Game Over

I finally completed my new game Mazeband. It was completed in about siz days. So I can say that I met the 7DRL challenge.

Download a copy of Mazeband right now.

Make sure to click on "request download ticket". Then click on "download". Sorry I could not put this game on my hosting service. It is currently down at the moment. This was the best free alternative I could find.

Play the game by navigating with the number pad on your keyboard. Get all the gold in the least amount of turns. See how good a score you can achieve (lower scores are better). I hope to have a more exciting game next year. Peace out.

Mazeband Progress

Now I have my Mazeband game drawing 5 distinct rooms. They never overlap. That was quite an achievement.

You got to make sure a new random room is not in any existing rooms. The trick is that you have to also make sure none of the existing rooms are in the new random room.

We now come to the crux of my project. Time to join the rooms with halls. I only have 1 day left in my 7 day roguelike challenge. Will I make it? I got a can of Mountain Dew. And I have some ideas for the hall drawing algorithm. Wish me luck.

Drawing Rooms in MazeBand

I got it so that your character moves around when you press the movement keys. That seemed like good progress. Now it is time for the main part of my game - the maze.

Everything about programming the maze is math. Sure it is just 2D math. But you got to get the details right. I got some rooms being randomly drawn. However they are all clustered in the upper left hand corner of the screen. And they always overlap.

I think I just need to tweak some values being passed into my random number generator. Then I need to code the rules that throw out a random room if it overlaps another. Then I will be off to the races to connect the rooms. Will I be done? No. But I will have achieved my goal - which is the MazeBand.

Progress on my Game

I finally figured out that I needed to use the WriteConsoleOutputCharacter function to get something drawn on the screen. Now I have the power. The rest is mechanics.

So I got a simple startup screen done. And I drew the outline of the maze. Finally I put character symbol on the screen too. I can retrieve keyboard presses. But they just don't do anything yet.

Now for the fun stuff. Time to experiment to figure out how to draw a good maze. That is the main goal of my 7DRL entry this year. I want there to be a bunch of interconnected rooms. The rooms should be random. Let's see if I can get this done by the end of the week.

7DRL Development

To save time I decided to develop my roguelike entry this year in the C++ programming language. I downloaded Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. Normally this software costs around $600, especially since I got the professional version. Luckily I am a student at a community college. Microsoft gives the software for free to poor students like me.

I know Visual Studio can target a "console application". To me that means you get text output on an old DOS box style window. I got an app to come up and display the DOS box. However I can't get the thing to display text where I want it on the screen. I am calling the WriteConsoleOutput function. You would think that would be simple. But the darn thing keeps throwing an error.

The optimal development environment would be one where I could concentrate on the mechanics of the game. I feel like I am wasting time trying to figure out the mundane programming tasks now like just drawing anything on the screen. If this keeps up, I am going to be doomed and fail in producing anything that looks like a game. I need luck. If you know how to do ASCII output with Visual Studio easily, let me know.

New 7DRL Entry

Last year I entered my first seven day roguelike contest. The problem was that I was just learning the Java programming language. Unfortunately I have not learned much more Java since then.

I still want to enter this year again. However I plan to fall back to using C++. That is the language I am most familiar with. I don't really know much about writing games. That's why this will be an adventure.

Wish me luck. Time to post my intentions on the roguelike development newsgroup. I will keep you posted here.