Philosophy II : On leveling

When it comes to RPGs, a character advancement system is something of a big deal. For some reason, I think there's very little quite as awesome as an interesting, rewarding system of character growth and advancement (then again, I think coding is fun, so feel free to take that with a massive grain of salt...).

So, naturally, it bugs me to no end when game developers screw everything up.

Okay, maybe I threw down that gauntlet a little too hard without qualification. Let me back up a bit.

Philosophy

I've been reviewing my changelog recently (not this devlog; the more mundane day-by-day "what I've been doing"), and I realize I've been spending a LOT of time tweaking the UI lately. Part of that makes me yell at myself a bit (stuff like "you should be doing cooler/more important things instead!"), but for the most part I'm completely fine with that. Thing is, the first, biggest, most major push I had saying "program a roguelike" was one simple thing: I wanted to resize the friggin' window.

Why yes, I have been working on this thing.

Gonna go ahead and say Rouge is up to version 0.1.1

Think I'll release the damn thing when I feel I can do so without having to qualify a bunch of stuff. This is independent of how nice an audience I can find for it; I'm still going to want to say "hey yeah you should ignore these parts they're not very good and this part'll be better later on and I'm planning on doing X in a later version and I really don't have the infrastructure for Y yet but I'm working on it and..." because I have grandiose plans for it and its current shadow of things to come is, frankly, kind of embarrassing.

Oh look, Pictures

Quick lookin' at some things I made happen (also, guess who didn't feel like cropping those screenshots?)

Picking a race to start the game.

The relative stats of each race are shown on the right (color-coded for convenience)

(more pictures after the break)

Version: 0.1.0

MAN that feels good.

Sixty-some hours of coding, 2,997 lines of code, and several friends repeatedly pestered, but it's finally happened.

I have something-resembling-a-game.

Details later, sleep now.

Rouge

The name is a joke.
The joke is, there's a good number of people who can't spell "rogue" properly. They surf the internets, looking for sweet new rougelikes to play. Little do they know, most people make roguelikes. My design is to answer the call for the rougelike genre, by creating it starting with the game Rouge.

Alternatively: This game feels badly for all the people who've misspelled Rogue over the years. This game exists to retroactively make you seem smarter.

Analyze THIS

So I finally finally found a lines-of-code (LOC) counter (by which I mean, I finally looked). And the results were a little surprising.

Turns out that, overall, Rouge has roughly 2500 lines of code. Woo. So far, the biggest thing I've ever written. And yet, compared with giants like ADOM, still barely even weighing in at fetal.

Speaking of Rouge, let's talk. So around, what, three months ago was it was the last time I mentioned anything about how it's going? Yeah, around there. Yeesh.

As far as my to-do list from then goes... we'll let's just go through each item

More monsters than just goblins (trivial, enemies already loaded from data file)

Yep, it was trivial. Making those enemies interesting, on the other hand, will be significantly less so. Making them level up properly is a relatively easy thing to do, but I'm putting it off for now because other stuff is more "hey guys" in-my-face.

Menus: class choosing (on levelup, when starting a character), race choosing

Yep. Talked about it a bit a few posts back. Not too terribly done I say now (but will bemoan it within two months). I've actually spent a pretty good amount of time making the menus shinier, so the plus/minus-es stats give you are now color-coded for your convenience. And because it's pretty? Doing so in a non-head-explodey way made me improve some basic-er systems, so it'll be easier to expand upon similarly-veined stuff in the future

Enemies attack you as well (trivial)

Here's actually where my biggest issue is, the thing that's technically the easiest to do. While I COULD add the four-or-so lines of code necessary to make this work (one/two for "attack main character" and threeish for handling potentially dying), I've been not doing so because it would make the proto-game I have now completely unfun. At present, there would be exactly zero chance of surviving more than three enemies, because of how my placeholder attacking algorithm works, because there's not too much of a strength difference between a 1st level monster and a 1st level player, because there's no way to restore lost health, and because there's no items to give a player competitive advantage.

Levelup capabilities

Easily done what with the whole menu-system THING; still have to program new-class unlocking, but right now my focus is more on the item system

Respawning, dynamically generated enemies

Dynamically-generated enemies is done, haven't made 'em respawn yet. Not too terribly difficult, but not going to do it now.

So, version-wise, where are we at? Currently, I'm skirting around making the item system. It's the next major thing I need to do to make this at all playable, because as it stands now the game is a nearly-realized engine. Which is pretty much saying it's almost to the point where it's almost-a-game. So it's around v0.0.9. When I put some basic items in, like a basic sword and piece of armor, then I'll turn on enemies attacking, and then I'll call it v0.1.

And maybe then I'll post some fucking screenshots or something.

And Now for something Completely Different

So I've been working on a side-project in pygame for a while now. Probably long enough to constitute more than a side project per se, but whatever. Not gonna explain anything about it, but here's a few things I made it do that made me smile.

• Implemented my very own Vector class. Not the vector that means "a smarter array", that'd be stupid (python, remember?). No, my Vector class is pretty much the backbone of the nifty-ish things I can make the game do, and best yet it integrates quite well with the tuples that pygame assumes I'm using anyway, so for system calls to drawing functions, for instance, I don't even need to convert my Vectors into tuples (because for all intents and purposes as called by a function, they behave pretty much identically).
• Finally got bullet motion pretty much ironed out. Bullets spread out in a gaussian distribution, so shotguns are worthwhile at medium range. Collision detection is implemented in a way such that bullets "move" ten pixels at a time (currently enemies are 40x40 rectangles) so as to ensure hitting enemies even when moving at high velocity. Still to do: implement a recoil system where your rapid-fire guns are more accurate when fired in short bursts.
• It's got explosions in it. Explosions are drawn to any arbitrary size based on the radius of said explosion. To draw an explosion, I draw circles on top of one another of varying color, starting with orange on the rim, passing through yellow in the middle, nearing white at the center. In order to keep from having to re-render each explosion each time it's called, I first check if the explosion is already stored in a list I've made. If so, I just draw the pre-rendered image. If not, I make the image, then draw it. This technique I learned while working on Rouge (which I will do more of eventually).

And for another aside: Mass Effect 2 is completely fantastic. I'll review it once I stop being too excited about it and can analyze it fairly.