Pre-preview release of Diggr

[itkachev]

Hello.

Fed up with playing boring old roguelikes, I've been working on my own special roguelike.
Normally, I'd be playing Nethack, (which is neither old nor boring), but how much of a single game can one play?

Thus, in a quest for variety, Diggr was born.

You can read the 'mission statement' and download a working .exe for windows here:

http://code.google.com/p/diggr-roguelike/

The archive includes 'GUIDE.txt', a short explanation of the game mechanics.
Please read it if you feel like it and have the time.

The game is pre-pre-alpha, though in a mostly production-ready state.
What that means is that the game runs, has a feature-complete interface and doesn't crash, as far as I can tell.
However, there is only enough in-game content up to dungeon level 4 or so; even so, it should provide a distraction for an evening or two.

Please send bug reports, suggestions, comments and hatemail to
tkatchev-personsign-gmail.com

Thanks.

[getter77]

Welcome and congrats on this ambition-laden project---I hope you also hang around Rogue Temple going forward!   

Hmm, what kind of release pace are you aspiring to now that things have went public?  Graphical tile/sound support?  Death system plans(players ghosts and such?)

I dig that it is aiming to get away from the most common attributes and whatnot.

[Ancient]

You can read the 'mission statement'

Lets have a look:

Diggr attempts to make impossible all forms of scumming. (A first in the roguelike world, I believe. :))
Definitely not the first. The very same goal lights the way of DCSS developers. Still, it is a great one to pursue.

Diggr is not at all based on AD&D in any way. All game mechanics are invented from scratch, keeping strictly in mind this list of requirements!
Innovation is always welcome. In last 7DRL event many authors strived for high score in this category.

Roguelikes that play themselves on autopilot are not fun!
I concur. Games lending themselves to borg have a means of killing tactical depth. Mechanics like autoexplore make playing more intense but harm the roguelike spirit in a way.

Diggr should also avoid common fantasy tropes and cliches.
I am not sure what do you mean by that and how it may help. Care to explain?

Later I will see how well Diggr submits itself to wine.

[itkachev]

Welcome and congrats on this ambition-laden project---I hope you also hang around Rogue Temple going forward!   

Hmm, what kind of release pace are you aspiring to now that things have went public?

No fixed release schedule, but I won't abandon it, promise.

Graphical tile/sound support?

Probably not. I can't play roguelikes with tiles -- something about those tiny pixel graphics makes them unreadable to my eyes unless they're maginified five times -- so if tile support happens, it should be coded by someone else.

Death system plans(players ghosts and such?)

Oh yes, definitely. I'm still mulling over the exact specifics, though.

[itkachev]

Definitely not the first. The very same goal lights the way of DCSS developers. Still, it is a great one to pursue.

I take an even more exteme position. For example, I don't like 'experience points', I think the experience point system invited scumming.

Innovation is always welcome. In last 7DRL event many authors strived for high score in this category.

Yes! Those were the most fun entries, in my opinion.

Diggr should also avoid common fantasy tropes and cliches.
I am not sure what do you mean by that and how it may help. Care to explain?

By fantasy cliches I mean an atmosphere (monsters and item types, etc.) in the style of AD&D, LOTR or Jack Vance.
 

[Darren Grey]

You can read the 'mission statement'

Lets have a look:

Diggr attempts to make impossible all forms of scumming. (A first in the roguelike world, I believe.
Definitely not the first. The very same goal lights the way of DCSS developers. Still, it is a great one to pursue.

ToME4 as well.  It's far from an easy goal, but it's nice that developers are making a conscious move to avoid one of the major problems with some games in the genre.

Anyway, best of luck itkachev.  Please post some screenshots here when you get a chance.

[itkachev]

Anyway, best of luck itkachev.  Please post some screenshots here when you get a chance.

Sure. Some screenshots: http://code.google.com/p/diggr-roguelike/wiki/Screenshots

Sorry for the home-made cropping of the windows.

[Darren Grey]

Mud-wielding and sleep deprivation?  Very nice 

A tip for screenshots: press Alt-Print Screen to take an auto-cropped shot of just the active window.

[getter77]

Gotcha on the tiles being something others might have to wrangle to visual preferences, but what about sound support?   

Any plans for a replay record functionality so people can more easily get spiffy/legible videos done to share/archive than..say...Nethack?  Brogue implemented stuff along these lines with the last update it had and would seem to be leading the pack outright on this front.  This certainly seems like the kind of Roguelike that good Video Let's Play series could be fashioned out of given the eclectic nature shown and described thus far.

[itkachev]

Gotcha on the tiles being something others might have to wrangle to visual preferences, but what about sound support?   

Sound is cool -- I really liked the sound functionality in DoomRL and AliensRL. I have plans for sound, but not as a first priority.

Any plans for a replay record functionality so people can more easily get spiffy/legible videos done to share/archive than..say...Nethack?  Brogue implemented stuff along these lines with the last update it had and would seem to be leading the pack outright on this front.  This certainly seems like the kind of Roguelike that good Video Let's Play series could be fashioned out of given the eclectic nature shown and described thus far.

Yes, definitely! This is planned for the near future, if I can write up a reliable implementation.
 

[itkachev]

Any plans for a replay record functionality so people can more easily get spiffy/legible videos done to share/archive than..say...Nethack?  Brogue implemented stuff along these lines with the last update it had and would seem to be leading the pack outright on this front.  This certainly seems like the kind of Roguelike that good Video Let's Play series could be fashioned out of given the eclectic nature shown and described thus far.

Done!

I've uploaded an archive of the latest version, which has a tool for replaying and/or sharing any of the games in your highscore file.

If you're interested and have the time, check it out.

[getter77]

did a quick check---spiffy start!

Suggestions:

-I'd like a Title screen dump on death versus a "space to end" that has you needing the restart the exe outright.   I always hated the program-close dump in Crawl and will always hope them to not be there.  Besides, main screens are spiffy...like the crazy one ToME 4 has going!

-Needs to be some kind of default save to disc folder to store the files to that is already there and reckoned with decompressing the archive otherwise it'll eventually lead to some needless clutter.  "Replays folder" or some such.

-Similarly, some designation to keep the game versions a replay was recorded under straight so that, if need be, people sharing replays online and whatnot will be able to download the right version of the game.

-A "click to select" interface of some kind for loading replays from disk would be superior to needing to precisely type out whatever it was named to save under.

-In a perfect world, I'd like to see the replay capabilities as a prominently displayed fixture in a title screen for the main .exe---as many people might well treat it as "out of sight, out of mind" otherwise.

Unrelated feedback:

It'd be really swell if there was some way to wrangle things where you could choose to play the game full screen, or as a self-stretchable Window.  At a glance, the Window seems to be rather rigid and the default, while not tiny per se, only occupies a chunk of my display.  Some sort of launcher aspect before dumping you into the "main game/title screen proper" where one could tweak things would be great.

In a roundabout way, something like this might also serve as another reason for "tile" support, in so much as I could imagine a high-resolution/size ASCII tileset would be of great use to people intending to play the game fullscreen at their native, and likely relatively high as of nowadays, monitor resolution for maximum immersion.  Though this is only relevant if you can't get the display and such to auto-scale with just ASCII as it is---not something I've enough technical understanding at present to know.  

[getter77]

Ahead to  11.08.28

The new release includes some very significant bugfixes, and a brand-
new religion system. If you've downloaded previous versions you should
definitely upgrade.

Thanks, and let me know how it goes!

Hooray for rapid release pace---the most delicious kind of pace!