Lazy day

Some family happenings and other things have left me quite mentaly fatigued today. So no progress on Combat Test beyond getting a few methods named but that was some progress.

So thinking back to roguelikes I've planed I remembered Desktop Dungeons. While the site right now is gearing up for some paid version of the game the free original one is still there. Desktop Dungeons was a very interesting game for me. It combined puzzle games and Roguelike elements into a nice little package. The main idea was that only the player moved around, combat could be easily predicted (except for some cases), and the only thing randomized was the layout. The layout was very important, beyond health potions, mana potions, and some class abilities uncovering unexplored area was the only way to regain any health or mana. The game starts out quite easy with only 4 class selections and no game changing monsters but adds them to the dungeon every time you beat the floor with a class. After that a new class may be unlocked along with themed floors, new items, and other such goodies. The goal of the game was to unlock everything so you could do ranked dungeons.

It executes this quite well. One of the running themes in good roguelikes is that they are "fair". While you may not get the optimal gear or the best layouts if you know what you are doing you can beat the game. This is not always the case but it's a good rule to follow. My first few attempts at Desktop dungeons were horrible failures where I didn't even level up a few times. In later runs on new computers I easily beat the starting portion of the game so learning what to do is a big part of the game. Each class plays differently and beyond the rogue or other classes that have chance abilities you know how most things will play out and can weigh your options to win. With enough planing you can take down the dungeon boss at relatively low levels due to killing other monster to gain level up mid "fight" with it. Generally entertaining though it encourages you to pull out paper or notepad to best mop up a floor.

Not sure what he's doing now. From the looks he's turning the idea into a full fledged game and having the minecraft inspired "pay for a beta and I produce it scheme". I played it a while ago and almost unlocked everything before moving onto other thing but it was a fun time. If you got a good 10 minutes to waste it's something to check out.

link to other site day

Not much to say here. More fixing up methods and other things. Though recently I found the Rogue Basin wiki and figured I should link it.

One of the attractions is that it has a very long list of roguelikes. Both "complete" versions and ones in various states of development. It even has a decent desertion of each one. On top of that there is a running list of recent updates to roguelikes it follows which is nifty. I haven't caught up on my general ones like dungeon crawl: stone soup but I even got to see that had a recent update.

The thing I enjoyed looking at though was various discussion on roguelikes in the making state. A How to write a roguelike in 15 steps is possibly something I should consider following. There is even some discussion on what makes a rogue like a rogue like buried on the site. Interesting things to me that almost make me want to drop combat project and work on a simple graphical thing. Won't be happening but is getting me to take down some simple ideas and possibly line up a "15 step" approach to doing something graphical.