Hardpointe, a failed 7DRL

1 min read 7drlhardpointeroguelikedevUncategorized

Hi everyone. Been a while.

As with every year since… 2010? I entered the Seven Day Roguelike Challenge. I thought I had enough old code lying around and enough free time to punch out something playable, but decided to pull the plug on day 5.5.

Since then, the idea has really stuck in my head and it’s a great excuse to kick some of the rust off of my lackluster coding abilities. I’ve written this one in TypeScript, which is a joy to use along with the VS Code IDE. It makes coding for short periods of time actually possible since it takes almost no time to get back into the “flow”. And of course as per usual I am using the amazing ROT.js library.

In any event, here’s what the game looks like so far:

I have a few design principals for this game, called “hardpointe”:
1. Tactical combat built from fun mechanics
2. Interesting enemies, with behaviors that match their abilities
3. No numbers over 3
4. Minimal buttons/input keys (4b: playable with a gamepad)
The main idea is to have the player build up a small set of powers across a restricted (3-4) number of “systems”, which can be activated with limited resources. Think Mega Man but with less recharging. As close to a “one hit point” system as I can manage. Right now 3 health feels right. Enemies have 1 or 2 health. The goal will be to destroy as many as possible without getting hit by chaining together attacks, abilities, and escape mechanics.
Right now all I have is a wall-smash, which I find very satisfying. Enemies have 2 health, and the player typically does 1 damage. But, if you attack “into” a wall you will deal 2 damage and can use this tactic to take enemies out before they have a chance to scratch you.
More to come. Meanwhile go and play my favorite 2017 7DRL so far: Woozoolike.

Precipice - Sketch to Final Game

1 min read precipiceprocjamroguelikedevUncategorized

One thing that made this ProcJam different from other game jams was the amount of planning I did beforehand. Here’s a sketch of what Precipice looked like before the jam:

And here’s what I ended up with:

Pretty good, I think! Most of the powers are in there. I think when I was designing the game I didn’t realize quite how quickly the abyss would swallow up the entire level. Because of this, certain features like the ground giving way underneath you even while resting (!!!) had to change. The ‘grapple’ ability was just too dangerous to use for adjacent monsters, so I turned it into a Teleport/Swap ability that works from anywhere in the map. This makes for a kind of cool situation where you can get yourself into a really dangerous spot, and then swap with an enemy and watch them fall, while you escape to safety.

Thank you to everyone who has played it so far — I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback about the game! If you feel like dropping me a line with comments, bugs, suggestions, etc… please feel free!

Precipice!

1 min read hexesprecipiceprocjamroguelikedevUncategorized

I decided to take a break from the constant Dungeon Dual/RoboCaptain tug-of-war going on in my brain and create a roguelike game for ProcJam. ProcJam was organized by Michael Cook and featured a lot of really interesting talks last weekend.

The result is a procedurally-oriented roguelike game called Precipice.

The terrain is procedurally generated, and the game is infinite — as long as you can stay alive.

It is heavily inspired by Hoplite, DataQueen, and the sidewalks outside of my house:

The gameplay is turn-based but can get frenzied as the ground starts to fall away underneath you. You have access to an array of powers to help you rescue artifacts from a ruined landscape.

You can play here on itch.io, or on my own page.

Fighting the urge to use fantasy tropes

2 min read dungeondualrobocaptainroguelikedevUncategorized

I have been working on an update of my 7DRL from earlier this year, Dungeon Dual. Since it is a web game, I can tell it was decently popular — certainly by my (very low) bar it is the most popular 7DRL I have put out there.

As a 7DRL it had some rough edges. But the core mechanic of the “asynchronous co-op” was there. Since then I have been polishing up the actual gameplay, UI, fixing bugs, making cooler animations, refactoring messy code, and all of that fun stuff.

The problem is in the back of my head I am also designing another game. My 7DRL from a few years ago, RoboCaptain, was also decently popular, and I have had various versions “in development” since then.

So, my plan was “hey I will just freshen up Dungeon Dual, and then put it out there” then take whatever improvements I had made to my CoffeeScript/rot.js engine and apply them to RoboCaptain.

The problem I am encountering is that designing a “classic” dungeon-diver is so addicting. The more I work on it, the less I am fixing bugs and the more I am adding entirely new mechanics to the game. Why? I think it is because fantasy tropes give us (as designers) so much to fall back on. There is so much “lore” built into all of our heads that is easy to leverage. Even something so simple as “would you like this dagger or this axe” is actually leveraging a collective intelligence/memory/lore that exists within your players.

This sort of lore is also influenced by the fact that so many great roguelikes are in fact classic “dungeons & monsters” sorts of games. You go too far down the path and you find yourself developing brogue, or ToME, or DCSS, or <pick your favorite game>.

I feel comfortable saying that a dungeon game would probably be more popular than an “indeterminate future” game with “robots and stuff”. At least initially. People on r/roguelikes will say that a great roguelike will win out, regardless. But I’m not so sure. I know my own experiences… not having a common “future robots & stuff” lore to leverage always makes me skeptical to start out with. The first time I have to choose between “laser pistol” and “plasma pistol” my brain starts to melt down.

The few existing great non-fantasy roguelikes such as DoomRL get around this problem by using existing canons. Everyone knows that Imps throw fireballs and that Cacodemons are very tough for early-game players.

So my question is: do other developers feel similarly? Is designing a fantasy dungeon simply “too fun”? How do you get players to get over the initial lack of “lore” and stick it out through the first couple ten-or-twenty plays of your game? Are there other future/sci-fi games that do this well?

Here’s some more images for the curious. Cheers!