7DRL Challenge 2015: Deathdealer

My entry into the 2015 Seven-Day Roguelike Challenge is complete! Deathdealer, an arena combat roguelike with trading card game mechanics, is finished and available for you to play.

Features:

• Survive as long as possible against endless waves of fiendishly difficult enemies
• Mix and match three schools of magic
• Customize your character’s deck from 69 different cards
• Vanquish 32 types of enemies, including 6 absurdly lethal boss monsters
• Unlock new cards every 5 waves to expand your capabilities
• Simple controls make the game easy to play
• Advanced ASCII graphics technology for a modern user experience

Controls:

• WASD, arrow keys, or vi-keys to move or use menus
• 1-7 to cast spells from your hand
• Tab to view enemy information
• Spacebar or period to wait one turn, to make selections in menus, or to exit the deck builder
• + and – to add or remove cards from your deck
• Escape to quit

Known Bugs:

• Enemy pathfinding is rather weak.
• Minimum deck size of 20 cards is not enforced, and issues may occur with decks of 7 or fewer cards; please make your decks contain at least 20 cards.
• No in-game help is available.
• Completely untested on any platforms other than Mac OS X.

Download Deathdealer for Mac OS X here, or the python source (for any platform with Python) here.

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7DRL 2014 – Day 7: In which everything is complete

Trinkets – the roguelike game I’ve spent the past week creating for the 7DRL competition – is finished, about 20 hours before the deadline! It’s a game about wandering an extra dimensional vault, acquiring trinkets and trying to get back home.

A build for mac is available here. Unfortunately, there’s no windows/linux build, but if you’re on one of those operating systems and want to play, the source is available here.

My high score is 59 – can you beat it? If so, let me know in the comments below!

7DRL 2014 – Day 6: In which victory approaches at high velocity

One day remains, and I’m actually almost done. It would be nice to redo the map generator, and game balance can always be tweaked some more, but the plot and endgame are implemented, the boss-fights are done with basic AI, and there’s even a score feature. Shown below is the second of four boss fights:

You have a bad feeling about this level…

… which turns out to be entirely justified.

7DRL 2014 – Day 5: In which parkour is performed in fancy shoes

Today was very productive; I finished the procedural generation of trinkets (for now, at least), improved the magic system, procedurally generated strangely worded descriptions of said trinkets, added new effects including knock-back and circular slide, and added all of the non-boss enemies, including the Abberant visible below:

Parkour shoes acquired!

Shown above is the non-procedurally-generated description of one of the coolest shoe types in the game (thus far, at least). These shoes allow you to run along walls, moving faster than enemies or even jumping over them.

I still have two more days left to go, and quite a bit still to do, including:

• Plot
• Victory conditions
• Boss fights + Boss AI
• Game balance
• Prettier maps

7DRL 2014 – Days 3 and 4: In which trinkets are created

So, I’m about halfway through the week, but days 2-4 were all mostly occupied by other things, so the real productivity is just beginning. I’ve reworked the combat system to use the same generalized targeting/effect model as the spells. I’ve also changed trinket abilities to work on that model, divided trinkets into six types (hats, orbs, wands, cloaks, weapons, and shoes), which can be equipped and used for various nefarious purposes. I’ve started work on the procedural generation of trinkets, but there’s still a lot to do on that front, which will occupy the next day and a half, leaving me with a day and a half for enemies, plot, game balance, and a dungeon generator that isn’t stolen from the libtcod tutorial. That’s plenty of time, right?

Weapons can now replace your bump attack with one or two spell casts. This one replaces your attack with two fire bolts, but they can also sunder defenses or daze and freeze enemies, among other things.

Death Star? Death Star! DEATH STAR!
This is what happens when you procedurally generate names by picking two words from a list and concatenating them…

 

7DRL Competition 2014 – Day 2: In which the art of sorcery is practiced

Magic system: Activate!

There are now six spells, and status effects, and some of the ‘everything goes horribly wrong’.

The spells have all been divided into ‘targeting’ and ‘effect’ components – except for teleportation, which still consists of duct tape and hacks and probably will remain that way.

There’s also a bit more user interface than before, and the trinkets are actually worth using sometimes (even if they are all still exactly identical).

Melee combat has also been re-written to allow for spells like the Ethereal Axe, which replaces your melee attack with a high-damage Arcane attack.

Tomorrow, I’ll be working on equipment. I won’t have much time though – classes and whatnot – so there probably won’t be a blog post.

The day after, procedural trinkets, more enemies, and everything going even more horribly wrong!

7DRL Competition 2014 – Day 1: In which a roguelike is begun

This year I’m participating in the Seven Day Roguelike Competition, a contest to make a game in the roguelike genre in a week. (For those not familiar with it, roguelikes tend to be dungeon-crawlers with procedurally generated words, permanent character death, and often old-school graphics. There are frequently some variations from this rough description.)

I’m making a game known as ‘Trinkets’ until I think of a better name. It is a game in which a wizard strapped for cash loots a pocket dimension, and everything goes horribly wrong. It will experiment with a nontraditional power progression; you become weaker, then strong again, rather than a constant power level or steady increase. There will be a plot and randomly generated Trinkets.

My time will be somewhat limited, as I am currently a college student, but after spending most of today programming I produced the following:

Taste the power, troll scum!

I’ve used some code from some past projects, specifically most of the data structures and UI code. I’m using python, with the libtcod library.

Current features:

• Move around…
• …on a procedurally generated map…
• …and hit things…
• …which hit you back, and can kill you if you’re not careful.
• Look for trinkets…
• …which have magic powers…
• …which are simply not as powerful (at least for now) as your spells.
• Speaking of spells, you have five (and will have six), which in combination make you nearly unstoppable…
• …at least until I implement the ‘everything goes horribly wrong’ part.