Warden is a lot of fun

I have been spending a bit of time playing Warden. This game is fun. I knew it was a good one when I walked into a room and had a load of enemies to attack. This is amazing that this is the author's first game. The thing has field of view, multi-colors, and all that jazz.

Instead of hit points you seem to have stamina. Great. Let's keep that stamina up. I found after a while that my stamina was always going down. I guess I need to kill to keep up the stamina. I liked that even though I died, I got resurrected in the same place to fight on.

The only problem I found was that the window was too tall and did not fit on my laptop screen. So I could not see the messages that were scrolling down on the bottom of the window. Otherwise bravo for Warden.

Versioning and TO DO List

I finally started versioning my roguelike game engine. I have declared what I got to be v0.01. This will allow me to track what changes I made in each version. It is nice to see some progress when looking back.

I also somewhat formalized the things I need done in a TO DO list. Here are the tasks that top the list. Currently weapons and armor all have the same character display. I want to make the on screen character representing the item be based on the kind of item it is. Then a staff weapon will look different than a daggar for instance.

The current implementation has one line for status messages. When one action results in many messages, you just see the last message. I want to add a scrolling message area. I also want to allow the player to call up a screen showing lots of prior messages.

One problem I have when monsters are chasing the player is that the end up stuck in a line. Only one monster can attack at a time. That is not realistic. I need to modify the monster chase AI to go around other monsters in their way.

The final important task on the TO DO list is to add uniques. This includes unique monsters, weapons, and armor. Whew. That's a lot to do. I guess it is time to knock out TO DO list item number 1. Version 0.02, here we come.

JSRL Version 1.2

A friend wanted to see the latest developments in my JSRL roguelike game. So here is version 1.2 of JSRL. The main addition is this version is better handling of messages to the user. I have a vertical scroller to handle that. You can see the last three lines of message on the screen. You can also scroll back to the last 10 messages.

I also redesigned the top potion of the screen. The dungeon level, gold amount, and hit points have been arranged vertically. They have also been lined up to look cleaner. All this work was for a secret new addition I am working on to put in the upper right hand corner of the screen. You will have to wait until version 1.3 to see what I have in store for you.

Monsters

The last item I had to add to my JSRL roguelike game was monsters. This proved to be a challenging task. It was easy to randomly place monster characters in the dungeon. But then I needed to code the monsters to become aware of the player. Then the monster needed to chase the player.

The addition of monsters also required battles. I added the ability for the player to attack the monsters. The monsters needed to be able to attack the player as well. This required me to track the hit points of the player and all monsters. It also required me to start providing messages to the user based on the results of the fight.

There is not much functionality to add. I should test the game in browsers other than Internet Explorer such as Firefox. Then I would like to put a title screen in there. Finally I shall upload the game to a site where everyone can access it. Get ready for some fun.