No Time To Play

After a week of barely adding anything to Dungeon Romp, I have to admit being overtaken by burnout again.

On the plus side, I’ve added the all-important time management, and it shows. Also, mobs can now have natural armor, and defense is no longer based off the same attribute as attack. That should allow considerably more tactical diversity… once I get around to taking advantage of it. The bug where a mob other than the player could trigger the end of the demo is gone, too. Last but not least, now there can be non-portable items, good for making signage and such.

On the minus side, it’s obvious to me now that three levels aren’t nearly enough even for a demo. So much for my code size target. Of course, adding another set of levels is a whole can of worms. And I still have to add ranged combat. At least now I know how. Probably.

But first, a break from programming. See you around.

I think it’s safe to say that anyone who is passionate about tabletop games has at some point tried to design their own. And anyone who did try knows it’s not in any way easy. But what goes into the rule system of a game? How do you make it fun? How do you make it balanced? Come to think of it, what do “fun” and “balanced” mean, anyway?

I had to answer these questions while designing a system of rules for Dungeon Romp. Which was a choice in itself, as the more obvious option was to go with an existing system. But it wasn’t the right one.

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I’m up to my ears in work again. All those shiny projects. On top of that, what little I did to Dungeon Romp is mostly refactoring work. In the way of user-visible improvements, now the game tells you when you’ve reached the end. You also get light sources and poisonous food (which is nevertheless useful). The really good news? I still have those extra 200 LOC, enough to fit another level generator, or else the much needed ranged combat and time management, for which I’ve just came up with an idea.

I also realized that until now there was no indication whatsoever that Dungeon Romp is open source. But like all my other games, you can have it under the terms of the MIT License. Enjoy!

Despite sacrificing a weekend’s work to a mini-vacation, Dungeon Romp is pretty much where I expected it to be by now. There are three levels of two types, variable lighting and experience gains, and mobs now have the option to swim or fly (which for now only enables them to cross water).

Unfortunately, the source code has almost reached my self-imposed limit of 2000 lines. Which means I will soon have to make a decision.

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I usually spend much more time thinking than coding, but this week was even more so, and that paid off handsomely. A week’s delay is a small price for getting the foundations right.

So, what’s the big news?

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Do you know why so many amateur game development efforts seem to stop at the “dude traipsing around a map” stage? Because that’s the easy part. The moment you add even the simplest interactions, you start to sink… until you re-emerge many months later with a polished title and a little less sanity. And getting there takes serious persistence.

All that considered, I shouldn’t be surprised that my self-imposed schedule just slipped. Lucky me to be making games for fun.

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Two weeks into my little roguelike project, I have a lot more respect for people who develop RPGs. It’s like all learning: the more you know, the more you realize how much you don’t. In this case, specifically, just how much is involved in making these games.

Take the combat system for example.

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Just in time for roguelikes becoming mainstream, my own attempt at one is taking shape. Third time, it seems, really is the charm. Which doesn’t mean this new project is free of problems.

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While my recent game Buzz Grid was very well received, virtually everybody complained about having to use WASD instead of the cursor keys. All my attempts to explain that it was a technical limitation fell on deaf ears. That’s natural; people need solutions, not explanations. But until recently, I couldn’t think of any way to add special key support in a portable manner without either:

• making the code much more complicated or
• making the game depend on some external library.

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Alright!… so now we’re close to having a somewhat functional product.  In that, we will have something that can accept connections and have some interactivity between those connections.

We talked about architecture, interthread communications, and network code.  Now, let’s integrate a script language.  The script language is going to be responsible for the game logic — basically, anything we want to be able to change really easily.  For this example, we’ll use Python because it is very easy to integrate. (continue reading…)