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.

Subtle Tweaks

Sometimes a couple small changes can make a big difference. The dungeon maze in my game dL1 shows a lot of walls. That was a little hard on the eyes. I softened that by changing the wall color to gray.

The maze is randomly generated each time. That is normally a good thing. However sometimes that meant the character started out stuck in a wall. This seemed uncivilized. So I made sure to choose a random starting position for the user that was not in a wall.

Finally I had quickly coded up a gold counter on the right of the screen. However it only displayed an amount as soon as you first grabbed some gold. Now at game start I show you have 0 zero pieces. It was not a big deal. But I like to add polish. Time to stop with these baby steps, and figure out how to add monsters that are "smart".

There's Gold in This Dungeon

Now that I am no longer struggling with the user interface, I am adding basic features to my dL1 game. Here is a big one. When you press the directional keys, your guy moves on the screen. And he does not walk through walls. That's a good thing.

I decided to add some gold in the dungeon. It needed something. There really isn't a maze set up yet. Guess what? I colored the gold yellow. Yeah I know. That is just plain crazy. There is even a counter that shows how much gold you have amassed.

The next decision is pretty simple. Do I add some monster enemies first? Or do I try to draw a better maze for the dungeon. The sky is the limit now. There are about 5 days left in the 7 Day Roguelike Challenge. Things are lining up for me to get a game that at least runs.