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.

User Interface Progress

There is some good news. I read a comment or two from my previous blog. The poster recommended I not use an applet to display my dungeon. A recommendation was made to use libjcsi to do my output. In 10 minutes I got a sample demo running.

An hour later, I have my Angband town like perimeter. I also have the user symbol (@) displayed in the middle. It might not look like much progress. However my previous user interface had some subtle problems. There were spacing issues when drawing the user symbol. Now everything is lining up.

The next step is to figure out how to capture input from the keyboard. If I can do that, perhaps I can get the user to actually move. Yeah I know that does not seem impressive. But it is a giant step forward for us beginning Java programmers. Props to "SZDev - Slash" for the helpful hints. Some day I will return the favor.

dL1 Screen Shot

I have started writing some code for my 7 Day Roguelike entry dL1. The outline of the first level of the dungeon is visible. I might have a slight vertical spacing issue to deal with. And I tried making the user appear in the dungeon as an "@", but I had trouble erasing the character. There was also some trouble aligning the symbol at the correct location.

But this is at least a start. Now if I can just solve my spacing issues, and figure out how to erase a character on the screen, we might have a character moving around a little bit. For now I am think I am going to call it a day. I have about 5 days left before the contest is over. That seems a long way to go. At this rate, I will be happy if I get a character running around the dungeon and picking up things.

Challenge Accepted

Good news. I have decided to enter a 7 Day Roguelike game development contest. That means I have 7 days to program a game like Rogue. To make matters more difficult, I am going to write it in the Java programming language, which I am just starting to learn.

This should be good fun. My game is going to be called "dL1". It will be a 1 level dungeon. If I get the basics working, I shall try to get a dungeon level which extends indefinitely in each direction. I also plan to give the player a lot of great artifacts early.

I posted my intention to compete in this contest. You just need to add a post in Usenet group rec.games.roguelike.development. My post is there. The journey now begins. I will post screen shots of my progress here on my blog. Good luck to me. I will need it.

RogueLike Challenge

This Saturday marks the beginning of the 2009 seven day roguelike challenge. This is a contest for programmers to develop a usable Rogue like game in a total of seven days.

That sounds like quite a challenge. It might take junior programmers more than sever days to get the town level working. Forget about a complete game.

Here is the real crazy part. I am thinking about entering this challenge. I love Angband. And I have often thought about writing a version myself. This might be just the spur I need to get things going.

This is a busy week coming up for me. However every week is busy. To add to the insanity, I thought I might try coding the program in Java. I am in the middle of learning the Java programming language through a college class. Good luck to me. I will know whether I will enter this contest by the weekend.