Hello fellow dungeon-crawlers.
First: This isn't the announcement of a release, but of a coming release.
Ever since I've started programming (I started about 20 years ago) I wanted to program a game. My only problem: I'm a horrible graphician. Well, someday I discovered roguelikes ... and I loved 'em. Random content, simple (or no) graphics ... just my kind of genre.
And now I'm announcing the coming release of my first roguelike (and game):
Gabriel.
Story: It's settled in a post-apocalyptic environment, so you will encounter mutants, hi-/ and lo-tech items/weaponry. I don't want to reveal to much of the story yet, but this is a short version of it:
After the devastation of the earth (I think nuclear ... but I'm not sure yet), man mutated. It's a horrible life and mankind is about to get exterminated. Once in a while, a 'positive-mutant' is born, who is called 'Gabriel' in the old legends. A 'Gabriel' is the only one who can enter the 'inverted-tower' of the legendary 'insanely-genious' scientists, who discovered a solution to mankind's problems.
Guess what ... you're the Gabriel, and you have to fight your way down the tower to discover the scientists dicoveries.
Development platform: Java, no other dependencies.
Gabriel uses my own scripting language which I ported to java about a year ago, and a 'fast-enough' console emulation (also written by me) using Java's AWT. (A typical screen refresh takes about 4ms on my 2.4GHz CPU).
Game design: Your character has a few simple stats: health, psi (some sort of mana), anger, hunger, melee-(and range)hit/critical/evasion chance. You are allowed to equip 4 kinds of weapons(knives, swords, pistols, rifles) and 5 kinds of armor(head, chest, hands, legs, feet).
You don't gain XP by killing monsters. As you are a mutant, and you're killing mutants, you have to consume the corpses of your enemies to help you mutate further. Consuming corpses also restores some health and hunger.
When enemies hit you, they make you angry .. and if your anger level is up to 100%, you fall into some kind of rage, which boosts your melee abilities (accuracies and damage) and restores health over time.
You don#t have any stat points to distribute on a level up, but you will get skill points, which you can distribute on various 'psi-abilities', like psi-shield, invisibility, and useful attacks.
The main reason why I announce the coming release of Gabriel here, is to keep me working on the project. It really makes fun to develop it, and I don't want to abandon it.
I will release a playable alpha version, as soon as I have added the 'save-bytecode' feature to my scripting language (this shouldn't take long).
There's still a lot to do, but the basis is nearly finished.
You can view my latest progress reports and game screenshots/videos on my blog:
http://cetone.wordpress.com/I really hope that Gabriel sounds interesting to some of you ... and maybe you can encourage me to release a v1.0.0 someday
Thanks for watching.
René (Neotec)
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