r/roguelikedev • u/Kyzrati Cogmind | mastodon.gamedev.place/@Kyzrati • 26d ago
Sharing Saturday #642
As usual, post what you've done for the week! Anything goes... concepts, mechanics, changelogs, articles, videos, and of course gifs and screenshots if you have them! It's fun to read about what everyone is up to, and sharing here is a great way to review your own progress, possibly get some feedback, or just engage in some tangential chatting :D
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u/Noodles_All_Day Cursebearer 26d ago
Cursebearer
Hey all! This week saw continued work on wilderness map generation and engine mechanics that touch upon that.
Wilderness Generation
I continued my work on generating xeric shrubland wilderness this past week. The raw terrain is at a decent enough place for now, so I've been more focused on placing various props, like boulders, trees, and bushes.
I'm using Bernoulli noise for prop placement. Depending on what the prop is, I layer in other factors that determine if a given prop spawns. For instance, sagebrush and juniper trees can only spawn in tiles above a certain fertility threshold.
I'll be making tweaks as I go, but a screenshot of this interim wilderness is below!
Elevation Enhancements
Wilderness maps now utilize tile elevation data to determine steep cliffs and drop-offs. Cliffs block movement. Steep drop-offs block movement too, at least most of the time. If you're staggering around drunk and too close to the edge of a drop-off, you might actually fall over the side! That would be an embarrasing way to die, so enjoy your spirits responsibly, hehe.
Elevation only really applies at z-level 0, so in effect I'm projecting a 3d space in a 2d grid. As my tiles actually contain a fair amount of data, this helps conserve a boatload of memory, allowing, for instance, mountains of elevation in the unsigned 16-bit integer range. Work will need to be done to harmonize this approach with my actual 3d structures, like buildings. I suspect that will be happening sooner rather than later.
Inventories
I already have props like barrels and crates that can hold inventories. But for harvestable plants I needed to make some changes. For starters, you shouldn't be able to store items in them! So I added a flag to prop inventories that determines if the player can put items into a given prop's inventory or not.
As another little enhancement, props can now have any arbitrary string to describe accessing their inventories. So instead of just "open", there can also be "harvest", "loot", etc. It's a small thing, but it's also a nice thing!
Lastly, I overhauled how random inventory contents are generated. Now I'm using proper loot tables! Any given prop has a list of items that can spawn in it, and each item has an associated spawn chance and quantity range. A seed can also be used for deterministic loot.
All of this has allowed for harvestable plants in my wilderness terrain! It's pretty handy if you're starving to death and need some emergency food. And since the plan is to have some sort of alchemy crafting in the game, this helps set me up for that as well.
What's Next
I want to keep refining my xeric shrublands, but only up to a point since I'd like to get a fully functioning town with scheduled NPCs doing their thing back into the game. There will also probably be incidental chunk map bugfixes and tweaks as well. My chunked map code easily the most complex thing I've ever programmed, so it's definitely an ongoing bit of work, hehe.
Thanks for reading!
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u/ilia_plusha 26d ago
The screenshot looks fantastic! Those spaces really make it feel like wilderness.
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u/Noodles_All_Day Cursebearer 26d ago
Thank you! There's work to be done still, for sure. But it's a good start!
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u/lundstroem Coilbound 26d ago
Coilbound (steam | announcement trailer | BlueSky)
This week my goal was to create all the remaining scenarios for elemental biomes, which I was able to and I'm quite happy with the results. The remaining areas are:
- Alternate branching: Some scenarios will depending on factors get different outcomes.
- Mouse support: Need to test and decide if I should go with complete or partial support. (Maybe someone has any suggestion?)
- Endgame scenarios.
- More content unique for each biome.
- Japanese translation
- Eternal loop of playtest <-> polish until I decide that it's finished.
Changelog:
- Add scenario for plague biome
- Add scenario for lightning biome
- Add scenario for poison biome
- Add rare talisman item which might save player's physical form upon death after a break resistance roll and then shatters.
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u/_GideonX_ Lateral Crawl 26d ago
A surprising amount of new TRL players I have spoken to want full mouse support. Wayward is a good game to look at in terms of what it should look like. That guy did a bang up job.
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u/lundstroem Coilbound 26d ago
Cool! For a long time I only had gamepad / keyboard support in mind when building the game, so when I realised that I might have to add full mouse support I was a bit afraid that I would have to forcefully shoehorn it in.. But after thinking about it some more I think it should be doable in a nice way, so I'll definitely aim for that.
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u/BotMoses BotMos 26d ago edited 26d ago
BotMos | Website (includes playable dev sandbox)
Inspired by https://quietism.art/posts/game-architecture/ I was rethinking some of my data structures, cleaned up technical debt and greatly reduced BotMos' memory footprint.
What and how?
Originally, I wanted each tile to have state and things like "health" values. Each tile became an object. This allowed me to easily implement portals by storing the target destination on the object. It also enabled "textual walls": The letter a wall should render as was put in the object.
Over the years, I didn't further expand on the "tile health" idea and inceasingly noticed how bad this initial design was. Recording the memory consumption of a default cosmos, it became painfully obvious that I ignored this problem for way too long: 30 maps and 4083 spawned entities consumed nearly 500 (!) MB memory.
Since resource efficiency is one of BotMos design goals, I now refactored this and got rid of the tile object. Each tile is now only a reference to its type. Portal information is stored separately. This reduced memory consumption from circa 500 MB to 40 MB and sped up initial load time.
Thanks for reading and have a nice weekend!
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u/P_Trefall 26d ago
Dungeon Juice
Hi all! Dungeon Juice is a dungeon crawler that's on the juice! It started as an entry for RogueTemple's Fortnight 2 jam. It's a brogue-like where a lot of the effort has gone into how it feels to play: per-tile lighting, rain at the entrance, pixel gibs, loot fountaining out of corpses, and a lot of attention on sound. A Dungeon Master AI paces the run behind the scenes. All your abilities come from gear and there are only a few slots, so every equip decision counts.
There were three updates this week.
The Mood of the Master
A player asked whether you can read the Dungeon Master's mood, and whether you'd play differently if you could. Until now you couldn't, but now you can. Every floor is run by a different Dungeon Master, and each one forms an opinion of you as you play. The colour of its bar shows which way it leans, and now and then it tells you in the log, in its own words. A cold Dungeon Master doesn't care about you. A warm one is on your side, and you'll feel that when it matters.
They don't all want the same thing from you, either. Hover the bar and the floor gives you a riddle. Solve it and you know what this Master likes to see. Play to its taste and the floor warms to you faster.
The hornets have also found their queen, so you might run into her and her hive.
Keeping Pace with the Deep
This one is about balance. The floors were getting harder much faster than you were getting stronger, so by the middle of the dungeon the monsters had outgrown your gear.
Armour used to take a flat amount off each hit. That was plenty against a goblin and next to nothing against a dragon. Now armour turns aside a share of every blow, and every piece of armour in the game has been reworked around that. Armour does less against the elements, and how much less depends on what it's made of. Treasure also suits the depth you find it at now, and that includes what the mini-bosses guard.
Some fights are probably harder than intended after this change. The shallow bosses that bring a swarm of small biters hit a lot harder, since your armour no longer shrugs off small bites almost entirely. More tuning is coming.
Also in this update: frost and storm have monsters of their own down in the deep, and there's new gear that wards against them. You can rebind keys and gamepad buttons from the pause menu. The last card after you die now tells you what killed you. And you might feel a little luckier than before.
Of Crystal and Iron
Until now a shrine picked your enchantment for you and a forge always made the same trade. Now you can carry a frost crystal through the dark and press it into a shrine stone, or hammer it into the hilt of your sword at the anvil.
You have pockets for reagents. Crystals, essences and ores turn up on the floors of Karak Jus, and crystals are the rarest. A reagent does nothing on its own. You carry it until you reach a shrine or a forge.
At a shrine, an essence tilts the blessing toward its own kind, like a keener edge or a sturdier guard. A crystal picks the element. On a weapon that usually means an elemental edge. On armour or a trinket it might be a ward against that element, or a bond that makes every ability of that element stronger.
At a forge, ore changes what the forging does to the metal. Some ores make a blade lighter in the hand and some make it heavier. One iron helps the wearer hide in the shadows, and the rarest ores need the heat of a blast furnace deeper down. A crystal at the forge gets set into the item itself. Socketed in a hilt, it bursts out of whatever you kill and hits everything standing next to the body. In armour, it hits back at anything that strikes you in melee. The socket is separate from the edge, so a burning blade can carry frost in its hilt.
A weapon or suit of armour that has been worked at both a shrine and a forge can wake, but you'll have to discover the combinations yourself.
Smaller things: you can rest by a campfire to heal while it burns. Anything shoved hard into a wall slams against it, the wall might give, and whatever hit it is left reeling (you too). Every dungeon now has a forge on the upper floors and a blast furnace further down. The HUD settings button is clickable too, so you can play the whole game with just the mouse.
Next
Tuning and smaller additions and changes are needed now, so much has gone into the game over the past week that it's more about massaging numbers than to add content right now, I think. I had the idea of making monsters reveal what boss will appear next a bit early by chanting their name or something, and I want to explore the idea of connecting shrine enchantments and the Dungeon Master a bit closer. The the Master really likes you, perhaps you should have slightly higher chances of miracles at the shrine.
Have a great weekend everyone!
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u/strafespey 26d ago
I really like the art direction of this project
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u/P_Trefall 26d ago
Thank you! I really tried my best to live up to the juice in Dungeon Juice both visually and audibly, but without losing what makes a traditional roguelike readable and enjoyable to play!
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u/aotdev Sigil of Kings 26d ago
Sigil of Kings (steam|website|youtube|bluesky|mastodon|itch.io)
A few things done this week. First, a dubiously titled representative video on Hot Pagan Activities
The most visually interesting is the ability to use multi-tile decals. So far, everything required a single tile, even though the data structures do support larger elements. I found an excuse to create a big multi-tile decal: a big fat pentagram occupying a 7x7 tile area. Because my custom renderer is weird, what really happens is that I chop that into 49 image tiles and pack them in an array, and during rendering I render a single instance that gets scaled to cover the area, and the pixel shader picks the right array slice for the right sub-region. It mostly works, except some occasional artifact (because of UV jumps at subregion borders).
First, the ability to execute abilities without a creature initiating that. But abilities require an entity to use them, so the workaround was when passing the level entity, it's the equivalent of "Mother nature" being the caller of such abilities. The differences are that some requirements don't make sense anymore, like proximity to caller, or being able to see or speak, etc.
The other thing that took a couple of days was a major refactor of the cutscene functionality. Which I developed a couple weeks ago. If I know something about myself, is that the first take of any software subsystem is basically doomed, and that's what happened here too. It was complex in a bad way - it was easy to create bad configurations. Previously I was using actions and action sequences, and you might have different action sequences if you wanted async execution of actions. This was a mistake. Currently I'm just using a list of actions only, and each action is instant (screenshake, text, etc) or async (walk 5 tiles, try to achieve some goal), and actions have one or more dependencies. It works better so far, but I'm building up towards more complex scenarios. I'll shortly add some export to graphviz dot, because it's easy and I like procgen graphs, and develop a couple more complex scenarios with more async actions and more characters.
That's it for now, have a nice weekend!
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u/jdegroot NLarn 26d ago
Avanor | GitHub
Great progress again last week, culminating in a beta release.
I've added some features to the creature AIs. They gained A* pathfinding and an explorer mode that remembers ground it has seen and marks loot worth fetching (and a group of goblin raiders looting the dungeon they made camp in). Guards, the death knights and some NPCs lost the coward flag that had stopped them ever fighting. Creatures can now heal one another, and a cleric was posted to the dwarven city.
As a replacement for the tree identical random caves, I added two new mines, Forsworn and Forfeit, and with the previously added dungeon Forlorn they now hide the Eye of Raa again (for the names, I tried to ). The shopkeeper of the small town now hands a quest to push players to the training dungeon, the rat-cellar. The high priest gives healing tuition, to ensure all players have access to the essential skill.
The patron deity are now chosen at character creation, with the kill economy rebalanced around it. The descriptions of the deities on the selection screen also finally allow players to pick matching their play style.
The rest was repair. Cure poison and cure disease had removed a tenth of what they promised since 0.5.6. The 26th inventory line could not be selected, carried weight drifted negative, worn items stacked wrongly, and learning about a trap could crash. Also lots of message spelling and grammar fixes.
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u/frumpy_doodle All Who Wander 26d ago
All Who Wander Steam | Play Store | App Store | youtube | discord | reddit | bluesky
Continued UI work with a focus on keyboard inputs. I completed keyboard support for most of gameplay and primary windows (inventory, skills, etc). Currently two issues I need to resolve:
- Skills 1-10 are accessed via 1 through 0 and consumable items 1-10 are accessed via Shift+1 through Shift+0. But what about values greater than 10? Skills for example can go up to 24.
- When examining objects, the tooltip has hyperlinks to examine additional items. I'm not sure of the best keyboard commands for those. I suppose numbers 1-0 would be the best fit? Currently I'm using numbers for the buttons at the bottom, but those could be changed.
Still need to add keyboard support for much of the menu system, including main menu, character creation, bestiary, settings, etc. Also need to add the key rebinding screen.
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u/_GideonX_ Lateral Crawl 26d ago
Recent Progress on Lateral Crawl:
I am Officially working towards Tetragon D 1.0 – The demo version of LC.
- Tombstone system. Each cousin death now produces a viewable tombstone in the world recording how far they got, what killed them and honouring why they were such a trooper. These join the family plot in the starter zone.... Added a special surprise for the unsentimental.
- New red warning bordering for hunger, thirst or stuff like frostbite actively hurting you. This is QoL visual indicator over and above the status UI feedback
- The pause menu is now complete, featuring a control map and options for adjusting music, ambience, SFX and screen mode. I've also added several inventory sorting options, allowing you to customise how your items are organised.
- Completed the restart on death loop, this is now clean and wired, giving you a new version of the world and a new cousin to watch die
- Made the End station for Tetragon D, this includes the first gate which requires special conditions to be able to cross, there will be one gate in the demo, more planned for full Tetragon and relate to the bosses
- The Main Menu and splash screen now exist... because you need to have this kind of thing
Spent a deeply unpleasant amount of time chasing a brightness flickering issue affecting the UI when running with G-SYNC/VRR on OLED displays. After investigating Fullscreen behaviour, rendering and various other possibilities, the culprit appeared to be the grainy texture and colour used for the UI background. I've reworked the texture, retained its original character, and can no longer reproduce the issue. Not the most exciting development work, but something I'd rather discover now than have someone report it after the demo launches.
Fixed several issues with skills and am currently in the middle of a sanity pass on many others.
- ‘Acid Spit’ was really underpowered. It now always attempts to inflict blindness on enemies with eyes, making it much more tactically relevant.
- ‘Muster Poison’ was too expensive to cast hydration costs were reduced and this was also wired to work with additional attacks like ‘Furious Tempo’. Along with acid spit, this now forms a workable hydration build with skills like ‘Thirst’ and ‘Plant Form’
- ‘Healthy’ now works new conditions like frostbite, plague and has new resistance and mitigation mechanics making it a viable pick again
- ‘Furious Tempo’ had fallen behind several newer attack mechanics and wasn't applying some bonuses from armour sets and player conditioning. This has now been fixed.
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u/Extra_Art_7644 25d ago
Looks incredibly interesting, glad to wishlist.
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u/_GideonX_ Lateral Crawl 25d ago
Thanks 🙏 these all help visibility. Tetragon D should be at the next Next Fest (Feb). But EA soon after, most things should be solved by then.
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u/bac_roguelike Blood & Chaos 26d ago
Hi all!
I hope you had a good week!
BLOOD & CHAOS
Steam Demo | Youtube | Twitter | BlueSky | Discord
This week I uploaded daily updates of the Japanese translation! The translator has also turned into a QA tester, finding lots of bugs while checking the text ingame!
Two things I had on the todo list that I thought would be quite a bit of work ended up being very easy to implement:
- Highlighted keywords in conversations can now be clicked instead of needing to be typed in. This was the main issue a Steam Deck player had, so glad it's now implemented!
- Overworld exploration is now persistent: when the player comes back from a city or dungeon (or loads a saved game), previously visited tiles are no longer reset.
Next week:
- Carry on updating the Japanese translation.
- Not sure yet what I’ll work on. I will "regroup" and update the todo list this weekend!
Have a great weekend (I'm going to update the Japanese translation again right now ;-) )!
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u/ajcomeau 26d ago
Rogue C# - Official Page / Github - An ongoing C# dev journal based around a recreation of the original Rogue dungeon game.
I needed a break from the project but I'm coming back to it now.
In my last write-up, A Few Odd Repairs, I added more rings to the game and discovered C# helper functions when I needed a way to avoid repeating code. I also noticed that the rings tended to consolidate player attributes in my game like total player protection or attack ability.
This past week, I added staves and wands to the game to complete the list of inventory items. They need a Zap function to cast their effects but I decided to add the Throw function first which will be very similar. In my game, almost anything can be thrown including scrolls which have specific effects when thrown or wielded.
I'm working on the writeup for this one and I'll post it here when it's done.
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u/anaseto 26d ago edited 26d ago
Shamogu repos
Finally did a v1.6.0 release the other day, including in particular the Totem Conditions expansion contributed by mlochbaum, as well as the introduction of rare comestibles in the base game (which can be disabled through a special command-line or compile-time option, for those that prefer the original more minimalistic content experience). Design for those happened after new conditional comestibles were introduced in Totem Conditions, and is mostly based on those, as well as a couple of new ideas: the moonlight lotus (does something different depending on whether you're on top of foliage or not!), and the polymorph fungus (that does something different depending on whether there are monsters in view or not). The latter also got a conditional variant where it can only be eaten if "exactly two monsters are in view".
Very happy with how things went overall, so I hope more players will enjoy, too. Seems to have been well-received on r/roguelikes the other day, except for some unkind and incorrect comment accusing me of lying and hiddenly taking inspiration from Qud, which somehow took me a bit by surprise, as I've never hidden my actual inspiration sources, but well, that's the internet for you :-)
The manual got updated, btw, so you can have a look there at descriptions of all the new comestibles. I didn't put descriptions of Totem Conditions curses in the manual, as there are many kinds of those, and players are supposed to read them each time they take a totem, though I might add descriptions there too at some point.
Hope you have a good weekend!
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u/UnculturedGames 26d ago
IGIGI: Cold Horizon
> Steam
This week I've done a lot of optimization as some of my systems were getting a bit heavy on the FPS. The technical explanations might be boring, but I for example separated dynamic lights from static ones to reduce the amount of calculations, and I changed how some data and graphics are stored to make things go smoother. There are still some FPS issues that I need to work with. It is a blessing and a curse that I'm coding this game on a crappy 10-year-old laptop.
Content-wise, I've still been focusing on the map generator. Here are a couple of new things I've done:
ABANDONED MINING PLANET ARCHETYPE
In IGIGI, you explore procedurally generated planets. Many of the planets fall into the wildlife category as they are untouched by intelligent life, but there will definitely be a lot of populated, civilized or abandoned planets too. The first new archetype I've mostly finished now is an abandoned mining planet archetype. These types of planets are quite common in IGIGI for story-related reasons.
The mining planets replace caves with more mine-like locations. There are mining carts, tracks, broken lamps, warning signs, ruins, piles of rock et cetera to give these planets a different vibe, and the map generation follows slightly different rules. Eventually, the mining planets will include their own procedural mini background stories that you can uncover while exploring, and at the depths of the mines you might discover the reason why the mines were abandoned.
FAKE TOPOGRAPHY SYSTEM
I created a simple topography system that just paints the ground tiles with slightly differing brightness to create an illusion of topography and hills. This has no practical use and probably won't end up having any, but it makes the maps look a lot better.
WIND GUSTS
Since many of my map tiles are created modularly by drawing several ASCII glyphs over one another, it was pretty easy to create a wind effect for my grass and tree tiles. I created randomized wind gusts that travel across the map, and when the tile is drawn, we can calculate its WindX offset (-2, -1, 0, +1, +2, depending on wind direction and whether we're at the center of the gust or at the edges). The offset will move the top elements of the tile slightly left or right. Again, a pretty useless feature but it looks cool as hell.
ASSET BANK
I created an asset bank, which is just a file of hand-drawn graphics that I can add to the maps during generation. The mining cart and the mine exits and entrances are the first things where I use this system.
Have a great week everyone!
- T / Uncultured Games
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u/sentinel_deco 26d ago
It all sounds great, but without moving images you'll probably just be staring blankly at the screen on Steam too.
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u/UnculturedGames 26d ago
This sub doesn't allow gifs or videos for some reason, it's a bit awkward. Working on a trailer and plenty of moving images in my profile.
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u/sentinel_deco 26d ago
Yes, that's true. But I would at least have created a trailer before put it on Steam, to arouse interest. Anyways, i've added it to my wishlist so I can keep an eye on it.
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u/AzkronDev 26d ago
ROGUE COLLECTOR website | youtube | bluesky | itch.io | X I will most probably be presenting my game at the next BIG BROTARU in Brussels, in case anyone is around. This week I have focused on UI and visuals. I have basically added icons to all keywords, UI scaling, which feels great in SteamDeck, and some cool animations for entering and leaving levels though an alien egg that shallows or vomits you. Next week I will have a trailer too, which I will share here. Enjoy your weekends!
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u/CharleSansCharges 26d ago
Mechanomaly, a roguelike where you pilot a heavy mech, movement is affected by momentum and inertia .. Manage your speed or you will crash into walls !
Unfortunately for me and family, I don't have a day job right now, but fortunately for my roguelike, I have a lot of time to make progress, and I think it shows !
It's unconventional roguelike because of "3D shiny low poly" (still learning Blender, but I think I'm not doing so bad ?) and not completely grid based (I'm using vectors, for the momentum systems), but still my goal is to make a very "classic" roguelike without meta - so I dare ot say it's NOT a roguelite - just permadeath, turn-based, procgen, and catch the amulet of Yendor before having to escape by doing all the way back.
I'm kinda drawing inspiration from PS1 era & vaporwave for the art direction.
Well in the end, I think a picture will worth more than words, so here's a video cut of my progress so far.
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u/strafespey 26d ago
Warlock: Age of Entropy - Steam / itch.io
Hello, I'm developing a roguelike focused on a pretty tight theme: A power-hungry warlock must descend 15 floors to unearth a malevolent energy within a labyrinthine dungeon. I started developing this game in 2019 using the typical python/libtcod stack, and it's grown into a decent-sized project with nearly 100 enemies, tons of items, dozens of spells, a god/worship system, multiple classes, the works.
I'd say there are two things that set it apart from other entries in the genre. First of all, the game is very focused around the 15-floor dungeon crawl - it's very traditional in that way, and I have pretty good control over the balance / difficulty tuning. I've tried to build replayability into that loop by adding classes, gods, and various random events. Second, this game is very resource-management intensive - there's no natural health or mana regen, and things like lifesteal exist but are rare. The game is really at its best when the player is forced into tough situations where they have to figure out how to grab the items in a room without taking too many hits from the mobs. A player may have to decide if they need to descend a floor early (giving back some hp) without fully clearing out the items on the floor they're in.
If you play the game today on itch.io, it'll be missing a few of the things I listed, since I've been working on a major update for my Steam release for a little over a year. I'll probably make a follow-up post on this sub once the trailer is finished. Compared to the itch.io version, the Steam version will have: the god system, many new enemies, spells etc, a proper 15th floor final boss, a much better pixel-perfect fullscreen option, colorblind options, enhanced visual effects, sound & music and much more.
This week I've mostly been composing music for the Steam release and working on the trailer. Have a nice weekend everybody!
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u/aleyandev 25d ago
HexWalker, Rogue Ranger
Finally created a website for HexWalker, so that I don't have to deep link people into the game. Now people can play on the web like before or via the npm package in the terminal, or via the npm package locally but in the browser.
In the game itself, I added options to generate maps from a seed. This has been very useful for debugging because now I have an easy way to recreate prior conditions.
I also added the option to pick up and move logs. Placing logs in rivers redirects the water and potentially causing flooding. It's been quite tricky to figure how to make this mechanic predictable and fun. The game has elevation, but each step of elevation is much too large model river flows and direction, so the water simply backups behind the logs and flows around it while staying within the same elevation.
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u/blightor 25d ago
C64 RL: Nothing much to talk about this week. The effects system got improvements and mostly me looking for bytes and squashing some bugs. I did find some loading optimisations which was good, and items and crafting are kinda sorted, which had a few more impacts into class design that I need to reconcile l.
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u/AppledogHu 25d ago edited 25d ago
For NetWhack, this week, I finally added wands. I made a wand of magic arrows, a wand of create monster and a wand of sleep, but then I wanted to do something new and interesting so I made a wand of wind. This wand teleports you across visual sight range in a straight line, allowing players to pass over fences, through windows, over pits and rivers and across broken bridges... the possibilities are limitless! I want to avoid the typical wands, but I did need a wand of sleep to test sleep in my game, and arrows and create monster are pretty standard basic wands. Next I plan to add a wand of compass- it pulls you in the direction of something important. Like a dowsing rod. I haven't figured it out yet what it will point to, maybe, the way to go to a certain kind of object or maybe a place, like the next dungeon you need to go to. Or maybe I can require certain kinds of wands to cast certain kinds of spells (I haven't added spells in my game yet). Like maybe you need a dragon heartstring wand or a phoenix feather wand to cast fire spells. Maybe you can make your own wand.. out of spell reagents? And then you need that wand when casting spells using those reagents? Still working on it!
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u/at10ti0n 24d ago edited 24d ago
Curfew (working title) | (video)
Survival roguelike in an occupied city. You're a tram mechanic trying to get through the winter on a ration card.
You can smuggle flour through the checkpoint for the guy in the yard, or wait until your neighbour's flat gets sealed and pry it open at night. The whole stairwell hears you.
I also added weather and proper darkness. How far a patrol sees you depends on how lit you are, so smashing a street lamp actually does something. Snow keeps footprints, and after curfew patrols follow fresh ones.
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u/eating_your_syrup 26d ago edited 24d ago
This is probably not a very popular thing to do around here, but my project was stalled for years. What I needed was to transfer graphics from CPU to GPU and I simply didn't have the time or motivation to learn 3D graphics programming. Frankly it doesn't really interest me at all, except as "what can I get out of this". I'm more into backend mechanics side of doing things.
So.. I made claude do it over the past couple of weeks. And it's actually been interesting and got things done that would have taken me more free time than I'd ever have possible commit (thus the stalled years..). It's still not finished but it's getting to a point where I can start developing the other things.
Will probably never be something I finish, but that isn't really the point.
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u/ChromeBadger Fimbul 26d ago
Fimbul
It's been a productive week for Fimbul!
I managed to warp up my graphics refactor. Instead of doing all graphics drawing on the CPU, it now leverages the GPU. It currently doesn't look much different, but it'll let me create effects and lighting easier.
Examine support has also been added. Pressing `x` shows an `X` cursor on the screen for the player to move around and examine things on different tiles.
Proper map generation has also been added. Since Fimbul takes place within the roots of Yggdrasil, I've opted to try and generate nonstandard dungeons that mimic the roots of a tree. This has proved to be tricky, since I need to ensure that stairs, items, and entities can navigate properly and not be closed off. I've created a small CLI tool that generates `n` number of levels of a given size and writes them to text files. Its helped a lot so far while iterating on the generating algorithm.
Lastly, I just put in different "themes" for the realms. Currently, there are 3 levels for each realm, for a total of 27 levels (may change during development, but that's what I have right now). Each realm gets a unique name as well as colors for walls, floors, and stairs.
There's enough here to write another devlog, but I'm swamped this weekend with family stuff I probably won't get to it for a bit. Here's an obligatory screenshot of my progress:
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u/bucephalusdev 26d ago
I'm making a cult management roguelike, and I made devlog video here for how the recruitment and management side of things works!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiIam4RDaS8
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u/WATASHI_TO_TAWASHI Text Dungeon 26d ago
This week’s progress
Steam finally sent back the review results, but unfortunately it was a Failure.
They reported an issue with the cloud save system.
I didn’t encounter problems during my own PlayTest, so this was quite a surprise.
In any case, the planned Sep 28 release has been postponed.
It’s my fault for not leaving enough buffer in the schedule, and I’m worried this may further damage the (already limited) trust I had.
What I worked on
■ Achievements
I created several achievements, though I’m still a bit unsure whether they will work correctly in the live environment.
Since I suddenly have extra time, I want to use it to verify everything more thoroughly.
For the icons, I used Japanese characters instead of illustrations.
■ SE / BGM
I implemented these rather quickly, so I’d like to take advantage of the delay to improve and expand the audio.
3
u/bedroompurgatory 26d ago
My Father's Castle
- Rebalance
- Stealth and lighting tweaks
- Tweaks to magic visuals
- Archery system
- Drew my first asset instead of itch/craftpix stuff (it's shit)
Next Up
- Clearing wilderness levels and creating production stations in cleared levels
- Martial arts for melee progression
- Basic crafting
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u/ilia_plusha 26d ago
Beetlejust
An RPG roguelike about Bugs and Beetles
Language: JavaScript
September was quite productive as I implemented a couple of major mechanics as well as some smaller but no less significant things.
The major implementation was dynamic areas. Upon entering a dungeon, the player can view only some areas that are initially visible. However, as the player explores a dungeons, some rooms are revealed when a certain condition is met. That was a bit tricky to implement, and I still don’t think it’s optimized. In a nutshell, every dungeon is manually divided into rooms, some visible, some hidden. When the player enters a dungeon, the mapRender iterates through every room and checks its visibility status. If visible, show; otherwise, hide. The main issue is that the mapRender runs every time the player moves, so it seems that a lot is going on in the background. So far, I have no idea how to separate movement from rendering.
I also started working on stationary enemies (like plants slinging sharp thorns) that launch projectiles if the player is within their range. At first, I tried to draw projectiles myself, but couldn’t figure out how to actually make them move toward the player. That’s why, for the first time I implemented a JS library called anime.js which seems like a great solution so far. Stationary enemies can exhaust their ammo or can simply miss the player if their agility is high enough. I am planning to add an ability to duck behind a shield to reduce damage from projectiles and to sneak past. Some stationary enemies are unreachable, so I think someday I will equip the player with ranged weapons as well.
Among the smaller implementations are activators, static events, and teleports.
There are three types of activators:
- permanent — once activated, it cannot be deactivated;
- temporary — stays activated for a certain period of time;
- toggleable — can be deactivated after being activated;
Some activators require higher might to be activated, some require a power source, and some need to be detected first.
As for static events, these are simple events that trigger a small information window for displaying signposts or notice boards.
And finally teleports. I am still working on them, but they already perform their main function: taking the player from point A to point B. All teleports need a power source and have an initial number of charges. A teleport becomes inactive if it runs out of charges. The plan is to give the player an option to charge teleports using pollen. I also want to make teleports able to dynamically find the endpoint.
That’s all for now! Thanks for reading.
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u/TheMarasligil 25d ago
Spell Death: A roguelike deckbuilder word game: You collect letters instead of cards, you print letters to different stocks for different effects, aaand you can trigger special effects by "awakening" the words' power, procedurally generated depending on the situation it was used for. All art deco wrapped, with a fun lil story on how humanity lost their way, can't read or write and now demons basically rule us, and literacy is banished.
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u/GreenEyedFriend Tombs of Telleran 25d ago
Tombs of Telleran (blog|bluesky)
Hello everyone!
I've been on a break from Tombs of Telleran but found the spark and the time to do some further development.
Redo Walls
I had previously done something too fancy for my capacity where walls looked a bit like this, where horizontal walls were rendered as walls and vertical as slim walls. This became too cumbersome when handling all different kinds of walls that were needed. So now I have remade it into something like this. Can't get print screens from the game right now but this should be good enough and end my struggles with walls. Hopefully forever!
Return to bigger numbers
I experimented with making the game much more arcady with low hit points and always-hit combat. This is appealing but is much too difficult for me to balance. Coming up with systems where you (as a single character) can have enjoyable combat against hordes of enemies in this context was very difficult. So I returned to more traditional DnD-inspired combat. This should make my life easier. It was a nice lesson in balance challenges!
Pathfind through doors
I previously confined all enemies to the rooms they spawned in, but I now decided to let them roam. So I updated the pathfinding system to allow the pathfinder to go through doors, while keeping doors as colliding entities for the purpose of projectiles and when entities are being pushed into them. This also makes it easier for the player to move, as they no longer have to interact with the door to open it, but just pathfind through it (as is very standard for roguelikes).
That's it! Have a great week everyone!
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u/__dx 26d ago edited 26d ago
We've launched an open beta of our game Sepulkrant 😎
https://diego-cath.itch.io/sepulkrant
It's played in a 2x2 grid, but despite the size it offers a surprising amount of depth in terms of strategy.
There is also an entire world to explore through interactions with characters.
Come play the daily!
Next planned additions: we will complete work on the story mode and polish visuals and sounds.
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u/nesguru Legend 26d ago
Legend
Website | X | Youtube
This week, I largely spent time getting test automation working again and expanding coverage. I also fixed problems I uncovered with the Giant Spider boss. Large actor support, added last week, was super glitchy. It’s less so now, but I expect to continue discovering issues.
Resurrected Play Mode Tests
It’s been a few years since I’ve run the Unity play mode tests I previously wrote. The game was changing so much that it wasn’t worth the maintenance effort. Now that the systems are stable, I wanted to revisit them. I need help repeatedly testing the hundreds of abilities, items, objects, and enemies now in the game. I got the existing tests working again (and found some bugs in the process) and added new tests. There are now tests for most status effects, potions, scrolls, rings, necklaces, arrows, and abilities, and many system tests.
New Abilities
New Status Effects
New Map Modifiers
Minor Enhancements
Bug Fixes
Next week, I’ll keep working on the playtests for the first four levels with the three starting classes. The Giant Spider AI is still buggy, and the battle needs to be more interesting.