Turambar Day 2

Things are looking much better today for Turambar. I got some monsters up in there. They do not move too smart. They get blocked when more than one wants to come get you. But they move. You can try to hit them. However you don't really do much damage for now. You essentially die in battle all the time.

I started putting in the structure for items such as weapons. But I still need some user interaction for wieldiing the weapons. I got stuck a bit there because I want some easy to user keyboard entries to pick from lists. Did some research on that today. Will hopefully finish that up tomorrow. Then you should be able to find and wield good weapons to attack monsters with.

To be complete, I should also attend to the monster movement AI. They just try to make a straight line toward the player. If another monster is in the way, they are trapped. If the dungeon maze prohibits a direct path to the player, they get stuck. Some of these monsters should be start enough to walk around walls to get to the player. Just how to I implement that though? It is a nice problem to solve I bet.

JSRL Version 1.3

Previously I had mentioned that my game JSRL did not work right under the Google Chrome browser. Yes it was true. But all that is a thing of the past. I just released JSRL version 1.3. And I fixed the Chrome bugs.

The layout of the game did not look well in the Chrome browser either. That got fixed as well. Functionally I added a bunch of different monsters in the game. I have not rebalanced the game as a result yet.

Here are some tough monsters I added to the game: basilisks, minotaurs, rocs, vampires, beholders, golems, liches, and nagas. There are also some other new monsters that are easy to beat like skeletons, orcs, and ogres. Next time I want to try to add a town level to the game.

Stairways

One of the last features to add in my JSRL roguelike game is multiple levels. I implemented this feature today. You need stairs up and down. Of course the topmost level should not have a stairway leading up. And the lowest level should not have a stairway going down.

I wanted to make the stairway movement logical. That means if you go down a stairway to get to a lower level, then you should be right at the location in the lower level where the reverse stairway exists. It was a little tricky, but I got that right. You walk down the stairs to find yourself standing on the stairway that leads back up to the higher dungeon level.

The final major feature I need to add is monsters. I am saving that task for tomorrow.

Gold in the Hills

I need something to give the players of my JSRL roguelike a score. One part will be how much gold they collect. Today I implemented placing random amounts of gold in the dungeon. Then I had to implement a gold display that shows how much you have collected so far. This display will be part of the main player stats line.

There are only two more ideas I want to implement before I call this 7DRL a success. They are multiple dungeon levels and monsters. I think I will tackle the multiple dungeon levels issue next. I want the whole game to be 10 levels. I just need to add some staircases up (and down if you are lower than dungeon level 1). Then I want to make sure the lower levels have more gold.

Pablo is Moving Forward

I had previously played PabloQuest and had some problems with it. Turns out I did not fully understand how the game worked. Once I figured that out, the game did not seem to freeze.

I heard from the author of PabloQuest. Apparently he has a new version out. I downloaded and played this new version. Immediately I saw some new stuff. You start out a new game by stating how many levels you want to play.

This time around I paid more attention to your companion Quest. I guess he is a dog or something. Quest will go into a room and kill the monsters for you. Works for me.

There are still questions I have. For example my hit points don't seem to regenerate by themselves. I tried reading a scroll of heal, but got only 1HP of health back. Also I found it strange that I would walk right over top of gold. I got to press a key to grab it. Look here. I am always going to want to grab the gold. Why wouldn't I?

Finally I must have gained a character level, because I was asked what I want to increase. I answered "life". Not sure what that did. Maybe in the end, when the game is finished, I can read the manual.

Pablo Quest

I just downloaded and tried out Pablo Quest. At first it seemed pretty slick. The dungeon walls were drawn nicely. The keyboard controls were intuitive. Things were looking good.

Then I attacked some monsters. And the game froze up on me. I run Windows 7. I restarted the application. As soon as I got into a fight, the game froze up again. Dang.

The Pablo Quest home page declares that the game is bad ass. I want to believe it. But I need to be able to get past the problems with the game first.

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.

Maze Technology

My new game dL1 is progressing slowly but surely. I was stumped for a while about how to make a maze. Even a simple one seemed difficult to implement. I think my problem was that I was trying to do too much all at once.

So I retreated to a room with just a pad of paper and a pencil. I went through the steps of an algorithm to draw a maze. Then I started implementing the algorithm. I did it one step at a time. And before I even finished, the maze looked good enough to declare that some progress was made.

If I had unlimited time, I would fully implement the complicated maze algorithm that I envisioned. However there are only a couple more days to get this program completed. So I think I had better move on to creating some monster opponents for you to do battle with. That also seems very complicated. Now it is time to start breaking that task down to smaller pieces.

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.