The Prancing Bard [7drl 2016, success!]

[Jan]

Uploaded my 7drl 2016 game and marked it as success, so might as well announce here! It is my first 7drl and I consider it successful, it is a small game about an idea I had for quite some time. Did not turn out as a dungeon crawler-exploration-RPG, but more of a puzzle game, bullet hell, tower defence, sort of.

Download it on this site:
https://sites.google.com/site/theprancingbard/
Blog entries:
7drl.org/author/jan
Contest list:
7drl.roguetemple.com

The Prancing Bard

Play notes while you move and chime into the melody of the world to unleash the harp of the storms.

Fight your way through 5 stages to defeat the cyclops or strive for the highscore in an endless stream of foes.

Features:
    * Movement patterns have to be matched with the streaming notes to unleash magic
    * ASCII graphics and effects
    * 5 stages with monsters
    * Defeat the Boss to move to the next stage
    * Endless mode for highscores
    * Colorblind option

[Avagart]

I have major issue about controls. I used to move player's character by numpad. Unfortunately, it's... well, weird. Keys kp1, kp2, kp3 which should move '@' to south moves '@' to north (so, kp1 works as kp7, 2 as 8, 3 as 9). I thought that it may be intended, because 'bard', 'dance' or 'prancing', but vi-keys works well.

[Jan]

Ok, thanks for noting. It seems to be a coflict to have the keys 123qweasd on the left side as controls as well... in this case 123 is nw, north and ne, which looks like it is the case with you.

Let's see, in the simplest case I remove the optional 123qweasd controls and keep vi and Numpad only.

Going to qweasdyxc is difficult because of z/y-issues on EU keyboard.

So yeah, this is not intentional

[EDIT] Found out what it is: Arrows and pos 1 etc are overlayed at my numpad and work well. switching to numbers give the above conflict. I'll update this.

[EDIT2] Updated to v1.1 should be working now, many thanks for the feedback, Avagart!

[Avagart]

No problem, Jan. Thanks for quick fix

[KhaoTom]

Congratulations on finishing your game, Jan.

Thoughts:

• The idea seems very original. It's great.
• The colored notes give the game a lively look to it.
• The spell cast effect is excellent.
• I love how the melody of the world serves as a constant source of change, forcing me to always be changing up my song. What worked before wont work forever.
• I was thinking it would be neat to have a command to spin the direction wheel, then I could cast in a different direction then the average direction I am moving.
• Any plans to add sound? Would be cool to hear the harp too.

[Jan]

Thanks for the nice feedback!

The element, which decides on the direction you shoot in, was actually the most difficult to design for me. The current solution is quite deterministic, which I like: The net movement of the 5 note pattern decides on direction. The disadvantage is, that you always have to approach the monsters you want to fight, which creates the need for enough space and attacking monsters from a distance early. I thought about a button to mirror the direction wheel, which lets you shoot in the opposite direction...

This might be part of (potential) future updates, as I left a lot of things out, like powerups (which give you more flexibility, or heal you) or monster spells (which restrict you, e.g. on the direction wheel). I am sure I did not fully explore the design space here. E.g. the inner white square of the direction wheel is a leftover of a "3-note-mode" which I eventually did not pursue further.

Regarding sound: This would be really nice! As libtcod does not support sound itself, it was out of scope for 7drl. I have no experience with sound libraries/modules in python yet, in especially how to include it to the particular code. Are there some examples of libtcod games in python with sound? I would be happy, if I could include it at some time.