Hero Trap [7DRL 2017 - Finished!]

[jtolmar]

Finished the last of the monster quota! New Hard monsters:

• Phantom - A fairly generic capital-hard monster, rather like a Troll, but it appears like another monster until you damage it or it attacks. Since the monsters in this game mostly have unique behaviors, it's actually rather easy to see it coming if you're paying attention.
• Exchanger - An evil wizard who mastered transmutation magic. Fairly fragile for a capital monster, like a Necromancer. Repeatedly casts Polymorph on the weakest monster it can see. This is basically the most evil thing imaginable. It needs quite a bit more polish but I think it's good enough to ruin someone's day, which is all I really need here.

A shot after wandering around in a room full of exchangers and zombies for a while:


Also fixed the message bug (poorly). You can't see that though since I'm only taking screens of the left half of the game so things fit in a forum layout.

[jtolmar]

Hero Trap now has a(n excuse) plot and a victory screen. You can win (ignoring that my HP is usually well into the negatives by the end even using wizard mode to descend straight through the dungeon), so now it's a real game.

I want to do a bit of playability stuff next - description screens, showing current status effects, making better use of my side panel. And then more items, even though I keep saying those are next.

[KhaoTom]

That quail is BADASS!

[jtolmar]

Didn't get as much done tonight as I wanted. I might "cheat" and take a day off work later this week for extra time.

Did about half of the sidepanel rewrite stuff I wanted. Multi-pickup still goes into a full screen window. I might swap the game to a one-item-per-tile system rather than bothering with that (Brogue and Shiren, my main influences, both get away with it). Didn't get to targetting UI, which is needed for staves and descriptions.

Implemented "flee" AI behavior using slightly sillier techniques than I wanted. I could do better if I was using my own pathfinding instead of rot.js's, but I'm trying not to get too potholed on technical purity here. It does actually accomplish its goals a large percent of the time so I can't complain too much. "flee" is the critical component of "harass," an AI behavior that toggles between hunt/flee based on whether a blast (summon, exchange, or bow) is on cooldown. This makes elves, centaurs, Necromancers, Liches, and Exchangers all much more clever.

I did triage my item list. I identified a list of nine simple item effects (five in a pinch) that would make this a functioning game, and I could balance it by cranking up their generation rates.

That quail is BADASS!

[jtolmar]

Did the description UI and panel.



I should update the quail description.

[jtolmar]

Made targettable items. It's connected to the UI via a sea of spaghetti code, but the API it presents to the items is fine.

Got a little sidetracked by level generator tweaks. I made it so floors get both branchier and more full of dead ends as you go, which was a really quick change using already-existing code. Then I tried to make the stairs spawn far from each other, which was a bit of an odyssey, and there's some things I'm not proud of in there, but it works.

I planned on doing quite a few items tonight. Hopefully it's faster now that everything is in place.

[jtolmar]

There's certain moments in games that become rights of passage for their players. This game just grew a new one, making three.

1. Get killed by the first monster even though I told you not to.
2. Get ganked by quails.
3. Find out what a Sword of Blinking or Armor of Blinking does the hard way.

[jtolmar]

Finished teleport items. Teleportation longer range than blinking. But more importantly, the sword of blinking and sword of teleportation have different interpretations about what sort of behavior they should have.

Finished healing items. The scroll of healing is actually one of my favorite items in a roguelike - it heals everything in LOS and is about as effective as a potion of healing. Which is pretty nearly strictly worse, but it's an interesting problem, and if you find a scroll of healing that means you won't find any potions of healing this game and you'll just have to deal with it.

Half-finished poison items. I wasn't really expecting these to be the thing that exposes a hundred bugs. I had enemies that stuck around on the map in a zombie-state after dying, a large variety of crashes, and I definitely need to fix status stacking because some of these items are silly.

My goal for last night was nine (not four) items and pieces of item identification/generation, so I'm behind schedule. The plan for later today was gasses and fire (Brogue-ish rules). I may skip those to catch up, though I think that actually causes more problems down the line.

[Darren Grey]

I stopped reading the thread after a while because it got too exciting and I want to wait to play the game to find out more. Everything here sounds amazing!

[Avagart]

It also looks amazng! These screenshots are truly gorgeous.

[jtolmar]

Can't guarantee they go into the game, but I could still use suggestions for what a Sword of Fire Resistance or a Sword of Levitation does. Granting the intrinsic to the wearer is taken, and applying the buff each time you hit something is boring.

I stopped reading the thread after a while because it got too exciting and I want to wait to play the game to find out more. Everything here sounds amazing!

Thanks! PS: Love the podcast. One of the episodes - where I was mentioned under an old screen name for something I forgot I did - was part of why I decided to do 7DRL this year.

Also obviously the game's title is taken from an episode.

It also looks amazng! These screenshots are truly gorgeous.

Thanks! It's ascii so anyone can do it, here are my secrets:

1. Use a modern font and a large size
2. Force square tile aspect ratio
3. Pick a really good color palette. I'm using DawnBringer's 16 color palette: http://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=12795

The large font is helped by all the work I've put into making a generation algorithm that performs alright for small dungeons. But I think the biggest thing is that DB16 is cruise control for pretty.

[jtolmar]

Added natural life regeneration (yes it's been missing this long) and got to floor 10 without items. So the game isn't totally impossible.

Added the level generation / item identification pieces to:
- Associate a base item type with an effect and an unidentified description, combining properties (orange potions have orange glyphs!)
- Figure out the spawn rate of that new item
- Distribute that item in the right quantities to the correct floors

Items theoretically have identified/unidentified descriptions but nothing actually toggles the identification bit yet. So you can learn that a milky potion is poison the old fashioned way and write it down. But I would prefer to be kind and use-ID everything pretty quickly here.

I'm going to take a bit of a break and try to do a second round of development tonight.

[jtolmar]

Added gasses. Brogue-style. Mine generally last a lot less time than Brogue's, though in many other respects they're very similar.

[jtolmar]

New monster.

b stands for something I stole from Brogue.

[jtolmar]

Zombies got you surrounded?



I know, use a scroll of immolation!



Problem solved!

(Yes I died to the resulting inferno.)