I See Monsters

Today I implemented some gameplay into my 7DRL entry. First I put up a minimal statistics line on the top of the display. For now it only updates the dungeon level the character is on. I also added hit point regeneration for the player. The only problem is that there is nothing that takes away the player's hitpoints. So the hit points stay constant at the maximum amount. All that is going to change shorty. I am slowly coding up the monster portion of the game.

The monsters are really not all that fun. The implementation seems mechanic, like I have done this before many times. I should just come up with a generic library to handle this. Then I can use that library in the future. For now I have monsters being created. The further you are in the dungeon, the more monsters you will see on a level. The monster now blindly follow the player around the room.

There are some limitations I need to overcome. Right now monsters cannot cross over top of items in the way. They also do not attack the player yet. Likewise the player cannot hit any monsters yet. All this will change soon, maybe even tonight if I get the time and energy. I just want a minimal set of monster logic to provide some obstacle from making the game too easy. The real emphasis of the game is the shape of each dungeon room.

Intoducing the Ellipse

Today I banged out the rest of the screens for my 7DRL entry. The major new geometry that I added was the ellipse. This is an elongated circle. Since the shape is drawn in character blocks, the sides are not smooth. But it is good enough for a roguelike. Having gained the power to draw an ellipse, I drew two ellipses on one screen and called it my Mobius strip.

This kind of looks like a figure eight turned on its side. Or it looks like the infinity sign. I actually read up on some newsgroup posts to see how people draw a circle. Turns out you use the x squared plus y squared is less than the radius squared equation. And here I thought I was going to have to dig into the sin() and cos() functions. That would have worked to. But why add trignometric complexity when a simpler technique exists?

7DRL Day 2 Progress

In the afternoon I completed the second room shape for my seven day roguelike entry. This was a diamond, which was easy because I already figured out how to draw a triangle. A diamond is just two triangles joined at a side. Then I went to the next screen which wsa a cross. And when I write cross, I mean the vertical/horizontal cross like the universal symbol of medic.

Finally I came back this evening and implemented what I think will be the final screen for the day - a criss cross. This is just a big letter X. It was tough to line it up to fit proportionally in the maze boundaries. But I think I got it right. Tomorrow I venture into the shapes that involve the circular geometry.

7DRL Day 1 Progress

I have spent an hour or two starting the coding for my Seven Day Rouguelike entry. Before writing the first line of code, I sketched out what each level of the dungeon would look like on a pad of paper. Some ideas are still under consideration. The first room was initially going to just be a normal rectangular room. But where is the fun in that?

So I instead started out with a triangular room. At first it was not that hard. However the screen is wider than it is tall. So the triangle did not take up the entire width of the screen. I tried making the triangle grow in width at twice the original width. However that causes it to botom out too soon. I am satisfied with having some crooked edges, but making the triangle fit the screen better.

I also added display of the player symbol. The user can move around the screen using some keyboard controls. I am also making sure the player cannot walk through walls. I am going to call it a day. Got a lot of other tasks to work on tomorrow. However I want to get at least two more screens put in there. And maybe start adding some stats to the top of the screen. By Monday I hope to spend a lot of time on the game, and maybe even complete all the room shapes.

2013 Seven Day Rogue Begins

I have just declared my intention to participate in the 7DRL for 2013. My info has been entered over on the Rogue Temple site, when entries are submitted. This year my game will be called Room Rogue. I plan to focus on drawing dungeon rooms that are something other than plain rectangles. I have sketched out a dozen interesting shapes. Some will be familiar from other roguelikes. Others might be unique.

Since I have been looking for an excuse to use some programming skills I have studied over the past year, I will be writing the game in JavaScript. That means it should run in a browser. Yes. No install program required. I did a 7DRL in JavaScript once before. However I really did not know much about the language back then. So I struggled. Now I hope I can learn a thing or two. And produce a roguelike.

I am a litle behind in school right now. That means I canot spend the whole week coding this game. Got to ensure studies do not suffer. However I do not plan to go into work this week. That would leave no time for the game. As long as I don't spend too much time hanging out with the friends and playing games this week, I should be able to throw down a playable game. Good luck to all entrants. I saw well over 200 entrants already over on Rogue Temple.