into coding (which will involve creating a new assets archive first).
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That's not really Maura and Clango, is it? Just a random couple that looks like them from a distance?
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Update: default key bindings in - check the instructions link below the game. Also - ground work for throwable weapons is in. You can currently throw daggers. Also revamped the hot-key system.
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Overworld finished. Exit upwards on level 1 to check it out.
Also added new rebuilt asset library. This means I can start adding new races, items and spells.
Next step: update github source code (it's vastly different to the current state of the engine).
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Source code for the new build is up. (https://github.com/st33d/red-rogue)
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Aaand you can play it fullscreen now.
Been fixing a lot of bugs and adding features like infravision goggles and the leech spell.
Working on making the portal spell at the moment. Which requires a lot of work re-jigging the engine to buffer levels either side of the portal. It's a tough job, but it's going to add a whole new world of game play.
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Just to update:
All of the races and items are in. Their special abilities have not all been installed but you can at least have a look at them with the debug menu. Their stats haven't been put in properly either, I'm going to try get extra spells in and round off each one at a time.
Decapitated heads can be crushed to produce "faces". Wearing a face turns you into that monster with its abilities and weaknesses (a sort of limited polymorph item). The disadvantage being that it counts as the armour you're wearing whilst you have it on.
Added a portal spell recently that can be eaten to open a permanent gateway to the surface to heal yourself, can enchant a weapon with random extra enchantments - but also sends it through a portal to a new mini dungeon where you have to retrieve it from, and it does other things too. So that's 10 spells out of 20 done!
I've also added menu enhancements such as guide arrows, menu movement speed settings, scrolling long names and a screenshot option.
Oh, and I've got creepy music and weird sliding walls called chaos walls that force you to explore more thoroughly. Later on the chaos walls will do nasty things like explode and spawn golems (I've yet to implement this but I'm looking forward to it).
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Sounds like fine work being done there---keep at it! 8)
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Neat game! I need to spend a bit more time with it, but so far I've been very impressed.
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Very well done! :D
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Ah, I really dig your artwork. I got incredibly nostalgic just looking at the stills.
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Cheers, have another:
(http://www.robotacid.com/flash/red_rogue/images/underworld-mock.png)
The underworld, from which the minion came.
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There's an Underworld now (albeit sans Death right now), there's also all the music in, new traps, abilities for some items have been added and I've mucked about with dungeon generation. There are going to be 4 zones in the dungeon (Dungeons, Sewers, Caves and Chaos). All will have a different feel and their own critter population.
I'm also planning on turning the Overworld into a Shiren the Wanderer style storehouse. The explanation being that the Rogue has cast a time loop spell on the dungeon entrance - hence she relives entering the dungeon until her quest is complete. But outside the dungeon she can place items that will not be destroyed when the groundhog day loop resets itself upon her death.
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The identify rune is now in. As well as having the ability to name things, reveal the map and unlock Lore, it can also prompt your minion to send you on quests.
Here's you and the minion searching for quest gems:
(http://www.robotacid.com/flash/red_rogue/images/quest-gems.png)
A lot of UI changes have been made, as well as various tweaks and bug fixes.
New sounds have been installed as well as ambient tracks for the Overworld and Underworld.
Also I've added a weird one:
Dogmatic Mode
It occurred to me early on that perhaps I could try making the game turn-based, but I dismissed it as something that would be there to take the piss out of the roguelike definition, rather than improve the gameplay.
But the game's mature enough to add this as an optional extra, so I tried something out. It's... interesting.
In dogmatic mode, time only passes when you are engaged in an action. When stunned or searching, etc. time will pass normally. Otherwise you must hold down a key or move.
For those who would argue that you don't have the time to think things through in standard mode, well, this solves that.
It's certainly not unit-turn-based. I know what that means and what's required to do it. But I think the finished game could technically have a mod done to it because of how everything is tile based - all monsters fit inside tiles. There are also discrete transactions taking place that fit into a unit-turn-based model. All I've done is spread them out across cpu frames.
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Haste, slow and protection spells are in.
The number of rooms the level generator creates has been reduced from 2 onwards (they were slowing the pace of the early game too much I felt).
Thrown spells now bounce off walls a few times and then fall to the floor if they don't hit anything. They can also be caught by the player if they get in the way. This should make throwing spells a lot safer.
I've also discussed in my dev-log the option of having offhand throwing weapons to make throwing weapons require less menu-dancing to use (at the cost of having a more complicated equip-menu). Everyone seems keen on the idea of wielding a sword whilst chucking knives, so that will be going in soon.
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Offhand throwing weapons!
Changed it so a character can equip a throwing weapon as well as a melee weapon. The thrown weapon auto-equips when you pick it up after a throw.
There's something really satisfying about punching through one baddie and then lobbing a knife that decapitates the next one a few titles away.
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This is pretty interesting and fun. I would call it more "side-scrolling" than "platforming" though since there doesn't appear to be any jumping involved.
Any chance of getting a stand alone downloadable version? preferably with fullscreen support. To my knowledge, it's possible to make flash games a stand alone exe. I think Cardinal quest is an example of this. I'm not a coder though so I very well may be completely wrong.
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Providing an exe or app is possible, but it slows down updating the source code to git. I will provide links to them in the game when it is finished. But you can run the game.swf from a standalone Flash Player on your desktop if you wish.
Fullscreen is selectable from options in the menu. You can play fullscreen in the browser but with Flash's keyboard restrictions.
You can't jump until you get the Amulet of Yendor.
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Finished a major milestone today.
20 weapons, 20 armour, 20 races and 20 spells across 20 levels.
All of the special case code for all of the core 20 of each is now done.
Here's a screenshot of the wraith wall-walking ability:
(http://www.robotacid.com/flash/red_rogue/images/wraith.png)
Now I'll be able to focus on level design and UI. As well as think about the intro and ending.
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Nice. I played this a while ago from the thread on Tigsource and it seems to have come on a lot since then. I may be being rediculously stupid but I can't seem to get past the teleport traps, however. I got stuck on the second level down because I couldn't get to the stairs down due to a teleporter in the way...
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You can disarm traps from the actions menu.
Also, click the Instructions below the game. It will tell you the hot-key bindings for useful actions.
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Bloody hell, done loads really.
Since the last update I've added:
fixes to a shit-load of bugs
sleeping, dreams and nightmares
writing on the walls
locks and keys, then fixed the code for them (locks and keys are sodding difficult and took weeks to figure out, if you don't like 'em, tough tits)
mushroom gas traps
visible dart traps (quite like that you can barely spot them now, plus some players like to make use of the traps - I've even added a heal trap in the chaos zone to troll players who use gas traps as a combat option)
new sounds
drop-kick-smite (when falling and attacking a character now rolls to smite based on their experience level - very difficult to pull off, it's a late game combat skill since it's only guaranteed to happen every time at level 20)
whirlwind attack (when surrounded and dual wielding or holding a weapon in their throwing hand a character will attack back and forth at twice their attack speed, switching between main weapon and throwing weapon. Letting go of a direction halts the whirlwind attack - useful when dropped into a pit of monsters. Again, another late game skill for veterans who want to dive into the fray)
randomised content progression (the order of content is now randomised within the zones, waaaay better for replay value)
less levels per zone (content is spread across a zone and the remainder is added to the pool for the next zone, still 20 levels of content, but the game gets to the point quicker - and denies you content unless you dare to go deeper)
Currently coding a tutorial-nanny-thing that gives you curt context sensitive training when you first play the game. I'll have to leave it turned off till saving progress is in.
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Is there still any chance for a stand alone downloadeable version?
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If you want to play on desktop, here's what to do:
Download this page:
http://redrogue.net/game.swf
Download the desktop projector:
http://download.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/11/flashplayer_11_sa.exe
http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/11/flashplayer_11_sa.app.zip
http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/11/flashplayer_11_sa.i386.tar.gz
(links are all from this page: http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html)
Drag the swf to the projector application and it will run on your desktop. Want to create a standalone executable of Red Rogue? Go to the menu on the projector, look under file, "create projector". Click on it.
Stupid easy right? So why aren't I providing standalone executables? Bug tracking. Recently I had a catastrophic bug that locked a player in the second level of the game. He provided me the random seed to recreate the dungeon and I was able to track down a tiny typo that was breaking the game on and off for many people - except me. When I'm satisfied the game is stable I will provide exes for as many OS' as Flash supports.
Oh, and if you play on desktop you get full keyboard support when you enter fullscreen mode from the in game menu under options.
I also added basic multiplayer (a la sonic and tails - on the same keyboard) recently because I'm insane. Seems to work well with gamepads:
OSX: http://abstractable.net/enjoy/
Win & Linux: there are links to JoyToKey at the bottom of the link above.
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Ooh, multiplayer sounds very cool.... but I have no one to play with :(
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This is the drop-kick-smite in action:
(http://i1066.photobucket.com/albums/u404/robotacid/fusrodah.gif)
Yet again, the character AI is way better at this than humans.
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Hey, I just had an interesting idea I thought I would share. Have you played demon/dark souls? In those games, players can leave short messages on the ground or by walls such as "powerful foe ahead" or "beware of trap". I thought, since red rogue has messages already, it might be an interesting thing to add. Of course then you'll have to have a server running that keeps track of which dungeons have been generated and shares them with people playing at around the same time, so it might be a lot of work. Another thing from those games is having blood stains of defeated characters showing up in other people's worlds, which would also be very cool. It's just something to think about.
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I've started doing Google Analytics event tracking to see where players are dying and what parts of the game they've explored.
It's free, very simple to set up, and you can send events for pretty much any old data as three strings that group them into categories, actions and labels.
/* Sends information to the Google Analytics tracking widget on the home page of redrogue.net */
public function trackEvent(action:String, label:String = "", value:int = 0):void{
var params:Array = ["_trackEvent", "game_events", action, label, value];
if(allowScriptAccess){
ExternalInterface.call("_gaq.push", params);
}
trace(params);
}
I'm trying to find out how to fetch that data from their API. I think it would be really interesting for the game to become moulded by the player hive mind.
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Current release is stable enough for me to announce that the game will now save all of your menu settings (including Lore unlocked).
Also:
Portals are now permanent. That means you can create permanent shortcuts to later levels and move the underworld portal to that level where you keep losing the minion (the underworld portal resurrects the minion).
And:
A Shiren the Wanderer warehouse mechanic! In the story the underworld and overworld are supposed to exist "outside of time". That means you can drop off as many items as you like in there and grind up a suitable arsenal. Keep in mind that you have to leave a level for the game to save your item collection to the save file.
I'm currently working on save and quit so you'll be able to go for a decent dive and then come back to the game later.
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The game is now at the bugs and polish stage. I've got some outstanding issues to fix, then I need to let the game cool down before playing the shit out of it to make sure it's stable and balanced for release.
Lots have been added since I last posted. Mostly bug fixes:
Altars to Rng: basically like magic slot machines - more a way for me to show off mechanics that are hidden by esoteric usage of runes really. Encourages players to experiment with magic to replicate the altar's effects.
Torches: I realised that the Dungeons is a low CPU area so I could afford some lights to help new players explore. It also helps make the Sewers feel different.
Endings: Multiple!
Saving: The game saves every at every level now, you can continue from the title screen.
Start in Dogmatic Mode: The option is there from the title screen so everyone can be a purist about the mechanics.
Easter Egg Items: Tribute items for people who have helped tune the game.
Elite mobs: With special powers and yummier loot.
The Boss: A sneaky bastard who's too smart to fight you directly.
Various UI and Balance Shit: Lots and lots of little tweaks and bug fixes across the game.
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Will be releasing this Tuesday December 4th.
Here's the links to the final versions, Red Rogue is now a desktop game (I'll be moving the online version to Newgrounds and Kongregate, redrogue.net will become a resource that loads on any browser).
OSX: https://s3.amazonaws.com/redrogue/redrogue.app.zip
Windows: https://s3.amazonaws.com/redrogue/redrogue.exe.zip
SWF file: https://s3.amazonaws.com/redrogue/redrogue.swf.zip
Haven't got a Linux build yet unfortunately. Hoping the internet will step in and offer to help convert the SWF with this player:
http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/11/flashplayer_11_sa_debug.i386.tar.gz
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Hey Congrats! A finished game. Very much awesome.
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Fantastic!
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Awesome.. good job at finishing the game, downloading, now.
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All done, we're live. Thanks for playing everyone.
Here's that Linux build link: https://s3.amazonaws.com/redrogue/redrogue
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Okay, I'm necroing this thread just to say:
I don't usually like sidescrolling platformers, but this plays well, the thematic elements work, and the writing gets ten out of ten for aweseomely creepy. Good Job Steed!