Azure7drl [7DRL 2016 SUCCESS]

[heckruler]

Whelp, I'm late to this race. Looked up today, saw it was March, and wondered when the 7DRL challenge was. OH! It's now.

Azure dreams was a 90's playstation 1 game that was sort of like a cross between Pokemon and a roguelike.  This is going to be something like that.

The focus of the game is to capture monsters to fight other monsters and breed them into exciting combinations of freak mutants and inbred horrors.  All monsters are named after a consonant-vowel-consonant scheme which determines their elemental affinity, stats, spells, and abilities.  Every trip into the tower wipes any progress the player gained, but the monsters keep their level. 

Day 1, 2, 3: Blissfully unaware that the challenge was happening

Day 4, Thursday, today: Taking a half-made stealth roguelike I failed to make last year and adding some stats other then HP and hopefully some combat.

BIG NEEDS: Procedurally generated monsters based off the name, a pet AI, some way to control your pet, some way to tame monsters, and some way to breed monsters.    Monster spells, abilities, items, and something outside of the tower would be really sweet.

[heckruler]

Day 4 ended up just hacking off old and steering the stealth-based RL towards a more traditional role.

Day 5 was entirely eaten by work and family.

BUT! There's hope. They just left for a weekend with a visiting aunt. There are roughly 30 hours between now and when they come back, which is a bigger block of time to work on my own projects  than I've had in quite a while. So let's do this.

[heckruler]

Day 6: OK, the bulk of combat math and stats and monster creation are done. That took WAY longer then I had hoped. Trig is hard.   In game design mode, I just throw around ideas like an elemental circle-of-death where water beats fire and gets a bonus based on how big their affinity is.   And I just kinda gloss over the math.   

Switching from 3-values to a 2d coordinate system just kinda blew my mind there for a moment.   And all that is ESSENTIALLY just to figure out if the bonus to attack is between *1 to times 1.5.      There's supposed to be other stuff built in around this, but for now? the impact is really small. And that's a little disheartening.


Anyway, tomorrow will need monster and pet AI.    Some way to capture or gain pets in some way.     I'd consider that the bare minimum to an azure dreams clone.   But MAAAAN I wanted to do more.

[heckruler]

Alright, 20min past midnight. What have I got?

Well, basic RL with an elemental circle-of-death... but no pets and no taming monsters.   Which was the main focus of the intended game.   

You know what?  I started 3 days late.   Rather than declare a failure of a  4drl, I'm going to release on Wednesday.   If I don't make it by then, sure, failure.

[heckruler]

What I like about this challenge though is that every year I can just go grab stuff that I distinctly remember struggling with in years prior.

Oh man, a state machine? Wait, I have that.   Console messages? Yep, did that too.     It's like making your own lego blocks.

[Zireael]

What is preventing you from working on it outside of 7drl week? I love the concept...

[heckruler]

It's part of the philosophy of the 7drl challenge. SHIP IT. In 7 days. Or move on.

Waaaaay too many people get stuck trying to bite off way more then they can chew or get bogged down in a project that, frankly, isn't worth it.

On a more practical level: The wife, the kid, and life in general are what keep me from working on this outside of the challenge. Last year I thought I could work on a "7drl" in the sense that I'd take no more then 168 hours.  Yeah, in theory that's still in the works, but I'm only 50 hours in. Turns out that if it's not pressing, other pressing matters take precedent. If I were single it might be different, but with a family, the scheduler just blocks out low priority tasks. When I say I'm going to take my missing three days, that means I'm going to work from ~8:30-11pm, ideally.

[heckruler]

Man, I screwed up the math bad. I wanted a 3 element circle of death, with gradient effects and various zones which would adjust the abilities of the monsters. It would make breeding really interesting.    But I glossed over how that would work out mathmatically. What this is, is a ternary plot. But they only have two degrees of freedom.  It has to sum to one. Saturday I fooled myself into thinking I got it all working out, but as I'm debugging the mosnter attacks, I'm noticing some really weird stats. I dig deeper and find out monGetAffin throws most monsters out of the traingle and monGetElementZone is confused.   If I had gotten to seeds and something like monAdjustAffin, and fed it 0.5 and -0.5, it wouldn't get you to the same spot.

God, I lost monday to just beating my head against that wall.   Maybe i could figure something out with polar coordinates, but I just hacked it off. I mean really, this is the last day. Damn shame as I think that's one of the more intersting aspects of this idea.

ANYWAY, the monsters all fight a battle-royal, and you've got a pet that follows you and attacks enemies.  Minimum to completion is some way to find/hatch eggs for more pets.   

It'd be nice nice to try and tame existing monsters by roping them.

It'd be nice to breed two pets.

It'd be nice to issue commands to you pet.

It'd be nice to give monsters abilities and traits.  Right now there's no point in having wind monsters.

And items would be nice. Without some way to replenish your monsters, it's really a race against them just dying of old age.


LAST DAY. And I've got to remember to actually publish it somewhere rather than just talk about the damn thing.

[heckruler]

WOOOOOOOOO!

Completion. It's a good word.

Alright. so this is NOT a great shining example of a fun game.   It's got a couple of semi-clever ideas, but the big one was retarded by lack of forethought.   Damn shame.   You can play, you can reach and... end. You can most certainly lose.

Unfortunately, there's a bit of an obvious solution because I never got around to making the predetors anything other then suicidal fanatics.


https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B7Dh9-Nf2AnMSnhIOTdjMHBYOEU&usp=sharing

make
./azure7drl.exe

libtcod library should be loaded from the local directory, but please pipe up if you have any trouble.

[heckruler]

Finally got around to fixing some bugs.   

And HO BOY where there some critical gameplay bugs.  Players not being placed at the start of the level. Monsters would murder each other to extinction.   Monsters dying lead to all sorts of wacky stuff.

What I'd REALLY like to do is add returning home, breeding, items, and the real element system I originally planned on. Buuuuuuut  sum total, there's probably been ~6 hours of actual work into the bug fixes. And that's over a span of... what? Two months?   So further development probably isn't in the cards.

BUG FIXES:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B7Dh9-Nf2AnMemp1ZW1IS0hybjA


What sucks is that this didn't even get into the list at http://roguetemple.com/7drl/2016/.   No Linux-only game did.   Sheesh. I guess that's a significant lesson.

[jere]

I responded to you on reddit about the lack of reviews for linux-only games.

Anyway, I gave this a shot. My biggest complaint is that it seems you burn MP on every movement, so you have to rest every 10 turns. Not sure if there is some point to that, but it was frustrating. I couldn't make it very far once in the tower. I usually got killed in 2 or 3 hits by the first monster encountered.

I like the city that precedes the tower and I like the idea behind the game. Bummer you couldn't get further on it.

[heckruler]

Thanks for taking a shot. 

Yeah, the MP thing is probably too frustrating. I remember that being an attempt to keep people from simply running from monsters... But in the original, there was always dead ends, running into other monsters, and traps, so it wasn't game breaking or anything.

... oh man, speaking of game breaking. BALANCE is one of those things I barely paid attention to. I've really got to schedule some time just to make the game fun.  Completion is good, but a game needs to be fun and winnable.