[Captain Failmore]

Pretty straightforward stuff here. Everybody's done one of these stupid things, so I figure, why not me too?

Features I'm working on right now:

• Random level generation. (ARGH DICKS)
  
• A very simple ray-casting component for lighting and visibility.
  
• Embarrassingly primitive cellular automata for assorted dungeon effects.

In other words, shit that doesn't even remotely resemble a game yet.

Features I'd like to implement once I figure out how:

• A level and experience system blatantly stolen from Linley's Dungeon Crawl.
  
• A terrain system incorporating multiple levels of cover and destroyable walls.
  
• A somewhat original system of special abilities. (Experimental, no clue if this would stick or not.)
  
• Other combat mechanics that retain intuitiveness while allowing you to do more than run into things.
  
• Excessively large levels.

It's not Dwarf Fortress yet but by god I will turn this into an autistic trainwreck of a project.

Any suggestions?

[Lachesis]

Shit son, this needs Dentists and Cowboys as playable classes

[Captain Failmore]

The idea of a 19th century dungeon crawler frightens and amuses me.

GUN WIZART

[Seventh Shade]

There's already a steampunk roguelike set in the late 1800's. Please make the random dungeon generation more interesting than what is in most games. Incursion is a fairly good example for making interesting dungeons. Also, the less keys the player has to memorize the better. Also also, let fighter types be able to do more interesting things then just run into an enemy until it dies. Also also also, good luck. Making a good roguelike is hideously time intensive.

[Captain Failmore]

There are two ideas that I'm considering for improving level generation.

First, layout improvements are an obvious one. By assigning unique growth habits to rooms and hallways they could assume more unique and unusual structures. In most roguelikes you wind up with a series of interconnected boxes, which isn't terribly interesting in itself. In addition - and I'm glad that some games like Stone Soup have this - non-random or semi-random dungeon features are a nice twist, especially if they have Hidden Fun Stuff (HFS) in them.

Second is the inclusion of permanent, semi-permanent, and temporary cover. Patches and floating clouds of vision-obscuring stuff could wind up affecting how you approach an open space. Sneak around and risk getting ambushed, stick to open spaces and hope there's not a range-loving monster around, or what? (That is, if I get to that point.) Walls that can be destroyed or moved would also help to keep your surroundings from being too bland.

Since my biggest concern right now is how I'll handle the layers of level data and drawing each level, it's likely that I'll have made at least some progress toward that end relatively soon. Basically, the levels will get drawn like this:

• A smattering of dots - 'nuclei' - gets chucked into a reference space in the V-layer.
  
• Each of these nuclei is assigned a growth habit and a list of connected nuclei or at least their coordinates one by one. Some of these growth habits may be non-random or semi-random features.
  
• A room is drawn around the nucleus based on its growth habit or which ever feature got assigned to it. (I also get to use crystal terminology to sound smarter and more original than I actually am.)
  
• The hallways are subsequently drawn, also according to some growth habit assigned before it's drawn.
  
• After all the empty space has been 'grown' (I'll have to be sure to include considerations for stairways to ensure disconnects don't happen) the empty space gets dotted with cover nuclei.
  
• Lather, rinse, repeat. The cover and any other features of note I throw in get grown according to their respective habits. Similar processes may be repeated for things like HFS, or a certain aspect of the magic & powers system I'm fiddling with.

The tough part will be programming in the different habits, determining how non-random or semi-random features get drawn (likely a special habit code) and how to avoid annoyances like disconnected rooms or features making parts of the level inaccessible, though I can't fix any of those problems until I actually cause them. Here's hoping that I get it right on the first try.

As for combat, I'm getting a bit more ambitious with that one. First, while it goes against the common creed that simpler is better, I want to actually use damage flags for weapons in a meaningful way. This makes it harder to be prepared for everything while making actually thinking about your equipment matter. (For instance, you're being sent to fight a rock monster. Maybe you should use a hammer.) In addition, certain weapons should have exclusive maneuvers associated with them, like winding up the blow from a flail to trade an increased attack delay for amplified damage, for instance. I've never liked that often my only option in these games is to just bump into things until they die while as usual magic folks get to have all the fun. That said I definitely want to at least put grappling in. (Say you could wrestle a foe to incapacitate them and get a free critical hit, but at the risk of having them pull a reversal and do the same to you.) That and make shields actually useful, they didn't call bucklers 'punching shields' for nothing.

It's hard to tell if I'll get that far with it, though. We'll see.

[CJA]

Put HFS everywhere, EVERYWHERE, FOREVER, JESUS GOD!!

[Captain Failmore]

WHAT KIND OF HFS

NO PENIS ROOMS PLEASE I ALREADY HAVE THAT COVERED

[CJA]

Rooms filled with a certain kind of food, rooms with only incredibly pointless items, a tile that heals all your HP out of nowhere. Stuff like that. Oh yeah, and random flavor text would be great and that's easy to get people to write.

[commodorejohn]

I like the generation idea proposed, it sounds like it would make some nice ADOM-style levels.

Also I will gladly write flavor text assuming it doesn't need to be particularily serious.

[Mr. Apol]

man i don't know who you are or where you come from but you excite me

[Captain Failmore]

Before I get too far ahead of myself I suppose it wouldn't hurt to ask:

Any nuggets of wisdom from seasoned dungeon crawlers?

Castle of the Winds, Reaping the Dungeon, and Stone Soup are about the extent of my roguelike experience. Enough to tell me what I like and don't like about the genre, anyway.

I'd really hold off on flavor text for now until I have some clue as to where I'm going with this past level generation and basic navigation. I'm fairly certain that I want to make NPC entities individual robots (as sloppy as that might be) and have the rest of the items of interest in the dungeon be stored on an object layer somewhere, but that's like... it. I'm not even sure if I want the default player to be moving around the board or just use a robot to represent the player instead. I'm all up in level generation's grill though.

Be forewarned that any finished game is probably going to be slower than shit and I really don't care.

[Lachesis]

I approve of this room growing method! Screenshots?

Mr. Apol, on Jan 23 2009, 09:10 PM, said:

man i don't know who you are or where you come from but you excite me

He's Taitorian

[Nytar]

Captain Failmore, on Jan 24 2009, 12:36 AM, said:

Be forewarned that any finished game is probably going to be slower than shit and I really don't care.

I care about speed for my roguelike. It had some nasty slowdown issues when several creatures were engaged in combat(with the player or themselves). This was primarily due to all the status effects being processed each turn for each creature, and over 10-15 effects could be active. I had to redo most of my game and use simpler methods that were still complex in some way.

[Captain Failmore]

Holy balls that's a lot of status effects.

What were they?

[Lachesis]

That's not a lot of status effects, Final Fantasy VI had like 30 of them (granted, half of them were invisible to the player)

[Captain Failmore]

I'm assuming he meant that these were visible to the player, things like 'poison', 'slow', etc.

[Nytar]

Captain Failmore, on Jan 24 2009, 02:32 PM, said:

Holy balls that's a lot of status effects.

What were they?

Let me check...

...It turns out there are actually 19 status effects in that version of my roguelike:

Bleeding - drains HP and covers the affected character in blood.
Stun - causes character to stumble around.
Poison - lowers stats until cured or gets overridden by a stronger poison.
Lethargy - drains SP, which is used for casting spells.
Burn - deals fire damage over time, lasts longer when hit with oil.
Chill - deals cold damage and reduces evasion.
Shock - deals elec damage and randomly stops actions.
Acid - deals acid damage and increases physical damage taken.
Wet* - lowers elec and cold resistance and increases fire resistance.
Blood* - allows certain creatures to easily track affected character.
Mud* - hides character from creatures with heat vision.
Oil* - lowers fire resistance, keeps other creatures from grabbing character.
Slime* - reduces effectiveness of healing spells.
Haste/Slow - increases/reduces character's speed and are mutually exclusive.
Shield - absorbs direct damage of any type.
Invisible - hides character from normal vision.
Blind - prevents character from using normal vision(they can still see through other means).
Seal - blocks spellcasting.

*These effects also drip, leaving puddles on the ground. It caused most of the slowdown.

[Seventh Shade]

It would definitely be nice to see a magic system that isn't really generic. Most roguelikes just have several variants of [damage type] bolt, [damage type] ray, and [damage type] ball. You need to play more ADOM, nethack, and Incursion. ADOM and Incursion are both great for character customization, Incursion does dungeons well and has interesting spells, and nethack has absurd amounts of hidden tricks and other stuff.

[Captain Failmore]

Agreed on the point of magic, but don't expect anything fancy right away. Trust me, I'm fully aware of how lame most magic comes off, both in variety and execution. I'll be experimenting heavily with the magic bit as time goes on, and will say at this point that the availability of MP could be of concern when preparing your more powerful spells. (I'll go into more detail if you'd like, but it gets complicated to the point where you'll probably be asking yourself if it's really worth it.)

At the end of the day, whether or not magic will be a play-style or a special goody for you to pick up occasionally will depend on whether or not the idea I have turns out any good in practice since... Well, I'll let this picture of mine speak for me, it does it a lot better.



I don't want the game to look like that.

I like the way that Stone Soup did some things for instance, but having fifty different flavors of magic arrow and some Pokemon style resistance-weakness matrix to go along with it really isn't my bag unless it's actually called for. (That is, if it were a major underpinning of the game like it is in Pokemon.) One thing I want to try is using magic to modify your surroundings since things like cover and destructible walls are definitely on my to-do list. Also, summoning a beard of bees. No game does this.

Nytar, that's a pretty comprehensive list of status effects. I'm unsure of the number of effects I'll include in my version (or how I'll implement them just yet) but as I experiment I'll determine which ones are necessary. I have mechanisms in mind for bleeding, stunning, and unconsciousness, as well as non-magical healing and regeneration, but nothing quite solid for status effects yet.

[commodorejohn]

What are you talking about, the game should look exactly like that. That should be the entire design document.

[Lachesis]

Captain Failmore, on Jan 24 2009, 02:08 PM, said:

I'm assuming he meant that these were visible to the player, things like 'poison', 'slow', etc.

Knocked Out
Zombified
Petrified
Critical
Berserked
Poisoned
Silenced
Blinded
Vanished
Imped
Haste
Slow
Quick
Float
Protected
Shelled
Reflecting
Retorting
Runic Blade
Interceptor

I missed a whole bunch, and of these, the only invisible ones are the last three (which the player would know about anyway), so yeah 10 isn't TOO many. Though, roguelikes seem to cover a different ground most of the time (Table RPG style vs Console RPG style)

[Captain Failmore]

Here's what I have so far. Level generation. Very ugly right now.

Adding variation to the rooms and hallways at some point in the future will alleviate this, obviously. How I set about doing this will depend on whether or not I can get the Builder robot to load code while it's running or if I just pack everything into one huge robot.

Attached File(s)

•  Dungeon_Brawl.zip (30.97K)
  Number of downloads: 78

[Padz]

I've had a quick look, the intro wouldn't link in to the level generator for me but i just looked in the editor.

It seems good with consistent and very ADOM(My most liked Roguelike) like layout of rooms. The main thing I think is that there are too many links between the rooms and often they join 2 or 3 together into a very wide walkway and It can look a little messy. This I think also makes the dungeons very easy to explore and locked doors or indeed any other obstacle would be redundant as there would be an easy way around.

But it is a very good base to refine and work off. I have tried making my own Roguelikes in MZX for years and can't get one working how I like so I know how hard it is. I'll be looking out for this so keep up the good work.

Padz

[commodorejohn]

A good start. Padz is right, the overlapping-rooms thing is awkward (especially if you're going to have flavor text, in which case you'd be walking through the room and suddenly get a different description,) but I like it so far. You might want to have some different room shapes, though, just to mix things up a bit.

[Captain Failmore]

Overlapping rooms are good for caverns and the less flavorful wilds of the dungeon, but bad for vaults and special rooms. I do have an idea that I've been planning to execute in some way, though.

Rooms are carved out of empty space, but there's nothing keeping me from having them also fill it in. (This is why I wanted to be able to load robotic code on the fly, by the way. I want a lot of these level generation scripts at my disposal so the rooms and halls can have a wide range of growth habits.) After making a room, the generator could build a wall around it and put doors at any un-blocked exits. A more intelligent room generator could perhaps be sensitive to distance or overlap, but carving out a space and then walling it off should do the trick. (Especially if it's overlap sensitive and stopped filling in a space when it found openness.)

Since the rooms are filled in by lines right now, it could just do this:

• Check if there's already anything where it wants to put a space.
  
• If no, drop the space down.
  
• If yes, stop drawing the line and skip it.
  
• Keep filling up space until it can't anymore.
  
• Keep a string of coordinates just like the Architect script and use that to just go back over the outer edge with walls. (First and last rows of coordinates, and the first and last coordinate of every row after that maybe?)
  
• Place at least one door where there's access to open space.

Obviously that disagrees a little with hallways coming before rooms, and you'd probably wind up with little corner rooms or something to that effect, but that would do the trick for some of them. We're not even getting into non-random and semi-random rooms yet.

If and when I get other bits and pieces of level generation logic thrown in, this should get more interesting.

This post has been edited by Captain Failmore: 26 January 2009 - 06:20 PM

[commodorejohn]

Yeah, that sounds like a workable plan. Irregularily-shaped rooms are nice, they just take a little planning.

[Padz]

Sounds like you have it all covered! This project excites me in ways that are possibly wrong

[Captain Failmore]

I won't say that I have anything particularly well covered, but that I do have something that roughly resembles a plan.

Monsters, on the other hand, I'm mostly clueless about.

[Padz]

Monsters are the easy bit! Unless you want purely original ones you can freely borrow from many many sources as most fantasy monsters are used in many games!
Or were you talking about the code for the monsters? I'm wired on red bull and just typing not thinking so much!

Edit: Is that your own drawing up there? If so do you have any more you're willing to share? That is very good.

This post has been edited by Padz: 26 January 2009 - 09:02 PM

[Captain Failmore]

The code, mainly. I'll have no trouble coming up with baddies, especially if I'm going to be borrowing from generic fantasy stock. Rather, coding the monsters in looks like it could be something of a royal pain. (However, once I have a generic entity code ready for the player and NPC critters that actually works, the rest should be cake. Getting there is the key.)

Also, yes, that picture is mine. Have another.