Hyperbolic Rogue

[Z]

Most roguelikes allow 8-directional movement, like Rogue. Recently there are many new roguelikes which explore changing this geometrical structure. Some games use 4-directional movement, and there are also some based on a hex grid. My Hydra Slayer and Vapors of Insanity both allow the player to choose one of these three geometries.

I thought that it would be interesting to create something even more different. Hyperbolic Rogue is set on a hyperbolic plane, and the map is composed of hexagons and heptagons.

Another interesting feature of Hyperbolic Rogue is heat. Your body generates heat, which attracts ice wolves and melts down ice walls.

I wanted to wait with this for the 7DRL challenge, but could not resist the temptation and wrote it right away (in 5 days).

[getter77]

Well worth implementing---stuff like this is very much needed and I would hope other Roguelikes take a crack at this method of world orientation/presentation to continue to liven things up and stretch people's reckonings.

Somehow the first thing that sprang to mind when I saw that screenshot was Slash's Expedition, probably due to there being not that many Roguelikes with an actual planetary setting vs a "world".

[Z]

I suppose you are referring to the perspective where the objects close to the player character are displayed bigger. I remember seeing a demo long ago which also used a similar perspective. In some sense it is also an extension of the view that was used in Ragnarok and JauntTrooper in order to have both nice graphics and detailed map of the level: a small part of the screen was used to show a 7x7 area with big graphical icons, and a bigger part of the screen was used to shown the whole level in detail similar to an ASCII map.

However, in hyperbolic space this is the natural way to show things: the amount of cells in distance d grows exponentially in d, so they need to be drawn smaller and smaller. I like how the game rotates the view when you move the @ (although it leads to nausea when played for a long time).

To set some goals to the players, my high score so far is 145$ (172 yetis and 135 wolves killed).

[Darren Grey]

Best I can get is around $60.  It does instead make you feel quite nauseous after a while  :/  Very cool though!

[Skeletor]

Very cool!

[corremn]

Beautiful, something like this would work well on handheld devices. It shows a lot detail but does not take up much screen.

[getter77]

On the nausea front:  Any reckonings on how something like this would fare on some sort of 3D viewing setup(if theoretically coded with support for the lot of them in mind I mean) and/or something about the framerate?

Agreed on the handheld front as well.

[Z]

Thanks! I'm happy that so many people like it.

Nice idea about handheld devices. The current version requires lots of RAM (each move forward generates about a thousand new cells, and each of them contains pointers to their neighbors), but it should be possible to optimize.

I have added some keys to control the visual presentation, so you can now choose to scroll instantly or manually to prevent nausea, hopefully. (It's hard to find any guide about that, maybe making the animation speed match the screen refresh speed would indeed help too.) Getter77's idea about 3D viewing is interesting, I have also added an option of a 3D view using red and cyan glasses.