Seven Day Roguelike 2013 pt.7

Failure.

After some more tweaking this morning, it is clear that this project needs a lot more than 7 days, at least for me. I've had a busy week that just didn't allow for enough coding opportunity.

What I've ended up with is a game that still feels far too much like Brogue, but has removed most of the fun from that game.

I'm probably going to keep working on this project from time to time. I want to see if I can get the core gameplay mechanic to revolve around hunting creatures for food, while avoiding being killed by the tougher creatures of the deeps.

Seven Day Roguelike 2013 pt.6

I finally found the bug that I introduced, and removed it. Monsters are trying to hunt down and kill the player again.

I still need to add visible monster corpses though, and I need to add monster eating behaviors, like being full making them less likely to attack, and eating distracting them from trying to follow the player. (Not to mention more advanced stuff like gobbos hauling kills back to camp.)

Right now I'm messing with the architecture code to try and make the cavern levels follow my general plan: the catacombs, the cave river, the cavern forests, the underground meadows, and the lakes of the deeps. I'm trying to decipher how the existing code leverages the blueprint objects to generate interesting level pieces.

After messing with it a bit though, my biggest concern is that, in the state its in right now, it just isn't much fun. I'm hoping that as I continue to add my own flair to it, and increase the amount of interaction between items and the environment, the fun will start to emerge; but I don't feel that is a certainty.

There's really way too much to do in the final day tomorrow. It is likely that I'm going to fail, but I'm glad that I've given it a shot.

Seven Day Roguelike 2013 pt.5

A little bit more progress on Rational Brogue; I've got prey animals running from the player. The effect is pretty great when you run through a group of them. Unfortunately, once they get away, they all run together, so it looks a bit silly when chasing them.

I also managed to break all of the predator creatures, they don't want to move anymore, which is a huge bummer.

One step forward, two steps back.

Seven Day Roguelike 2013 pt.4

I've made a couple of changes that have started to make the game feel a bit more like what I intend.

For one, I've reduced the HP of the player by two thirds. This has revived the dangerous feeling of the caverns a bit after I've taken the teeth out of just about everything down there in search of my goal.

Secondly, I've modified some of the animal behavior in very simple ways. Predators will now take attacks of opportunity against prey creatures, though they won't hunt them yet. Prey creatures will try to stay away from the player, though unfortunately they still retain the need to hunt the player, so they're eternally torn in a foolish dance that eventually just gets them killed.

I've got a long way to go...