Topics

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Early Dev / The Red Prison - roguelike based on 5th edition D&D

« on: February 02, 2019, 03:24:20 AM »

The Red Prison is a roguelike adaption of the Basic Rules for the 5th Edition of D&D. It’s been in development for about five or so months and it’s quickly progressed to a fairly advanced playable prototype.

Download: http://patjw.itch.io/theredprison

Every week I upload compiled builds for Windows and should be playable for Linux through Wine.

The game features four classes (fighter, rogue, wizard and cleric) and four base races with subraces (human, mountain dwarf, hill dwarf, wood elf, high elf, lightfoot halfling and stout halfling). Currently most low level content is in the game along with an ever expanding bestiary. I’m in the process of working on mid-level content and high level features is an eventual goal.



The game features auto-explore, detailed character creation and party selection. All classes and races are complete enough to be playable. There is a real focus on party mechanics and you and your allies can be revived by others after being knocked unconscious if your team manage to win the battle before you die. You can meet and recruit other NPC’s in the dungeon and there are a few different types with different skill sets to explore, although magic-using allies are still a work in progress.

Another feature is a detailed lighting system combined with some races having darkvision and others going without. You will need to decide whether you use an offhand equipment slot for a torch or whether you explore in the dark or ask your allies to light their torches for you.

The game follows the rules as closely as possible so the Basic Rules double as a quasi-manual. All of the various statistics about weapons, armour, monsters and spells are faithfully created in-game from those rules. They’re included with the game but available here for download: http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/basicrules

Some features of 5e D&D don’t translate well to roguelikes, such as initiative, bonus actions, reactions and some other things but hopefully players will find that the game aims to be as accurate a conversion as possible.

I’ve only really posted about this game in the roguelikedev subreddit to date but I’m starting to realise that I need more playtesters to help me shape things with the benefit of fresh eyes and more importantly, I think the game is fun enough now to be worth distributing!

The general development goals from here are to keep adding the more complicated features (such as attacks of opportunity and grappling etc), along with more spells, more items, more monsters, more detailed party interactions and a much more sophisticated encounter system where monster distribution makes more sense than just random placement of enemies in a random dungeon.

If anyone is keen to give it a go and give me some feedback, I’d be very appreciative!

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7DRLs / Fida'i - 2014 7DRL

« on: March 16, 2014, 04:56:55 AM »

Fida'i is a game of stealth, subterfuge and murder. You take the role of an assassin sent to kill on a series of ever more dangerous missions which will require careful planning and intelligence for you to be successful.

http://sites.google.com/site/fidairl/



Fida'i is unlike other roguelike games in that you are much physically weaker than most of the game's enemies and if you decide to challenge them on an even playing field then you're going to have a very brief game.

Sneaking up on unaware opponents, running and hiding, throwing stones to distract your foes and making use of the other tools at your disposal are all tactics you'll have to exploit to reach your goal. The game utilises a directional field-of-view which means that enemies can't see you coming as you loom up behind them to dispatch them, but you need to be vigilant to avoid being caught unaware with the sound of an approaching threat being your only warning.

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / ARRP - The Burning Plague

« on: September 22, 2013, 06:01:23 AM »

Presenting the first public release of The Burning Plague:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/zlw8ns0x4eluoel/The%20Burning%20Plague%20v1.zip

http://theburningplague.blogspot.com/





Inspired by Spiderweb Software style RPG's and building on the Dead Simple RPG rules, I have been working on an RPG with a focus on story and meaningful combat as opposed to the big numbers of grinding and loot gathering. The game is not procedurally genereated but is intended to be fully moddable from plain text data files.

Features currently include a working (almost complete) combat system, graphical tile set, and a test map with a number of challenging (and sometimes not so challenging) encounters as placeholders.

Still to come is the magic and religion systems, so there might be less utility in playing a sorcerer or priest at this early stage beyond the aesthetic. There is also a great deal to be done with the game's plot which has deliberately been omitted from this release which is intended to be a demonstration of the game's look and feel, and its combat.

4

Early Dev / The Burning Plague

« on: April 15, 2013, 09:37:41 AM »

The Burning Plague is the working title of a roguelike/CRPG game that I've started working on and will be blogging about as a way of keeping my coding motivation up and also as a way of documenting my progress - already my collection of screenshots is making me laugh as I look back at how it was all looking just a few weeks ago.

The basic idea for the game is that I wanted to focus on a no-frills RPG similar in style to the Spiderweb Software series of games - in particular the Exile and probably Avernum series.

Beyond the style inspiration of aiming for a Vogel-esque RPG, my initial content is loosely based on the Dungeons and Dragons module for low-level players - The Burning Plague. The initial goal is to release an alpha version of the game which fleshes out a short RPG covering an expanded adventure based on that module. Gameplay is intended to be based on roguelikes to a certain extent in that you will only control a single character and rely on providing orders to your companions to boss them around so that it becomes more of a party oriented experience.

Dev blog can be found at the following link: theburningplague.blogspot.com

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Rasatala 7DRL

« on: March 16, 2013, 06:22:29 AM »

This my 3rd 7DRL and I managed to finish this one with about 20 hours to spare.

In a nutshell, it's a coffee break roguelike with a Hindu mysticism theme and with player and monster facing being critical to gameplay. There's no natural healing by way of rest so you've got to interact with certain agents within the dungeon for healing and really pick and choose your fights. There's four different character classes who should all play very differently and realistically be of different challenge levels as well.

"The mysterious jungles of Zardula conceal the corrupted caverns of Rasatala. For centuries the reviled ruins have been shunned by travellers despite tales of some of South Asia's most valuable treasures being lost within. Rumours of twisted snake-men, cruel tiger spirits and insane cultists abound. Those who enter are often driven by greed or a desire to cleanse an ancient evil - perhaps a combination of both. No matter their motivation, none who enter have ever been seen again."

http://sites.google.com/site/rasatalarl/

I'd love to hear your feedback about how it plays. You lose a bit of perspective when you're playtesting your own game after a busy week, not to mention playtesting for bug fixing purposes instead of looking for a good time, so it'd be great to hear someone else's view.

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Early Dev / 7DRL - Defender of the Deep

« on: March 13, 2011, 04:10:06 AM »

This is my entry in this year's 7DRL competition. I'm planning on keeping the development going from that base and hopefully into a much more tactically complex and longer game and I'd very much appreciate some feedback!

http://code.google.com/p/defender-of-the-deep/

Play as an orc, kobold or goblin! Murder halflings, gnomes, elves, dwarves and humans! Pray to your dark god for help (but be careful of their wrath)! Harness the power of magic to destroy your foes or escape their reaches! 5 (non-persistent) levels of roguelike action!

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Programming / Run and hide

« on: November 23, 2009, 02:52:35 AM »

Hello friends, here's a small roguelike project which I'm working on as a stepping stone towards something bigger: http://magnuscanis.com/runandhide/

At the moment it's a simple (in terms of gameplay) Java applet which aims at encouraging the player to avoid combat as much as possible. In terms of the length of the game, I would imagine that there's somewhere between a couple of minutes to half an hour of gameplay in it, depending on what you think of the concept.

The setting is the over-done (but convenient for my purposes) setting of a zombie apocolypse and the player is the sole survivor of a small village which has been overrun by the maraudering undead. As the name suggests, you're supposed to run for your life! There's no character progression or other facets of the game (such as weapons or other equipment) at this stage, and it possibly might stay that way.

It's probably a long way from its finished state, but it's playable and I hope someone finds it interesting at this stage. It might look familiar to you because the code is based on another roguelike project (details of which are here: http://www.roguetemple.com/2008/05/24/a-couple-of-simple-applet-roguelikes/) and this is due to the long period of time over which I haven't had anything to do with coding anything whatsoever.

At the moment, it's arguably a variant of that original applet, but the gameplay is considerably different and moving further away as time goes on.