So, my favorite genre is roguelikes. For years, I've been pretty disdainful of the lack of this type of game on the 83/84+ series. Finally, I decided to just make my own.

I'm about 60% done with it. I coded the engine over about 2 days, and now I'm just doing a ton of stats tweaking and adding monsters, items, etc.



I'm keeping the storyline under wraps for now, but the basic premise is that you can only go forward.

Some quick notes:
I'm doing the project with Axe.
I'm using Crabcake.
I used a slightly modded version of Builderboy's flame routine for the holybomb animation.
I've already changed how some of the items work since this screenshot. I have one more item that I currently intend to implement, with maybe others if they improve the gameplay without breaking the game. Getting the stats just right for a difficult but still beatable roguelike is incredibly tedious.
My main overhaul that I need to do is start adding a ton of text for events and (maybe) some special events, rooms, etc. too. Those are a big maybe at this point.
Yes, the walls are supposed to get weirder as you get deeper into the game.

I am in deep need of help for character design. If anyone wants to volunteer (for credit when the game is released, of course) to design a big bunch of 6x7 px sprites for monsters, that would be wonderful.

I was planning doing something similar....
Good luck anyway! :p

Don't let me stop you! The more roguelikes, the better

This looks like it could turn out to be quite a fun game, Phero! I must say that I didn't realize you were an active community programmer, but I am of course always more than happy to see more great projects underway. What sort of 6x7 monster sprites are you looking for? Once each of the monsters, front-facing, or several different poses or a sequence for each monster?

I really haven't been for a long, long time

I just got the fever to make a game for myself and, naturally, I intend to share it



Yes, that one. Most roguelikes have a very boardgame-esque quality about them, so it doesn't bother me that the "pieces" all are not animated. Roguelikes are largely about strategy in movement and item management, which I'm really grappling with right now.

Since that screenshot, I've added two items and a condition where the room you enter is completely dark and you have to "feel" your way around using event text unless you have the right item to remedy the situation. I spent a good deal of time last night and this morning adding stuff to it, but the game is already getting rather large, so I need to focus on just adding more monsters and an end condition, then playing the living heck out of it to tweak the stats and make sure that it's both difficult and able to be completed.

I've also tweaked a ton of things in the game, but mostly they're all interface tweaks and adding event text, fiddling with monster and player stats, etc.

If you haven't done so already I would also look into Calcrogue for the m68k series calcs, it is a very very well implemented roguelike for the calcs and may give you some ideas as to how to keep things simple while still adding depth to the game.

I'm very familiar with that title

I'm going a radically different direction with this roguelike in a lot of ways. I think that a future project might be a more traditional roguelike, in which case I would take a huge cue from Calcrogue, since that was done so well.

Also, here's a quick update on the game:


Wabbit is doing the grey funny, but otherwise that's how it's coming along. Lots of event text added, a couple of new items, etc.

This seems like an interesting game, it looks really fun. I hope you finish so I can play it. Keep up the good work.

That's three-level grayscale, by the way, right? I was toying with sprites and I wasn't positive about it. It's too bad that Wabbit is making the grayscale look so ugly and flickery.

Yep, it's 3-level. My greyscale is a very small amount flickery, but it is being exaggerated tenfold by Wabbit for some reason, no matter how I play with the settings. The way that Wabbit renders the greys looks a bit worse than the game currently looks on a TI-83+ (the game is being coded and run on an 83+ SE currently, although I'd like to make it available for both when release time comes, which means that I'll likely have to try to optimize at least a little to keep the speed reasonable).

An update. Back in October, I picked the project up after months and months of inactivity. I started adding some event text, some extra little features (only one of which shows up in the screenshot above, I think), and then didn't touch it again until yesterday. Yesterday, I added a few routines and have started building towards an end-state. A few extra sprites added, some small optimizations made... etc. Hoping to get some closure on the project soon...

Always great to hear about a latent project that gets new life breathed into it and isn't, after all, abandoned. What do you still have left to do until you call this complete?

After the work that I put into it today, the only thing that absolutely *needs* to be done is write an ending for it. Today, I implemented a last stage, final boss, end state, and everything else that leads into that. Basically, it was a final bypassing and weaving together of different sets of all of the other systems, which was honestly more complicated than it should have been.

After the ending is written, I am going to have to playtest the living heck out of it and then tweak numbers until I lose hope and just leave it be Roguelikes are notorious for needing to be endlessly tweaked because of the probabilities of various things happening, making the game too hard/easy/unbalanced/etc., so I will try to do as little as possible of that.

I may very well rework the entire sprite-drawing engine, as it is absurdly inefficient right now and takes up way too much space. In its current form, the compiled program is roughly 16k, and there is no need for it to be that large. That was the main roadblock to adding bits and pieces from a big list of features that I have written down for it: it was getting too big and some of the engines way too bulky to make it practical and still run at an acceptable speed (it's already about as slow as I can tolerate, especially since the screencaps are running on an 83+ SE).

What is more likely is that I will write the ending, playtest it for a while, then release it, potentially revisiting it, updating it, and reworking some of it at some point down the road from there.

What's the final boss like? I haven't played too many rougelikes, but I'd love to see one that had a multi-space boss, like one with tentacular arms that you have to cut.

And yes, updating multiple times after finding bugs is a fantastic idea.

Sounds like good progress--if you need any beta testers, I'm sure you'll be able to find a couple here

That was actually extremely similar to the very first version of the boss that I put in, however, some of the moving logic that I had to patch in was so slow that it really detracted from it. I had planned on doing a multi-space boss from the beginning, but gave up after I was disappointed with the performance. That being said, I won't say much about the boss in the current version, as that would be giving it away. It's really nothing crazy, but should prove to be a challenge and can be addressed in multiple ways depending on the items that you have available when you get there.




Soon, hopefully... soon...

Ooooh I like this! It reminds me a lot of the earlier Ultima games.

Nice job Phero!

Some title art. Too many things that I want to add. I'm going to have to nail it down to just one or two extra features before releasing it, I think.

You can save a bunch of space by making "Chambers" and the door image data, and the rest of it just inverted text on a black background. I only assume you're not already doing that because your 'a' and your 'b' aren't standard TI-OS lowercase letters. Of course, you probably already thought of that yourself.

I had played with a couple of different things, including writing the text using one of Axe's "Fix" settings. I ultimately decided that I really wanted to have a full-blown title screen image. Definitely not as efficient with space as it could be, but there is something extraordinarily satisfying about it to me