Messages

1

Early Dev / Re: crashRun 0.4.0 released!

« on: July 15, 2010, 03:26:16 PM »

The reanimated unionzed maintenance worker hits you. -- more --

I spent a good little while trying to decide if reanimated unionized maintenance workers should be weaker or stronger than regular reanimated maintenance workers...

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Programming / Re: libtcod+lua

« on: March 30, 2010, 12:31:56 PM »

Anyone interested in libtcod enabled lua scripting host?
i.e. application that can run lua scripts and have built-in support of libtcod.
I even have 'walking @' with fov demo in lua

It's completely standalone (beside libtdoc and SDL runtime).
It's probably good for prototyping... if you know lua

While I don't know lua that well, I'd bet it was fast enough to run as a game itself, since libtcod would be doing a lot of the heavy lifting in terms field-of-view and such.

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Programming / Re: What makes "major" roguelikes different from the smaller ones ...

« on: March 27, 2010, 04:33:10 PM »

Hm ... this is surely rewarding. It all breaks down to a comparison of obstacles and means to overcome the obstacles. When I again think of LambdaRogue (sorry, folks ...), I can name just a few obstacles:

[snip]

These are all the major game elements. Nothing similar to Nethacks "The dev team thought of everything" approach, 'cause the existing possibilities are enough to survive in LambdaRogue. When I die, it's because I am unpatient and rush through a corridor, or forget to regenerate HP and PP (= mana).

Hm ... But this might as well perceived as boring by many players ... 

That doesn't sound boring to me.  Your audience might be a little different than the people who are really focused on all the nethack trickery* but you can certainly make a fun and challenging game without those aspects.  It just changes the sort of game you are aiming to make.

A lot of people do find Angband boring, but a lot of people find nethack too weird, silly and quirky.

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Early Dev / Re: Faded Prophecies (Alpha)

« on: March 27, 2010, 02:45:43 PM »

The overworld map looks pretty cool!

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Programming / Re: What makes "major" roguelikes different from the smaller ones ...

« on: March 27, 2010, 02:44:18 PM »

I wonder how many Nethack players really make use of / find all these surprises and easter eggs. When I still played Nethack in the past, I always felt overwhelmed about all these possibilities and different commands. I was aware that I could do lots of things, but it was too much of work for me to try and figure it out. So I simply tried to get a nice weapon and enough food and to survive, not using any of the more complicated stuff. Thus, I died and died and died.

I suspect most nethack players develop a subset of the possible tricks that they use frequently.  What's great is that the game seems to always allow possibility of figuring out new tricks.  The other night I accidentally picked up a lodestone and wasn't carrying any holy water or scrolls of remove curse.  I scratched my head for a while and ran through my inventory and noticed I was carrying a wand of cancellation.  Hmm...may as well give it a try.  I dropped all of my items I thought might be hurt by the wand, stepped to a clear square and zapped myself.  I was hoping the wand would turn the lodestones into regular grey rocks.  It didn't but it did remove its cursed status.  Apparently the wand of cancellation removes blessed/cursed statuses! 

So long story short, the appeal to nethack is multiple sometimes creative ways to solve problems you find yourself in and the possibility of finding some new trick.

Angband is a game I like very very much (along with its predecessor Moria). It's a rather straightforward and has a very consistent theme. I also like its big levels, although many people seem to find them (and the constant need of re-exploring) boring. Angband was the game I always had in mind when beginning to code LambdaRogue in 2006 (that's why LR's levels are regenerated every time and items are more important than dungeon interaction, and why the first level is a town level).

I think the part of Angband I like is the character development.  It's fun to level up and find new cool items and artifacts.  What I *do* find frustrating is how long it takes my characters to get to the point where they die   Angband is the game I'm most tempted to save-scum on because I can play a character for several days before reaching the point where the monsters get too dangerous and I don't know the strategy/tactics to get further and die.  This is usually around dungeon levels 35-40.  So I'm more invested in these characters that day than in say, Nethack or Crawl, where if I die, it tends to be fairly quickly (in terms of play time).

I do like both games, although my first love is nethack.

6

Programming / Re: Restricted Actions

« on: March 23, 2010, 09:37:25 PM »

A lot depends on the nature of the game you are trying to create (and it's something I've scratched my head a bit over too).  Games like Zelda often have one solution to a problem whereas some roguelikes try to allow chances for creative problem solving and interested situations and combinations.

To draw an example from nethack, there are magic markers in the game that let you write magic scrolls, but you can also write on the floor with certain types of wands to achieve different effects.  Shooting gems with a sling also has different game effects in some situations.

If you disallow the write command unless the character has a quill or pen or whatever, you are closing the door on the more varied possibilities (and if your write command offers the player the chance to write with a wand you're sort of providing spoilers).

That said, if you don't plan a nethack-style game (Angband is very strict in what its items are used for and it's a fine game) then you can probably do a nice streamlined user interface.  This might be especially good if you were making a roguelike for a mobile device or console.

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn-based) / Re: Poll Concerning LambdaRogue

« on: March 23, 2010, 03:44:24 PM »

I don't have a Windows machine at home

If you have Linux at home, you might try the Linux version The source should also easily compile under BSD. (Somebody even made it run under MacOS).

Oh! If someone got it running on OS X, then there's hope for me!

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Programming / Re: Some themes, have they been done before?

« on: March 23, 2010, 01:18:32 AM »

I like the sound of the Black Pope one, and the escape the space station one sounds cool too.

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn-based) / Re: Poll Concerning LambdaRogue

« on: March 22, 2010, 04:41:15 PM »

I think one of the main reasons why I have not played it yet is the name. It strongly suggests to me that it is some clone of Rogue written in Lisp (Lisp is based on Lambda Calculus, and one of the most important operations in Lisp is named lambda), i.e., it is not interesting except for Lisp fans.

Actually, that was my first thought too when I first heard of LambdaRogue

Mario, I was playing it a bunch at my previous job because I was frequently bored and slacking.  Not so at my current position and I don't have a Windows machine at home to play it on.

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Programming / Re: Help me decide on an interface

« on: March 22, 2010, 04:36:14 PM »

My pick would be number 3, thin lines and bold text.

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Off-topic (Locked) / Re: Favorite 7DRL so far

« on: March 22, 2010, 12:06:48 AM »

The main page of roguetemple.com has an article linking to the full list of entrants.

"2010 7DRL Challenge is over, results!"

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Early Dev / crashRun 0.4.0 released!

« on: March 21, 2010, 02:28:41 PM »

After being a slacker for the better part of a year, I've posted crashRun 0.4.0.  Some of the new features include:

- Two more levels of the complex, and a number of new items and monsters.
- Expanded character creation. There are a few randomized backgrounds for your character.  Your starting skills are more customizable and you may optionally customize your equipment before you begin your adventure.
- Cyberspace is hopefully less boring and annoying (but still needs more work)
- Likewise the starting level is smaller.
- Simplified commands. Open door, close door, and jack into computer terminal are replaced with a single action command. The use command is a little smarter.  If you 'use', say, ammunition, the game asks what gun you want to put it in (although the reload command still exists).
- Stealth is a little more useful.
- Your character now has primary and secondary hands.  Some weapons are two-handed, but if you wield two at the same time you engage in two-weapon combat.  You must now be wielding a firearm to fire it (previously they acted like wands/staves in nethack or angband).  To make all this easier to manage you can now record your weapon layouts in slots to make it easier to switch between them.
- Many bugs squashes (and probably more introduced!)

One thing I tried in this version is to bundle crashRun as an executable using Py2exe.  This seems to working and the .exe is one of the available download options on the site.  Otherwise Python 2.4 or higher and PyGame must be installed.

The crashRun website is: http://www.crashrun.org
Or you can go straight to the download page: http://crashrun.org/downloads.html
I have begun hosting the source code for crashRun on github: http://github.com/DanaL/crashRun
And the crashRun development blog is here: http://crashrun.blogspot.com/

I had a lot of fun working on this version and hopefully the next one (code-named: Even More Stuff Edition) won't be too far out in the future.

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Other Announcements / Re: 7DRL 2010 discussion.

« on: March 20, 2010, 07:16:37 PM »

Did any of them become even close to a RL? It looks like a lot of work with reviewing and hosting of these.. games.

I actually thought most all of them adhered pretty close to the roguelike genre. Mine was 3d, but it was a roguelike in every other way that I could make it in 7 days. The dungeons were very roguelike, which is most noticable in the ascii map. It was even turn based.

I would unequivocally call Smart Kobolds and Trapper roguelikes, if somewhat specialized ones.  I can't think of any essential roguelike ingredient they're missing.

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Other Announcements / Re: How I found Roguelikes

« on: March 10, 2010, 03:18:38 PM »

@Fenrir -- I prefer ASCII graphics for roguelikes most of the time, too.  Don't get me wrong, I like pretty graphics in some games, but in an RL game, I find it a better presentation of all the tactical information you need.  I'm probably biased, though, because I'm a programmer who sucks at art.  So I can still develop roguelikes without having to beg/borrow/steal tiles.

I think I'm the old man of the thread so far.  I played a few rogueish games on my Commodore 64 (Temple of Apshai and one called, uh, the Valley or something).  Later, on my 286 I found Moria and some version of Hack.  I've tried to figure out which version of Hack it was.  It had speleologists but no Gehennom.  You had to kill a minotaur in a maze level at the very bottom.  And it was the first roguelike I won.  It would be about 15 years later that I won Nethack for the first time

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: r.g.r.d. reddit

« on: March 02, 2009, 12:13:04 AM »

Subscribed!