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Topics - miki151

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Design / Any roguelike point & click adventure games?
« on: June 26, 2014, 10:35:52 AM »
If we leave out the randomness and permadeath (or death altogether), a roguelike would turn into a weird point-and-click adventure game. It would feature rich interaction with the environment, heavy use of items and equipment, and possibly a big world to explore. Instead of hacking & slashing you'd be solving a big mystery, following a scripted scenario. Basically Monkey Island in ASCII. Are there any games like that?

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Design / AutoTileGen - automatic tileset generator
« on: April 08, 2014, 11:48:37 AM »
This looks pretty cool, has anyone used it?

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/autotilegen/x/3045849

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Programming / A guide to using a scripting language in games
« on: March 12, 2014, 10:40:38 AM »
I'm looking for a good tutorial on scripting. Mostly from a design point of view, like what parts of the game belong to the engine, and what parts to the script. Preferably for an experienced programmer. (if you can call yourself experienced and not know anything about scripting) Doesn't have to language specific, but using C++ and Lua would be welcome.

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I've been using a Nethack-like system so far with a "more" prompt. It's good because it makes the player read all the (possibly important) messages, but I try to display important things in a more visible manner anyway, like coloring the PC green if he's poisoned. With fast paced playing the "more" prompt gets really irritating, so I want to get rid of it.

I very much like the idea of a game narrator, so I don't want to take the route of tiny, little, disappearing messages in the corner that no one reads. I want the majority of the players to read them most of the time. Is there a game that has this well implemented that I can shamelessly copy from?

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Design / Robot roguelike?
« on: November 20, 2013, 07:00:00 PM »
I just had this idea...

Is there a roguelike where you play a robot and you assemble yourself from different components before the game, and during the game you can mod yourself and have to replace the broken parts?

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Programming / Picking up monsters
« on: October 09, 2013, 01:38:26 PM »
What I like about roguelikes is that they allow non standard behavior, like wielding potions or corpses. I was thinking about taking it a step further and allowing to treat live monsters as items.

Some examples:
- pick up a puppy you need to rescue and carry it
- pick up and throw an enemy against a wall or into a river, provided you have the strength or size advantage
- eat a live monster
- use a spell turn someone's weapon into a snake
- carry an unconscious enemy to lock it somewhere

I was wondering if something like this has been already done by someone. Also, implementation wise, is it enough to represent picked up monsters using a special item class. I think trying to represent items and monsters with the same class hierarchy would be a disaster, maybe someone has thoughts on this.

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Programming / Asm.js, C/C++ in the browser
« on: September 30, 2013, 05:49:49 PM »
I think it's a pretty neat technology. It's basically a C/C++ to javascript compiler. So in theory you can port any C/C++ program to the browser. Supposedly the newest Firefox can run this code really fast, without much performance loss.
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/154994-epic-mozilla-release-unreal-engine-3-html5-demo-to-the-public-and-its-awesome

It means that maybe we will soon be playing the old classics in the browser, on any device. Save files and high score automatically uploaded to a server.

I gave it a try, it's pretty straightforward. SDL is available in the toolchain, so best to use that.

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Programming / How to do archery?
« on: August 20, 2013, 07:04:15 PM »
I'm standing before a few choices on archery UI and mechanics in my game.

Have the player wield the bow or make a separate equipment slot for it? Nethack uses #1 and I like the tactical element of switching weapons when going from shooting to melee, but I don't like it when I forget to switch: "you begin bashing monsters with your bow". Adom does #2 and it seems like an easy solution, maybe too easy.

Another thing is the UI. You can use the "throw" command on arrows and assume they are fired if you've equiped a bow. You can have a separate "fire" command, which automatically chooses the arrow or have arrows readied in quiver. Finally, you can also "apply" a bow to shoot. To make things complicated, I'm planning the crossbow to require two actions: loading, which takes more time, and shooting, which is instant  (it will be more powerful than the bow, to balance it).

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Programming / What's the best simple graphics library for C++?
« on: July 24, 2013, 12:25:17 PM »
I've used Allegro for many games, because it was simple and had low hardware requirements. When making my recent game, I started with Allegro 4.x, but had to switch to Allegro 5 due to better unicode font support. But now trouble has started, on some Windows PCs the game runs really slow, due to problems with hardware acceleration and/or D3d, and doesn't start at all on a Windows 7 on Vmware. Furthermore, there are performance issues, as some drawing primitives are much slower than in Allegro 4.

Does anyone have any recommendations on a simple library that doesn't get in the way too much? All I need are drawing primitives, bitmap and truetype fonts support, and portability between Linux and Windows. I know many people use libtcod, but I think it's too constraining for my needs, as I'd like to be able to draw anything I want on the screen, as opposed to using a pre-made console. But maybe I'm wrong about it. And I don't know how well it runs on older computers.


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Programming / Releasing partly obfuscated code
« on: July 06, 2013, 02:40:46 PM »
There is always the question of going opensource or not. There are arguments against (of course they are debatable):
- keeping secrets of the game from source divers
- stopping people from making unwanted variants
- having the option to make income from the game in the future
and for:
- attracting contributors
- portability
- higher chance of building a community (?)

I was wondering why not obfuscate parts of the code that you are most worried about, and distribute that. I think you get best of both worlds. You can hide your secret AI stuff, game plot or other logic, while letting people work on improving UI, porting etc. What do you think?

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Early Dev / KeeperRL (formerly Zagadka)
« on: July 04, 2013, 06:50:27 PM »
UPDATE: Zagadka is evolving into KeeperRL, a roguelike style Dungeon Keeper clone. Check out the link below for a demo video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRxxejoodzk



I've been writing this little game for about 3 months. The title is temporary, and I haven't decided what the story will be yet. So for now it's a generic Roguelike with a village and small dungeon. I think it's playable and I like playing it myself.

Some notable features:
- there is no HP as known from other games. You can be wounded more or less seriously, but there is also decapitation, cutting of arms, legs and wings, and other fun stuff.
- you can hide behind things and surprise attack
- there are rivers, bridges, rolling boulders and other fun things in the dungeon
- semi-intelligent monsters, that can use items and will chase you or run away if they are afraid
- a few weapons and armor
- no exp or skill system yet

Note that this is a dev version and there are many rough edges. It's not meant to be complete, but you can walk around, explore and bash monsters. There aren't any serious bugs, I think, and I haven't had a crash for weeks.

Here's the link. There are instructions in English and Polish inside.
http://students.mimuw.edu.pl/~makbet/zagadka-bin.zip

So, let's see what you think :)



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Programming / interesting items, spells and combat techniques
« on: May 23, 2013, 05:36:02 PM »
Hello, greetings from a novice RL developer :)

I've been thinking about new interesting items and spells that would break the routine in roguelikes. I'm mostly concerned with combat, adding some tricks and twists, ways to kill stronger monsters, deception, etc. Something other than the usual scroll of teleport :). Here's what I've come up with (not much yet).

- potion of panic; throw it at monsters to cause them to run away or do stupid things, drink to have movement bonus away from enemies
- potion of rage; monsters cause higher damage or charge at enemies, but are easier to hit , in extreme cases would attack friends
- spell of possession; control the mind of a creature for a limited time
- far sight spell; see what's going on in a different part of the map
- double trouble; just like Rodney in Nethack, you clone yourself for a few number of turns
- throwing heads of enemies at their kin to cause panic or rage
- putting wooden things on fire
- pushing enemies into water or lava (I haven't figured out how this one would work yet)

Post any ideas you thought would be cool in a RL. Be warned though that I might use them in my game :)

Michal

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