Messages

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Other Announcements / Re: The 7DRL crop of the year

« on: March 18, 2011, 02:10:14 AM »

Rook is mine.  It's good to see that people are playing!  The only other thing the orb+ring combo helps with is enemies hiding behind brush or doors.  I'll need to get ranged attacks, paralysis, item id, and a bunch of other stuff put together before it lives up to its full potential.  I absolutely agree that you couldn't add it to an existing game; the code and the game rules both have to be designed around it.  If you have any ideas, whether for enemies that would be interesting because of it or for other items that (like the ring) are subverted by the orb, I'd love to hear them.

I was frankly amazed how much variety I ended up with, since all the actual game content was a last day push.

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Other Announcements / Re: Project: Roguelike Renaissance

« on: June 03, 2010, 07:55:22 PM »

My point, and I'm undoubtedly reiterating what other people have said, is that planning is of very little use.  Even if you can only devote a single hour at a time for now, you must do it.  You cannot put off the early phase, and ten hour pushes aren't useful until you've got the hang of a few tools, anyway, and started to get a feel for the languages you want to know.  There are even interpreters for various languages running from websites -- you can play with http://doris.sourceforge.net/lua/weblua.php to try some simple Lua, for instance.

Play with TOME4.  That sounds like a fine idea.  But the point is, you've got to start, and start now.  You can't go on hearsay.

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Other Announcements / Re: Project: Roguelike Renaissance

« on: June 03, 2010, 06:42:18 PM »

Nothing matters half so much as getting used to the frustration of experimenting with new tools.  Spend a few days pumping as many hours as you can into a couple of languages and their respective interpreters, compilers, or linkers.  You will not make any progress with books or their kin.  You might think that sitting down with something new and spending two or three hours completely frustrated is a waste of time and discouraging -- but it will be a basic part of your life from now on.

Things will go wrong.  They will not work.  It will not be your fault, but it will eat hours of your life.  So dive right in and get used to it, and learn how to use the language you choose while you're at it -- there's more to a language than its syntax and semantics, after all.  If you can't use the toolchain (I mean again the compiler and linker or interpreter), you can't use the language.  So just dive in.

C is a great way to go.  On a Linux box, especially, nothing is easier to get working.  Lua is great, too, for the same reason, and it has great relevance in gaming.  And remember always that the bulk of game logic -- the stuff that you'll be contributing the most to with your ideas -- has nothing to do with graphics or sound, or even the grid layout of a roguelike.  You can testing new ideas for combat systems, or conversation AI, or alchemy even when you only know printf and its peers.

Of course, reading source is the second most important thing to do (next to writing it), and it sounds like you've started doing that.

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Other Announcements / Re: Where to begin

« on: May 16, 2010, 06:41:58 PM »

Brogue is very inviting and easy to get into.  Pender's just released a new version a week ago, so it's shiny and up-to-date.  The focus of his design is on simplicity of elements, so the game seldom feels overwhelming -- the way some of the major roguelikes do -- and it cleaves tight to the model of Rogue itself.  The download page (http://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/home) documents almost everything in the game, so you can search when you come across something new.

I second the Teemu suggestion; its relatively short narrative means that a new player, with enough dedication, should be able to win the game before becoming an old player.

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Programming / Re: Pathfinding implementation not working the way I want it to.

« on: March 25, 2010, 11:34:56 PM »

The underlying problem here is that every path from A to B is the same length, as long as it has the requisite diagonals somewhere along the way -- and if it takes an extra diagonal step or two that's fine as long as it takes them back.  Giving a different heuristic won't give you reliable control over which path you get back.  Use the A* heuristic is a way to speed up the search, not a way to prune it.

Since you're not using this to plot a monster's path, be imaginative.  The cost of a step might be the distance from that cell to the straight-line path between A and B, for instance.  (The distance from a point to a line segment is easy to calculate.)  Instead of asking which cell is closer by your game's rules, ask yourself which cell you want A* to pick and charge accordingly.