Messages

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / MageGuild 2.0 Released

« on: July 20, 2010, 01:12:15 PM »

After a (way too) long beta, MageGuild 2.0 is finally out for public consumption. It's available over at http://www.lukossoftware.com/node/8.

This version was largely about adding new stuff...new enemies, new items, new terrain, new features for the editor, and so on. Hope you enjoy it, and if you find any bugs or have any new ideas to share, please toss me a line, or report an issue on the Lukos site's bug tracker.

Thanks!

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Programming / Re: Programming advice

« on: January 25, 2010, 03:29:46 PM »

Something you might try is having an effect capable of applying sub-effects. So, maybe your lightning-damage effect first applies a pure damage effect, then a paralysis effect. Then, a lighting spell can simply call the lightning-damage effect, whereas a pure paralysis spell could call the paralysis effect by itself, and so on. If you set things up correctly, you could nest these things as much or as little as you need to.

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Programming / Re: Wolf character

« on: October 12, 2009, 01:05:01 PM »

Agreed; if you've got a letter representing more than one creature, they should all be related. All the big RLs do this, don't they?

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Programming / Re: Movement and Circular FOV

« on: August 20, 2009, 05:50:57 AM »

The big thing for me on this point is that it's very counterintuitive that diagonal steps would take more of anything. Yes, if you sit down and think about it, it makes sense...but when you have a convention in the majority of games (and not just roguelikes, but anything with a discretely divided map) that diagonal steps are equivalent to orthogonal ones, doing anything different violates the user's expectation.

As far as the FoV issue goes, my project draws squares for radius-based things. It looks a bit weird, but it makes it a lot easier to tell exactly where a fireball's explosion will cover, for example. This is also counterintuitive, but (IMO) less so than shaving the corners off areas for appearance's sake, and a lot less than diagonal steps taking more of a resource.

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Programming / Re: Grinding

« on: July 04, 2009, 06:44:00 PM »

Grinding really bothers me, when I encounter it as a player. If there is the possibility for profitable grinding, than I feel like I'm getting penalized if I don't grind; this, in turn, makes me feel like the game is punishing me for playing it in a fun manner. Likewise, hard time- or turn-based clocks bug me, since I like to wander around and explore...when I start getting punished for running out of time, I feel like the game is preventing me from playing in a way that I find fun.

Personally, I think the goal is making the game in such a way that the most fun thing to do is also the best thing to do, strategically. Granted, this is kind of an unattainable state, since people find different things fun, but seeking that goal has been a guiding principle for my game design choices.

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Programming / Re: On ranged attacks

« on: June 28, 2009, 01:57:51 AM »

Both approaches have their upsides and downsides. Basically, free targeting makes ranged combat more powerful, while straight-line targeting makes it weaker. If you're looking to make a game where ranged combat is generally superior to melee combat (DoomRL, Angband), then free targeting is a great choice. If you're looking to make one where there's some level of parity between ranged and melee combat, then straight-line targeting is a really solid idea.

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Programming / Re: Ambitious Rogue-like Project. But...

« on: June 13, 2009, 01:22:10 AM »

Be ready to scrap your first roguelike projects in favor of gaining the needed skills. Don't embark into your ultimate roguelike project until you are ready, else you will be trapped into an infinite refactoring cycle (or you may eventually achieve it, but after lots of unneeded pain). Reuse the useful parts of your code, but never get into creating a generic roguelike engine. Start simple, release often. Favor working releases over polished code accumulating dust in your hard drive.

QFT, massively. This is exactly the process that finally led me to releasing something playable.

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Other Announcements / Re: Project: Roguelike Renaissance

« on: June 09, 2009, 06:32:17 PM »

For pure tile editing, I use Tile Studio (http://tilestudio.sourceforge.net/) I'll be the first one to admit it's got some quirks, sometimes some pretty big ones, but it's got some major advantages over Photoshop or GIMP for tile editing due to the fact that it isolates the tiles into separate "images" for you to edit.

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Other Announcements / Re: Project: Roguelike Renaissance

« on: May 31, 2009, 08:33:50 PM »

I guess I'm somewhat unclear as to why some of those items are on your list. I get what you're going for, for ones that have been abandoned, but several of them (including my own) are under active development by a committed developer. In those cases...what, exactly, are you proposing to do?

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: MageGuild 1.4 Released!

« on: May 22, 2009, 06:23:56 PM »

I just released a 1.4.1; it's mostly bug-fixes, but it also adds some tutorials and some reference material to the editor's help menu. As always, you can get it from http://www.lukossoftware.com

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: MageGuild 1.4 Released!

« on: May 11, 2009, 10:38:31 PM »

Well, the general plan is that the next release containing new content will be 2.0. I've got some ideas for what will be in that release, and I hadn't particularly planned on including community content; however, if some really good stuff should be created, and the creators of that stuff should be willing, it would be rather remiss of me to exclude it, now wouldn't it?

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / MageGuild 1.4 Released!

« on: May 11, 2009, 01:36:01 PM »

Announcing that MageGuild 1.4 is finally publicly released!

The big thing for this version is the addition of a level editor: you can now build custom scenarios to play through, and create mods for the base game. Have a great idea for a monster or an item that you think the game is missing? Create it as a mod, add it in. Want to see how other players fare against your most devious mazes? Build a scenario for them to test themselves against. Once your creations are done, upload them to our new site and share them with the community!

As always, please report any problems you find, issues you have, or ideas for improvement. Thanks!

Get it over at http://www.lukossoftware.com !

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Temple of the Roguelike / Re: Send your banners!

« on: May 07, 2009, 04:25:16 PM »

Could you update MageGuild's banner, please?

New image URL should be http://lukos.x10hosting.com/images/mageguildbanner.png , new link URL should be http://lukos.x10hosting.com Thanks!

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Programming / Re: Advanced Dungeons of Freedom

« on: January 17, 2009, 12:17:51 AM »

The only real problem with Javascript, IMO, is that it allows you to do a number of things that are incredibly bad programming practices. If you're confident that you can write solid code without a lot of structure to keep you from falling on your face, JS is a perfectly fine language for you. In my case, I create enough stupid errors with a more structured language, so JS is a bad choice for me.

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Programming / Re: Want to make an Roguelike starting from ASCII

« on: December 17, 2008, 02:58:15 PM »

To second that point: I've got a roguelike released now, MageGuild. And before that happened, I had... Let's see... four or five roguelikes completed to some level of playability, plus quite a few that never even made it that far. It is possible to succeed, but not without learning lots of lessons that you can't get any way but trying and falling flat on your face.

So, get out there, get working on your project, but don't get too discouraged if it takes you a couple trial-runs.