The Way Of The Warrior (working name: Stubborn Warriors) - 1DRL/7DRL, Finished

[zserge]

Hi, all!

It's my first experience in writing games.

A game is a one-dimensional roguelike, I don't expect much from it, but I hope it will be playable.

The plot is very simple. Three brave warriors fight with evil. Each on his own linear path, they always act the same - jump together, move together. So the right order of commands matters a lot.

I don't have much time to write a real 7drl, so it will be more like 1drl.

I started writing code at 21:00, 8 Mar local time. I hope to have something playable in the next few hours.

Serge

[zserge]

Four hours. At least now it looks like a roguelike.
Three warriors - fighter (@), archer (}) and monk(&) each on his own path.
Three kind of monsters (too much disbalanced yet).
Potions and gold (don't know what for yet).
So far it's the most stupid game I ever played.

Here's the screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/cUAc4nK.png

[Worthless_Bums]

But it's -your- stupid game

[zserge]

Six hours since I started coding.
Added warrior experience, killing monsters now improves warrior skills, added two useful one-time items - a bow for archer and a magic spell for monk. Now it's a bit more playable, but still very disbalanced.

Now I'm going to move it from plain Node.js to the broswer to make a public demo.

[zserge]

Ok, seven hours. 4AM local time. Enough for today.

Now you can play it in your browser (I tried only Chrome). Some instructions are on the page below the game field. First you type the row numbers for fighter and archer, then move, jump, kill, shoot monsters. Then another level, again place warriors and fight.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5689099/1drl/index.html

What's next? Since I still call it a 1-Day Roguelike - I'm going to get some time tomorrow evening to make it more balanced and more finished.

[zserge]

I'm back. I hope to spend another few hours today to make it playable. I started coding today at 18:00 9 Mar local time, now I have fixed some typos and added legend to the browser interface. URL is the same.

[zserge]

Just added more powerful monsters - Orc Lord and Gargoile Lord. Still can't beat them unless I'm very lucky.
So, now there are 6 monsters of 3 unique behaviors. Pretty minimal.

[zserge]

I have half an hour left to the end of my first 24 hours and my one-day-roguelike. I would say this phase is over.

So I'm playing the game now, checking everything looks correct. It seems more balanced, but much harder than it was yesterday. Still - the Archer rules. The most useful warrior. However fighter is the definitely weakest one. Most of the levels I was thinking how to save the fighter from death. Monk is nice, but its power becomes noticeable after ~25 levels.

So to sum up. Game is definitely playable, but a lot of moments are annoying. First five levels are just hack-em-all. Then archer's bow is the most valuable, but then when gargoyles and orcs arrive every step should be thought twice.

I pushed the sources to the bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/zserge/1drl/overview
Web version is still on dropbox: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5689099/1drl/index.html

Enjoy!

Hey, but 7DRL is not just about the first 24 hours! Right. What I have now would be called 1DRL. However if I find time during the week - I will try to make it better to have a nicer 7DRL.

Ideas:

* Warrior death may be recovered with gold
* Some nice surprises may help to go past the 30 level. Like increasing defense skill for fighter.
* Orcs intellect should be improved. Now they stop at gold or potions
* Gargoyles should be more clever and maybe less aggressive
* Probably add a possibility to go to the previous level to improve skills before the game turns into nightmare.
* Add the story line
* Make normal web UI that would be playable on mobiles as well
* Maybe add some colors to make it easier to analyze the level

Serge

[zserge]

Yes, level 30 is the end for me. Just found a bug that the game has no end Instead warriors infitely resurrect with 1HP. Of course on level 31 there is no chance to survive with 1HP.

Here is a screenshot of a browser version at the moment of my moral extermination at level 31: http://i.imgur.com/XhFFWrH.png

[zserge]

Hi everyone!

You though I gave up? No! I'm back and I have some news.

Even if the game is dead simple - there are millions of ways to make it better. So, I rewrote it all in javascript instead of coffeescript that I used for my first sketches. I split it into modules, so it's more flexible now. Also UI is not tied tightly to the game logic.

How to make game balanced? Teach computer to play it and see how it goes! I made a simple auto-player mode that plays until it dies again and again. Then I can see how far it went and analyze the results - e.g. if some monsters are too complex, or some warriors are too much invulnerable.

Game logic changes:

* Combats are now with some randomness. Fighters always lose health points as per the opponent "attack" value, but excluding the random value from zero the the current character "defence" value. That's why Archer is not invulnerable anymore, and characters with equal strength still can win the fight.
* Game is lost when at least one of the warriors dies. But that happens too ofter? Right, that's why they can are resurrected if possible. Warrior is resurrected at the end of the level if player has a certain amount of gold. Half of gold it spent on resurrection.

Finally, the browser version. It uses Pixi.js (yeah, WebGL is the best technology to display ASCII graphics, isn't it?).
Now user can undo the placing of warriors if he mistyped. And there is now an "info" screen that shows verbose information about the characters of the current level. And of course now there are colors!



I will upload a new browser version once I feel it becomes stable playable. Probably to a new location, so both version (one-day and seven-days) are available online.

Serge.

[zserge]

Ok. I finished the game!

Here's a link to the browser version: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5689099/7drl/index.html
Tested in Chrome, but should be playable in Firefox as well.
Sources are as usual, on bitbucket.

I wrote a simple heuristic AI that picked the best random solution to each level, and watched how far it goes before the warriors die.
Actually, there is no positive end of game condition (I mean you can lose, but you can't win - paths are endless). So the rules were - if AI reaches level 50 - it wins. Its most impressive victory was: level 50, gold 237. Can anyone beat it?

I will write a post on 7drl.org to describe gameplay, rules and probably add a simple screencast.

Also I'm thinking about Android/iOS version with nice graphics, but that's definitely beyond the 7DRL limits.

Thanks to everyone who followed my progress! It was really fun to write a roguelike.

Serge

[george]

Hey, you might think it's a dumb idea, but I think it's pretty neat!

[ekolis]

I never thought I would find a roguelike where VI keys made logical sense...

Why does the fighter have the worst defense? That seems kind of... odd... Also, defense seems a bit erratic - is it a random number from 0 to the stat or something?

Heh, apparently you CAN jump over the gold... oops! Oh, you can go back... too late now, I'm on another level!

The archer's bow can shoot out of his lane? That's... unexpected! Or can it just hit the same enemy more than once?

You can jump over MONSTERS?!? This changes EVERYTHING!

Nifty little game though

[zserge]

ekolis, thanks for your comments!

Yes, fighter has zero defense by design, he's deterministic, you can always know how much damage he will get during the fight.
During the combat warrior and monster looses (Attack - Random(Defense)) health points. For Fighter Random(Defense) is always zero.
Also, Monk's damage from magic is proportional to his defense level, and not his attack level.

You can jump over everything. That's the only way to survive if you see you're too weak or too unlucky to fight.

Archer shooting mechanics is a bit complex to explain. Maybe I should redo this in the next Android/iOS versions. Well, basically, the arrow flights to the right from Archer's position until it meets a monster on his lane. If the lane doesn't contain a monster to the right of the archer - well, you wasted an arrow. Next, once it hits a monster in the same lane - it kind of ricochets and damages all monsters on all lanes to the right of the first hit one.

Also I feel like I need to describe all these rules in details somehow, but since I'm not a native english speaker I can't be laconic enough to fit in a short paragraph that would be displayed on first screen inside the game, so I limited my documentation to the 'Press space to start' message

[Pickledtezcat]

A very interesting concept. Nice.