Topics

1

Design / Roguelikes with infrequent, dangerous and interesting combat

« on: January 14, 2014, 08:35:10 AM »

Are there any good roguelikes out there where combat doesn't happen all the time, but when it does it's dangerous? I am not a big fan of the whole "lots of easy/meaningless monsters" style of game, so I'm looking for something different.

2

Programming / How are huge game worlds stored in memory?

« on: January 12, 2014, 04:55:17 AM »

Take ADOM as an example, which has an overworld, several different towns, dungeons, and persistent NPCs associated with certain locations...

How are these stored in memory? Is each town serialized, then deserialized when you enter into it? Or they all actually loaded into memory at any one given time?

I am really confused about how to model linked levels in general, actually. Obviously only one is usually "active" at any one time - the one the player is on. But then there are edge cases, like in ADOM where a nearby monster will follow you down some stairs.

3

Programming / I have 4.5k lines of code and no clue

« on: January 31, 2013, 07:39:21 AM »

I have a "roguelike". it's 4.5k lines of code. It's data driven, favours composition over inheritance, is very encapsulated, and it barely does anything. It hurts my head even thinking about it. Considering a re-write - this has happened to me multiple times, I get this far, get confused, and start again (usually in a different language).

My problem is not with individual algorithms. I either get them from a library or code them up myself.

My problem is about structuring game. What does this class/module/method/object/function/whatever do? What's it responsible for? How do I group them? What knows about what? Where does this information go? It turns into a huge spider web of confusion for me.

I know some people can just hack a game together and not care about how stuff looks or modularity or anything else. Those people presumably have much larger brains than i do, because even though my code is clean by most standards I still have no clue what's going on.

Are there any good resources on this higher level stuff? The interconnection between different parts? Because it's biting me in the ass again and again.

4

Programming / Game Mechanics

« on: January 25, 2013, 01:17:22 PM »

So right now I am working on my timing system. I am going about it in a really, really ad-hoc way.

Is this going to bite me in the ass? Are there any decent guides out there to a good roguelike mechanic system? I am not just talking about a time system, but stuff that ties into it like combat.

5

Other Announcements / Which text roguelike has the best, most approachable UI?

« on: January 14, 2013, 11:00:05 PM »

So I am looking for some *cough* inspiration. UI is likely hugely important in getting non roguelikers to play a game. However all the discussions I see about making UI nice and accessible presume some sort of more sophisticated graphical environment..

I am interested in what can be done on a console game, or pseudo console.

So please, suggest any ascii/unicode games that have a great UI. The game itself doesn't even have to be fun, just something that's easy to get started at.

6

Programming / Which name is best?

« on: January 13, 2013, 02:33:33 AM »

I was browsing roguebasin, looking at recently released roguelikes the other day, and noticed not many names caught my attention at all. In fact I can only remember one name "Bronze and Faith" (I bookmarked for that reason alone).

Now I like to think myself as good at naming, but my taste in name is not everyones taste. So here's a list, please pick the best one. And feel free to hurl any naming criticisms my way, I'm not sensitive.

7

Programming / When to use scripting languages?

« on: January 08, 2013, 12:16:18 AM »

I'm in the early stages of a roguelike on the jvm, and progress has stalled a bit. At first I was writing a little "engine" in java, then calling it from jruby, but a number of issues cropped up (weirdly bad performance that I couldn't really profile from jruby).

so am now doing a re-write of the jruby stuff in java - I just added a "gamespecific" package to my engine and off I went. Stuff like colors, tile definitions, hardcoded overworld, items etc are already in data files. I feel like I might embed a scripting language at some stage - it's trivial to do in java - but I don't know what stage.

Anyway, people love bullet points, and I'd really appreciate if you could tell me, for each item, what should be scripted, what should be in java, and what should be in data files?

- menus (start, inventory, etc)?
- procedural level generators?
- quests?
- npc dialogue?
- AI?

8

Other Announcements / Is anyone here blind or semi-blind?

« on: June 02, 2011, 01:48:48 AM »

I was thinking today that turn-based, text-graphic roguelikes would be the sort of game that'd be easier to make a nice blind-interface for. I had a quick google around for blind friendly roguelikes and I could only find one, written by a commercial company at http://www.blind-games.com/.

So I was wondering...does anyone here have some degree of blindness and play roguelikes?