The Fall of Mont Asall

I downloaded Mont Asall today. The first thing I noticed about it is that it start off in a small window. Then I have to answer a bunch of questions from a judge. Well I wanted to get on with the game, so I just guessed at the answers.

It came to a point in the beginning of the game where I had to choose some items. I was able to move the cursor between the items. But I could not for the life of me figure out how to select them. I pressed the space bar and enter key. I attempted to get some help by pressing ? and h (for help) to no avail.

Feels like I never really got started in this game.

Big Time Progress

Today I made excellent progress on my 7DRL entry Turambar. Got some items in the dungeon. You automatically pick them up when you move over them. The big news is that I got my user interface selection down pat. You can now wield weapons and armor. Yessir. The monsters will no longer beat up on you. You have a chance at fighting back and winning the battle.

I only implemented the user interface for wielding. But now that I got some code to handle that, it should be trivial to do all the other choice selection operations like "take off" weapons/armor. This is very exciting. One of my goals this year was to perfect this user interface. You press 'w' to bring up the wield dialog. Then you only have to press one key to make your selection. Previously I used some standard dialogs which required you to press the enter key after making your choice. That was just too annoying.

Tomorrow I will implement all the other dialogs that require a user choice. Then I can add some uniques and the game is essentially done. The only hiccup is that I must attend school tomorrow. Luckily I studied ahead of time before the 7DRL started. Go team Turambar!

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.

Roguelike Next Steps

I performed a redesign on the code for my roguelike game engine. Changed the way I stored items that were in the player's inventory or equipment list. This made a lot of the routines simpler and more generic. Now I have the power to implement additional items such as potions, rings, amulets, and wands.

But I think I might change directions. Implementing more items is just an extension of what I have already. I need something new. I think it is time to add monster opponents into the game engine.

Monsters have some different behavior. They fight you. That adds some real time battle code. Right now the controls are just the player moving around the dungeon and interacting with items. I got to consider monster movement now as well. Also need to implement the hit points system for both players and monsters. Let's see where this leads.

Weaponry

Previously I had implemented armor. You could find it in the dungeon and pick it up. Armor showed up in your inventory. You could drop the armor you picked up. Today I implemented weapons.

It turns out that weapons are similar to armor. They have a name. You can pick them up. They show up in your inventory. You can drop them if they are in your inventory. They have a symbol for display purposes.

In programming terms, I found that armor and weapons share properties and functionality. I was able to determine that these are two specific cases of the general idea of items. Once I got the item behavior down, making some weapons that are items was easy.

I hope this mean that other item types such as potions, rings, and amulets are also easy to add. I think I am getting the hang of this.