Making a one dimensional roguelike interesting.

[guest509]

My only advice, as always, is to stick with your 'gimmick' and milk it to the max.

1D roguelike? Back and forth? Man there are TONS of games that do that very think and are pretty fun.

Check out Urban Champ on the NES. The command were: Move forward. Move back. Jab. Haymaker. And you could have your defense high or low. It's the best 2D fight game I can think of. But there are others...

Street Fighter (SNES and Arcade), it has jumping but try a few games without jumping. In high school I used to play without jumping. Win without jumping and I give you a quarter, otherwise bring it!

Ring King (Arcade and NES, Arcade preferred) was basically 2D but with the occasional break where you circled.

Mike Tyson's Punch Out and Punch Out for the SNES and Arcade are 2D games essentially.

Finally I can think of the game Trojan (NES and Arcade), you can jump but it was not a jumping game, if memory serves jumping was more of a combat move than it was used to traverse the level.

In closing there a bunch of shitty boxing games for the NES, SNES and SEGA that were back and forth and in and out affairs. They sucked. I'm thinking of George Foreman Boxing here.

Also the platform stages of Double Dragon.

Hope that helps man.

[guest509]

  I seem to remember multiple fencing games that are linear. Pretty neat. Block high, mid or low, advance, retreat, thrust.

[halvorg]

I've experimented with lots of different methods of rendering the game, I've landed on SDL for now.

Simple combat is well on its way, but I am a bit stumped on how to show multiple enemies in one tile (currently 16x16) given that there will be more than a couple different kinds of enemy. (having n "subtiles" in a tile breaks if  there are n+1 enemy types)

An examine button would of course work, but that is not something that the player should be forced to do every other turn.

This is a snapshot of how it looks right now [http://i.imgur.com/VkHwvIm.png], please ignore the unaligned/overflowing text and rough boxes, everything is very temporary. I like the simple representation of the game world up top, but it isn't powerful enough to adequately show multiple enemies on the same tile.

If I limit the view distance a lot I could have a textual description of every enemy in sight available somewhere, I think that is the better solution right now. -- But I still want the player to have movement skills such as jump or charge available, which requires a minimum of view distance for it to make sense.

[Vanguard]

You could do something like this with miniaturized versions of enemy sprites.

Or maybe it'd be better to enforce a one enemy per tile rule?

[requerent]

You could do something like this with miniaturized versions of enemy sprites.

Or maybe it'd be better to enforce a one enemy per tile rule?

Or make it so that each terrain type can only hold so many enemies.

But- imo, at that point things are becoming uninteresting in the 1D sense, as you're just emulating 2D in 1D.

[JohnK]

Simple combat is well on its way, but I am a bit stumped on how to show multiple enemies in one tile (currently 16x16) given that there will be more than a couple different kinds of enemy. (having n "subtiles" in a tile breaks if  there are n+1 enemy types)

You should have loads of screen space when working in 1D, so could they not just stack up the screen like this...

Code: [Select]

      h
   g  h
@  Gggh
======================
Maybe the ordering of the stack could be important too, so you can only attack the top/bottom monster in a stack (and special attacks/spells could alter this), or similar.

[halvorg]

But- imo, at that point things are becoming uninteresting in the 1D sense, as you're just emulating 2D in 1D.

Good point.

[joeclark77]

You could also do a little bit of a ballistics type game like Bowmaster where you are setting the angle and power of the spells you cast or arrows you fire, trying to take out enemies while they approach.