Messages

76

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: IRDC London 2012 - Call for Dates

« on: February 02, 2012, 04:43:34 PM »

I'll be there.

Some archive of the talks would be pretty sensible, even audio would be enough (host at roguelike radio?)

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: IRDC London 2012 - Call for Dates

« on: January 29, 2012, 02:17:25 PM »

I'd be up for this. It's a bit far in the future for me to confirm on dates though.

78

Early Dev / Re: Red Rogue (platformer roguelike)

« on: January 28, 2012, 05:39:43 PM »

The identify rune is now in. As well as having the ability to name things, reveal the map and unlock Lore, it can also prompt your minion to send you on quests.

Here's you and the minion searching for quest gems:



A lot of UI changes have been made, as well as various tweaks and bug fixes.

New sounds have been installed as well as ambient tracks for the Overworld and Underworld.

Also I've added a weird one:

Dogmatic Mode

It occurred to me early on that perhaps I could try making the game turn-based, but I dismissed it as something that would be there to take the piss out of the roguelike definition, rather than improve the gameplay.

But the game's mature enough to add this as an optional extra, so I tried something out. It's... interesting.

In dogmatic mode, time only passes when you are engaged in an action. When stunned or searching, etc. time will pass normally. Otherwise you must hold down a key or move.

For those who would argue that you don't have the time to think things through in standard mode, well, this solves that.

It's certainly not unit-turn-based. I know what that means and what's required to do it. But I think the finished game could technically have a mod done to it because of how everything is tile based - all monsters fit inside tiles. There are also discrete transactions taking place that fit into a unit-turn-based model. All I've done is spread them out across cpu frames.

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Classic Roguelikes / Re: Beaten Any Roguelikes?

« on: January 27, 2012, 07:14:42 PM »

I think Diablo 2 only counts after beating it on all difficulty modes. The late game in it is horribly broken and requires some roguelike metagaming in order to beat it (I used the Amazon and ran away from everything whilst using heat-seeking penetrative arrows).

I also completed iRogue for the Palm OS:

http://roguelike-palm.sourceforge.net/iRogue/

My only real quibble with the Tungsten T5 was that it was designed in such a way that if you let the batteries run out, you lost all data.

Despite the fact that I wrote my undergraduate thesis on it (with a plug in keyboard), and had quite a bit of fun programming it, and completed the only real roguelike I've ever completed, I have to say:

Fuck that device. Fuck it's stupid, non permanent storage and its reset to factory default settings when you leave it for a day uncharged. Fuck it in the eye.

80

Programming / Re: Dead link to Field of View research paper

« on: January 09, 2012, 01:25:32 PM »

Thanks very much. I'm going to mirror it until the author complains or puts up a new link for now. I refer to it in a shadowcasting demo I made:

http://robotacid.com/flash/red_rogue/shadow_casting/fov.pdf

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Programming / Dead link to Field of View research paper

« on: January 08, 2012, 05:38:11 PM »

There was a field of view research paper pdf that did a comprehensive comparison, including speed tests of all the major FOV algorithms. It encouraged me to port the python code on Rogue Basin for shadow casting to AS3 for my game.

It used to be here:

http://roguecentral.org/libtcod/fov/fov.pdf

I've tried contacting the site, but to no avail. Does anyone have a spare copy of the pdf or the ear of the guy who wrote it at all?

82

The Roguebasin / Editing Rogue Basin for Dummies

« on: January 03, 2012, 09:09:26 AM »

To be blunt, I don't know how to edit wiki pages or how to create new ones. So I'm pretty much in the dark about how to create a page for my game or how to add to the announcements list.

Are there any links that would help get me started? Or are they there on RogueBasin and I'm just being blind?

83

Early Dev / Re: An article about dropping "skip turn" from roguelikes

« on: January 02, 2012, 09:19:00 PM »

I think the skip turn removal is a fair point, it's unfair on the monsters who don't get a skip turn.

84

Temple of the Roguelike / Re: Thread move request

« on: January 02, 2012, 09:11:00 PM »

Cheers 

85

Other Announcements / Re: Roguelike Radio podcast

« on: December 23, 2011, 06:18:12 PM »

4 directional movement got on my tits in 100 rogues, especially with a hunger mechanic on top of that. But I have to admit that on the iPad the gameplay was very accessible and I only lament the sometimes clunkiness of the graphics programming (juddery panel movements and gaps between tiles as the level scrolls). All in all it's not perfect, but it's still a good game. (Though I wish they'd had a demo version instead of making me gamble - I've bought a number of shit games for the iPad now and demos really help stop that happening.)

The other roguelikes I've tried on the iPad have been pretty ropey to be fair. I dread to think what it would be like to play them on the iPhone. Though iNetHack had a rather good approach to interface with an inspectable menu for the myriad of controls and illuminated ascii letters as opposed to a dodgy tile set where you'd have to guess what the artist was trying to draw. It's free, go get it.

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Other Announcements / Re: Roguelike Radio podcast

« on: December 23, 2011, 03:17:37 AM »

I will say again on the Internet (capitalised by the iPad) for the umpteenth time that graphics IS gameplay. You have to communicate to the player what is happening. Unless your game is purely sound based I doubt you can do that without graphics that effectively illustrate what's happening. Brogue for example. Great gameplay and graphics that communicate well to the audience. And it doesn't matter if a monkey could kill me or be my friend. Somehow I realise I'm still in control and I'm delighted to discover my new monkey friend. He's just a letter "m" but I get it, that's the style and the style has won me over with its charm. His humility is to be applauded. Come along and lets lay waste to this hostile lexicon before us...

87

Other Announcements / Re: Roguelike Radio podcast

« on: December 21, 2011, 07:03:42 PM »

Unless I missed that the presenters were just talking about roguelikes, the repeated sentiment that we're going to see more randomness and more permadeath is the opposite of my experience.

If anything, the growing trend of checkpointism in games, an option in Mario on the Wii to autocomplete the level and smarter save points suggests that games as a whole are moving further away from permadeath. Personally, I thought that permadeath wasn't about any sort of masochistic difficulty setting, but about exploration and exposing the player to a breadth of content.

Same for randomness. It's not the bottom-up emergent randomness of roguelikes that's making it's way into the mainstream but the top-down designed randomness of graphics programming. I think a lot of indies are paving the way for bottom-up random, but there are still people who don't want that sort of game.

My boss for example hates randomness. I always wondered why he insisted that Zelda was an RPG, yet he hated RPGs. I recently figured it out: Zelda is an RPG with all the random elements removed.

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Temple of the Roguelike / Thread move request

« on: December 20, 2011, 02:13:42 PM »

Could I get my Red Rogue thread moved to the "Early development" subforum where it belongs please?

http://roguetemple.com/forums/index.php?topic=1765.0

I didn't see the other subforum when I joined and it's like I've put a feedback thread in the technical forum.

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Early Dev / Re: Red Rogue (platformer roguelike)

« on: December 20, 2011, 02:10:46 PM »

There's an Underworld now (albeit sans Death right now), there's also all the music in, new traps, abilities for some items have been added and I've mucked about with dungeon generation. There are going to be 4 zones in the dungeon (Dungeons, Sewers, Caves and Chaos). All will have a different feel and their own critter population.

I'm also planning on turning the Overworld into a Shiren the Wanderer style storehouse. The explanation being that the Rogue has cast a time loop spell on the dungeon entrance - hence she relives entering the dungeon until her quest is complete. But outside the dungeon she can place items that will not be destroyed when the groundhog day loop resets itself upon her death.

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Other Announcements / Re: Must-play Roguelikes

« on: December 09, 2011, 11:54:18 PM »

Been playing Shiren the Wanderer on the bus for the past two weeks now.

The pace of play, the persistence of items and characters beyond permadeath, the trickle of hints from NPCs, the casual controls but fuck-you encounters deep in - I think all developers could learn a lot from this.