Turambar Begins

I have started the actual coding of my 2012 7DRL entry Turambar. Luckily I used a dungeon generator I had previously prototyped. So now I got a dungeon displayed and a character on the scren represeting the player. Everything else is stubbed out. But that's okay. I got a start.

Now I am trying to research how to do dialogs in the Java programming language. I tried a JOptionPane. But you have to press enter after you make a selection in that. If only I could choose an setting that allows that thing to return back as soon as the user presses a key, I would be good. I suspect I will need to roll my own customer dialog. This is one of my goals this year in the 7DRL. So I guess I can spend a day (or a night) trying to figure this out.

Collapsing Unique Monsters

I had previously hacked together some code that dealth with regular and unique monsters. The problem was that this code was separate. I had routines that dealth with regular monsters. And I had routines that dealt with uniques. This was cumbersome. So today I combined the two.

The breakthrough came when I decided that uniques act just like regular monsters in the dungeon. The real difference lies when you create them initially, or kill them. In both scenarios there is only one unique. If you kill it, you don't see that specific monster any more. That is unlike regular monsters such as an orc. You can kill an orc. But you might encounter other different orcs on the same level.

Next up I want to give the player a better chance at startup. Perhaps they could get a daggar and a cloak. It would give them a small fighting chance until they find better items in the dungeon.

A Review of dL1

I was reading the development USENET newsgroup for the 7 day roguelike competition. There was a link to a review site for the games entered. I was curious as to what would be said about my game. So I read the review on dL1.

Here are the things listed that I need to improve:

1. Provide batch file to launch game
2. Prevent inaccessible locations on map
3. Have monsters attack you if you go near
4. Give some progression if you clear the map
5. Make the game winnable

In essence, the reviewer wanted the game improved from the viewpoint of a player. That sounds like a reasonable request. The goal of my entry was to get something that worked. On that I succeeded.

So let's call the version I entered v1. Now it is time to produce some incremental releases that address the concerns of the reviewer that I want to correct.

Multi Hued Dragons

I got a little bored always fighting young red dragons. So I decided to add a little color to the mix. It was not hard of a change. Now every monster has a different color. They are all still young dragons. Perhaps I will also try to sneak in some other monster types. Dragons are a bit hard for a first level player.

Another change I recently added was one where the monsters (in my case the dragons) pick up gold. Before they would refuse to even touch the gold. They treated all gold locations as wall. But that is no more. After a dragon moves over some gold, the gold goes away. And unlike other Roguelikes, my monsters do not drop treasures yet. So much to do. So little time.