7 day rl 3rd day

Lots of progress. Have almost all the item types I want in the game, All the enemy mechanics I want, and the gimmick firmly in place. Now comes the horribly filling of content and figuring out how to balance/make this fun. Not much else to say, happily surprised at progress so far.

And a screenshot for giggles

Slowly chuging out progress

I've missed some update days and have quite a few things to go over. Since I'm horrible at writing up an entrance to this I'll just lazily give a list.

Character abilities :  Characters abilities are no longer linked to stance and class. They are now their own drop down menu in the middle of battle that is selected and changes your current action. This took some rewritting of the battle system but it's going to make putting new things in as easy as making the "attack" function and adding it to the proper lists.

Different wands : Wands are now unique. They no longer just a charge number and a name pulled from a weighted list. Each wand can effectively have unlimited effects as long as they all go off on the target. I even for giggles added a "cursed" trait which forces the target to be the person useing it, not sure how long it'll function like that but I like the idea of cursed items in a roguelike as long as they aren't the anoying sticky ton of penalties kind. Been playing Brogue and listing to some talk about it has really given me ideas on what I want to do with curses but I'll can them if I can't keep the concept intersting.

Status Effects: Coming in static and timed flavors these do various things. All of them work on a tag system that's referenced when the event is called for. Wands mostly prompted the status effect development and the abilities have taken to them for effects from abilities such as a boost to the next attack or a risk on powerful strikes.

Monsters per floor : Finaly got this in here which will allow me to build the dungeons to be different. Old system only cared about what level of depth you were on and made monsters based on that. Other fun things with monsters per floor is that this can change over time. Cause the large predators in some eldritch horror underground cave to disappear? Now you have to deal with a lot more of the poisonous not quite veggie eating pray they ate.

Weapon/armor generation : Weapons like wands were just a number and name before, now they are their own full fledged class with fiddly bits and material components. I plan on allowing some upgrade to weapons of building and refining weapons through a game has more appeal to me than weapon tiers. That said I'll probably still fall into the trap of weapon tiers as that's how the game works right now.

More progress

Lunch break and coffee breaks are being productive. Continuing to figure out things and expand on rpglike as it's a working model.

Got an Overworld set up and multiple dungeons/towns working. Some minor glitches with that and need to get individual monster encounters in there but it's a very good start. Got a lock puzzle set up so quickly it's leaving me a little sad I with how legend was holding up, but it is giving me ideas on how to generate the puzzle dungeons more effectivly though I have a lot more work I need to do on room generation.

Progress

Long short is earlier this week I had a revilation of how Zelda keys work and how I was working on something far more advanced. I probably won't be able to work on giving more updates (as if that is a change) for a while as I'm on training at work which is screwing with my scheduled and a lot of other things. We'll see how it goes but progress. I suppose next would be adding combat back in and populating with some basic move towards player gloop and moblin equivalents and adding some sorta simple boss before a shiny ending spot. Then release a demo possibly with the python to exe creator so we don't have to bother with python problems.  Either way progress.

Late night quick post

A little more gets added each day. Most important was actually last week but mock up a proper "scene" just didn't seem to get my programing spirits up as tacking on more stuff. So no ascii in game image.

What we do have now is saving through good old fashioned not really efficient pickling. Took a few days to uncouple TKinter from the data structures and getting methods all to the top most module for remembering functions and it was golden. Size was a little big so I subclassed some dictionaries to act as 2d lists, which I could further optimize by making it just a single dictionary with some more trickery and math in it, but I don't do math well. The save right now is about 16 KB which through zipping can get down to 10 KB, not bad for out of the box saving.

I can improve this through some better class sub classing and getting rid of irrelevant data to be saved (like stats in a wall or objects). Though the real size change would come from me writing my own save output. For now though pickling is the way to go and lets me examine a world to a degree and modify it on the fly without recoding in the middle of it.

So saves and loads done. Next I overhauled the display system getting it more towards useable. I have event text coming out at the bottom that is triggered through various things. Only holds 5 of the past events and no logs at the moment so a bit limited but workable. After that I set up somewhat of an internal scripting system to allow events such as stepping on to give commands to the engine without a whole bunch of function nonsense (as there is enough of that) so stepping on an item can tell the DM to remove it from teh room. Somewhat proper object orientated design as the item never needs to know the room it's in or how to interact with it. Last I got done was the beginning of puzzles. I can get objects to disappear and be placed by stepping on them. So things such as switches are now possible. Next I'll see about getting damage back into the game and smack a few mobli-goblins around in the test dungeon. I've already had them spawned just  to see if they'd persist room transition but had no interaction with them beyond trying to get past them as they move about randomly.

Super Alpha release?

Blame friends for bad jokes, and me for actually putting them in.

So I guess this is a release? It's not clean, it's probably got spelling errors and game crashing bugs, but god does it feel good to get it made.

I almost deiced to not release it but this actualy makes me excited. I finally got something that halfway looks like a game, this never happens with my little projects. There isn't much to it and bad jokes abound but it is a piece of software with a start, a middle, and an end (that hangs forever). So I decided to put it up. Next steps will be making more monsters, item pick up, and figuring out how to save this.

Simple run of the engine, not even properly re-sized for the GUI. You walk around with arrow keys and proceed through a whole 9 to a treasure. Though there is a trick to it.

Get it here . Should run on cPython 2.6 though made with 2.7. Read me should be iside if I didn't mix up files. Run the Dungeon_Master.pyw to get the game to work.

it begins

<link to music with copy rights here>

So I've revamped the simple rogue like system and spread it over a few files. Easier for me to chew when working on it though a little confusing with all the windows. Right now no movement and such but my tests show it still works for that. Either way progress.

So for this quick blog on break I'm going to go on about my goals for this Zelda Like Rogue Like which really is only taking inspiration from those games. Probably far too much of it considering the format for my goals. The basic goals that are needed aren't even given any tags. The ones that are have special importance. Milestones are goals that I see as doable and would greatly improve the game so I am going for them. Power Goals are goals that I think are great but would require a lot of work and may be more trouble than they are worth, though I think they're worth a lot.

So first off. Main goal for this game. A package of code that can run with vanilla python 2.7 (which I may even package a striped down version with the game to make sure it runs). Not using the Curses library, while it's a roguelike standard I prefer working on it as a graphical approach even if it is a canvas filled with single character text blocks, it just gives me more options that I may use. Now for the List via special categories.

Zelda List

Screens : Rooms both inside and outside
Screen transition *MILESTONE* : Not just teleportation between doors, screen moves in a zelda like fashion between rooms.
Mobs : Standard
Overworld : The large dungeon between dungeons
Dungeons : The crawl
Tool items : Meat and potato of this game. It revolves more around the "tool items" more than monsters and finding better weapons.

Zelda 2 List

Stats : How large or small  I'm not sure
NPCs *POWER GOAL* : And not the vender kind, the ones with random bits of information that could help a player if they get lost, sorta requires towns.
Towns *POWER GOAL* : Where NPCs gather safely and have innae babble

Zelda a link to the past List

Side quests *POWER GOAL* : These technically appear in original Zelda but I remember more little side quests from this game. Get health up and other effects here.

Puzle temples *MILESTONE* : Meat and potatos of game, it'll be hard but it needs to be done. Technically original Zelda had this but in a more prevent you from getting through as you don't have the items that let you move over obstacle way. This is more you need to hit this switch with a boomerang and put a bomb down here and run across room idea.

Own list:

Randomized backstory *POWER GOAL* : I'm not using zelda and I'm not sure where else to get "plot" for. So random list of names and event sequencer could be fun.
"Puzzle" Bosses *POWER GOAL*: I'm not sure where this one started but Bosses being weak to their dungeons item is a common theme.

More to be added at some point or further explained/explored but I think this covers the basics. Only one more thing left

Please don't sue me Nintendo

A bad reason why I'm not using Curses. Wonderful graphical offsets

a roguelike update?

So after weeks of doing nothing with it and playing with other Tkinter components I present.

It's an update. Not the best one and actually glitchy. There are quite a few things I don't like about it but following the ideas for making a roguelike I shouldn't be so hard on myself.

First is that it's hard coded, the 5 lines you see there are positioned there, I'd like it to be at the bottom of the viewable screen. This could possibly be easy to do but I was tired when I finally finished this up so it got hard coded to see it. Not something I should beat myself up over but I like dynamic structures, it helps for changing layouts later.

Second Tkinter canvas centers blocks of text. I do not like this at all. I may have to write my own code to properly justify things to the left. Not sure why Tkinter would think this is a good way to do things considering it works on standard top left coordinate scheme but it's the reality, maybe there is an option to do it that way.

Third it doesn't work. It fills out fine until the sixth item is hit, in which it should "push" all the ones before it up once and the topmost one into nothing. Right now it doesn't do that and I didn't get into the guts to find out why.

Fourth odd glitch. Players will hit themselves after moving on their first spawn. I do not know why but only noticed this with output.

Now for the nice things.

I got it done. It's progress. More than that I discovered a nice feature, with the way I have things move and attack each other enemies moving into each other will attack. This lead to some very confused minutes when I noticed this but it works exactly as it should. I would just need to add in some triggers to count allies as walls for movement purposes to avoid friendly fire, for now it's funny.