Return to Roguelikes

I have been sick for a while. So work on my roguelike game engine had stopped. Today I felt really good. Got a long nap in after work and dinner. I fired up my IDE and took a look at what needed to be done in the engine.

At this point I have enough code that I need to start tracking down some bugs. One nasty one was that items would appear in the dungeon, but I could not pick them up. It was like they were not there. But they were displayed.

Today I went through the code where the player picks up the items. Then I tracked down how the items get put there in the first place. Finally I checked all the code where items get moved around. Finally I found the problem. At the beginning of the game I give the player a few low level items. I steal them from the dungeon, but don't erase them. Problem solved.

Next I tried to test out whether unique items dropped by unique monsters might get picked up by regular monsters. Was unable to set up a scenario to test this. However I did find that some unique monsters did not drop unique itesm when they should have. This is another bug to track down.

The First Screen

I started writing my Angband clone for the Seven Day Roguelike Challenge. It was a rough start. I had programming problems getting the screen to display. There were a lot of errors. I googled the web for some help. Found a technique that works.

Now I got a screen with all dungeon wall characters. However I got some code that backs a general dungeon in memory. That dungeon is being transposed onto the screen. I guess the next step would be to carve out rooms and corridors in the dungeon.

Yeah the screen does not look sexy. But it actually displays something. That is a start. I think I will call it quits for the night. A good night sleep should put me in position to knock out some more code tomorrow. It is still the weekend.

Seven Day Roguelike

It is official. I am going to write an Angband like game in the next 7 days, or die trying. I posted my announcement as a reply in the rec games roguelike development USENET newgroup.

My game will be written in the JavaScript programming language. That means you will be able to run it in your web browser. It will be a challenge as I am learning JavaScript right now.

The goal will be to get anything running. I will be happy if I get some dungeons walls up, an "@" symbol running around, and some gold and monsters. The eventual goal is to have 10 dungeon levels and a big boss to fight at the end. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Time to start coding.

Pablo Quest

I just downloaded and tried out Pablo Quest. At first it seemed pretty slick. The dungeon walls were drawn nicely. The keyboard controls were intuitive. Things were looking good.

Then I attacked some monsters. And the game froze up on me. I run Windows 7. I restarted the application. As soon as I got into a fight, the game froze up again. Dang.

The Pablo Quest home page declares that the game is bad ass. I want to believe it. But I need to be able to get past the problems with the game first.

Meeting Medusa

For a very long time, I have been very conservative with my Angband character. Did not dive too deep into the dungeon. However to make it to the next couple character levels, I needed harder monsters to fight. So I decided to go down a few dungeon levels.

I was careful with the various evil hounds that attacked. Then I ran into Medusa in a corridor. This was lucky because she was summoning hydras a bit. I hasted myself, cast my shield spell, and also casted a resistance spell. You never know when extra resistance protection can save you.

My Lance of the Eorlings weapon smite Medusa quite a few times. I guess she counts as an evil creature, so I do a nice average 357 points of damage per round. It was disturbing that Medusa's hit points were not draining quick enough. However I kept up the attack until I had her head. Then I finished up, bumping off the hydras she summoned. The bummer was that she only dropped gold for me. No artifacts were found.

User Interface Progress

There is some good news. I read a comment or two from my previous blog. The poster recommended I not use an applet to display my dungeon. A recommendation was made to use libjcsi to do my output. In 10 minutes I got a sample demo running.

An hour later, I have my Angband town like perimeter. I also have the user symbol (@) displayed in the middle. It might not look like much progress. However my previous user interface had some subtle problems. There were spacing issues when drawing the user symbol. Now everything is lining up.

The next step is to figure out how to capture input from the keyboard. If I can do that, perhaps I can get the user to actually move. Yeah I know that does not seem impressive. But it is a giant step forward for us beginning Java programmers. Props to "SZDev - Slash" for the helpful hints. Some day I will return the favor.

dL1 Screen Shot

I have started writing some code for my 7 Day Roguelike entry dL1. The outline of the first level of the dungeon is visible. I might have a slight vertical spacing issue to deal with. And I tried making the user appear in the dungeon as an "@", but I had trouble erasing the character. There was also some trouble aligning the symbol at the correct location.

But this is at least a start. Now if I can just solve my spacing issues, and figure out how to erase a character on the screen, we might have a character moving around a little bit. For now I am think I am going to call it a day. I have about 5 days left before the contest is over. That seems a long way to go. At this rate, I will be happy if I get a character running around the dungeon and picking up things.

Challenge Accepted

Good news. I have decided to enter a 7 Day Roguelike game development contest. That means I have 7 days to program a game like Rogue. To make matters more difficult, I am going to write it in the Java programming language, which I am just starting to learn.

This should be good fun. My game is going to be called "dL1". It will be a 1 level dungeon. If I get the basics working, I shall try to get a dungeon level which extends indefinitely in each direction. I also plan to give the player a lot of great artifacts early.

I posted my intention to compete in this contest. You just need to add a post in Usenet group rec.games.roguelike.development. My post is there. The journey now begins. I will post screen shots of my progress here on my blog. Good luck to me. I will need it.