Hero Trap [7DRL 2017 - Finished!]

[Avagart]

But square fonts have own disadvantages - for example, they are not looking good as text, due spacing. I see libtcod roguelikes with square fonts that spacing between letters was just too big - i t  i s  j u s t  u n co m f o r t a b l e  t o  r e a d  s u c h  a  t e x t . Altought, seems that your font is very readable as text.

That colour palette is pretty nice, I never thought about limiting number of colours and tones.

[jtolmar]

Added damaging item effects - blasting, cleaving, fire. These probably need tweaking. Also I've been neglecting animation and message queues on all the effects, and they really need it.

Globally lowered the monster spawn rate. I might change it back, but previously floors 4+ were really crowded.

Remaining engine work is the identification system and reworking statuses. Then it's all content and polish. The plan was content tonight, polish tomorrow, and last minute panic / polish / packaging it up on Saturday morning. So I need to squeeze some engine work into there somehow.

But square fonts have own disadvantages - for example, they are not looking good as text, due spacing. I see libtcod roguelikes with square fonts that spacing between letters was just too big - i t  i s  j u s t  u n co m f o r t a b l e  t o  r e a d  s u c h  a  t e x t .

That's true. And indeed, large blocks of text in my game look like ass. But the majority of the game isn't these so it's an acceptable tradeoff.

A better approach would be to switch back and forth between console style and variable width, which I'd consider if I was writing my own rendering engine, but I'm not rewriting rot.js this week.

[jtolmar]

Caught up on effect animations and messages. Added item identification and caught up on those messages. Phew!

Rewrote the way certain messages are broadcast - instead of the 5-radius thing from the Coding Cookies tutorial, it now checks the entity's sensory mixin.

Rewrote the FOV actually displayed to the player. Instead of computing a FOV that happens to be the same as the player's, it checks the player's sense mixins. This will be important when I start trying to figure out how clairvoyance works. In the process I accidentally made the game incredibly slow as it computes full FOV from the player to check each tile. I added a dumb cache instead of actually fixing this, which means the game is now faster than before I introduced the bug.

[jtolmar]

Way behind on my plans to do content stuff tonight. But I did fix up statuses, messages, a bunch of polish things, and get vision-enabling status effects working.

This lead to the creation of one of my new favorite items: the wand of clairvoyance. This is my favorite in the same sense as a scroll of healing: it's actually worse than common items in sensible roguelikes.

Here's a screenshot. I'm about to zap my wand at the target.


And now I can see around that corner!

[jtolmar]

Went through my polish list and realized most of it was already done. So I guess tonight is the pile of content night.

Made unicorns a little less dumb. I was also going to make all pathfinding smarter but the rot.js A* only supports weights of 1 even though it's like a three line change to support higher ones. Going to avoid rewriting it or patching the library.

Tweaked oklob plants. Now they're weaker in a lot of ways, but briefly paralyze you.

Switched the entire game to one item per tile. I use Shiren-like rules (dropped items go somewhere nearby) instead of Brogue-like rules (dropped items swap). It's probably possible to teleport an item through a wall.

[jtolmar]

Removed the stairs keys in favor of stairs just activating when you touch them. Made stairs a little safer in various sneaky ways. Completely broke the game's messaging system (AGAIN) and wasted heaps of time on that.

Added several new monsters (D, B, j, s, p, y, r). Most of those are for deeper depths. I now have just barely enough monsters that every monster in the game is non-guaranteed.

I think all that remains at this point is:

• Package it up, make sure my server is still working, all that crap.
• Write as many items as I can in the remaining 16 hours (which includes when I should sleep).
• Balance test. (lol like that's happening in any real capacity)

[jtolmar]

It's a little later at night than it should be, but the item effect count is up to 15 and it's actually starting to feel like a real game.

I've seen a couple of disconnected dungeons pop up recently, which is concerning. I have an incredibly cheesy solution in mind if it comes to that though.

[jtolmar]

Okay, you can play this game now!

http://noisyowl.com/herotrap/

It has been tested in Chrome on someone's macbook and my janky outdated Linux laptop. I know that I did something IE doesn't like somewhere along the line. It's also possible that a missing unicode glyph makes something invisible in some other environment; I only had to swap one for my friend with the mac but maybe something else has a harder time.

I still have a little bit of time left and reserve the right to do bugfixes, balance tweaks, or add an entire new item in that time as I see fit.

Also I'd like to note that I got to floor 14 on roughly this build (actually harder) after a few tries. I'm not sure if it's actually winnable (floors 20 and deeper) are ridiculous, but I think it might be.

Edit: That's it, time's up. I did a few bugfixes in that last hour. Here's the competition version (I may modify the other version eventually). http://noisyowl.com/herotrap/7drl/

[jtolmar]

Hit depth 15. So that's the new number to beat.

[jtolmar]

I've found enough crash bugs in the 7DRL version (http://noisyowl.com/herotrap/7drl) including a few crash bugs that I'd recommend sticking with the one I'm updating (http://noisyowl.com/herotrap/).

As far as I know/remember, the only updates have been bug fixes and a really simple change to enemy scheduling. I'll make another archived patch before trying anything that involves adding content.

Also, I was wondering if anyone would be interested in a design postmortem.

[jtolmar]

I've now forked the game into three versions:

• Current (/herotrap) - Unrestricted development. It even has a changelog.
• 7DRL (/herotrap/7drl) - Bugfixes only. I even went back and reverted my monster schedule improvement.
• Unpatched (/herotrap/7drl/unpatched) - Original 7DRL as of the deadline. You can crash the game by reading a scroll of blink to a Hieroglyph, most of the items of cleaving break the menu, and more!

You don't need to know any of these things, because there are links between them. Except on the unpatched version, because I'm not even touching the container page.

Finally, Rogueliker was kind enough to post a video of him playing the game! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCd_I-hAqkg. Exciting.  Additionally, both myself and a user on reddit have reached floor 22. So even the 7DRL version is probably beatable, albeit really hard.

[red_kangaroo]

I wanted to ask: can we expect to see a monster similar to Brogue's monkeys? They could make quite a nice easy monster.

Thinking about it, a monster that can polymorph items / teleport items from inventory, but is slow and thus can be generally avoided, could also be an interesting encounter.

(BTW, I'm the same kangaroo from reddit.  )

[jtolmar]

Haha, I think you haven't played recently,  . I added four item-hate monsters yesterday, and monkeys are among them!

Polymorphing items is interesting as an item destruction mechanic. I haven't done item destruction yet (even the classic item-destroying monster I just does something else), though I'm not completely opposed to it. Shiren The Wanderer has a monster that turns your items into riceballs, and it's one of my favorite roguelike monsters. However, in Hero Trap specifically I think an unlucky roll on an item destruction could make the game unwinnable really easily.

Welcome to this forum! Definitely looking forward to your feedback on some recent changes (new monsters, troll nerf).

[jtolmar]

Finally beat my own game.

I think my last balance patch made a few mid-to-late capital monsters too easy, as a lot of this win came from stats. I'm also thinking of removing an armor tier, as currently mithril is just a little too good.

[red_kangaroo]

Haha, I think you haven't played recently,  .

I'm caught red handed. Yeah, I was travelling these past few days - it's great to get yourself outside for a night or two.

Shiren The Wanderer has a monster that turns your items into riceballs, and it's one of my favorite roguelike monsters.

I haven't played Shiren, but that does sound good. Monsters whose attack can sometimes actually be beneficial to the player are cool. In Ragnarok/Valhalla, for example, there is a mage whose spells polymorph your inventory - a true disaster if you get your equipment and priced scrolls tunred into junk, but you can also drop everything but junk and do some third-party assisted polypiling for better items. I personally like such trade-offs.

However, in Hero Trap specifically I think an unlucky roll on an item destruction could make the game unwinnable really easily.

Yeah, that's definitely true.

Finally beat my own game.

Wow, congratulations!