64digits competition journal

It's pretty cool that you're making a rougelike! I've secretly wanted to make one, but the scripting is out of my league. You'll notice that most things I want to do tend to have that constraint onto it...

I looked at your script and my brain shut down...I like the concept of boxes stacked onto each other and then have the doorways added afterwards.

Are any of these usable? They are pretty fun to draw :)
When you know your bestiary, post it, and maybe I (and others) can do even better.

(These sprites are a gift, if you want them, I don't ask any crediting)

EDIT: oops! Looks like uploading in BMP format caused jpg conversion

EDIT2: fixed!

Yes, those are quite usable (or would be in the proper BMP format).

Here is the current bestiary:



The later ones make the earlier ones look bad, but OH WELL. Bound to happen when you're settling into a style, I think. I don't mind making some of the monsters goofier-looking than others anyway. (If you're wondering about the monsters' orientation, it's going to be a first-person perspective.)

Your silhouettes suggest certain monsters types that I will have to add; I am open to any other suggestions as well! One of my design goals is to give every monster species a distinct behavior or other identifying trait. If you bump into a new color of wolf, you should expect it to be roughly a stronger incarnation of the last wolf you fought. Time will tell how well I pull this off.

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Mega Tact v1.1
Super Penguin Chef
Wizard Blocks

Monster roll call, part two:



I touched up the newt and am much happier with the newer incarnation. The slime is bog-standard (and yet pleasantly round!), while the bat is required, since the game will have caves.

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Mega Tact v1.1
Super Penguin Chef
Wizard Blocks

I was afraid of that.

Don't worry; the script actually makes no sense, because phpBB mangled it.

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Newts! Can you eat them?

Fantastic icons Mogri/James! I think it's a pity to be using additional enemy sprites in a radically different style (not that they're bad!), but I guess it is an RPG contest, after all.

However I think the straight lines on the bird's wings and the pixels on the arms of the bat which look a lot like texture sampling artifacts are a little jarring.

Items items items items items. Let's talk about items.

We're not breaking new ground here: the item types are weapons, armor, rings, scrolls, and potions. Okay, scrolls are called tomes, but same thing, right?

Weapons and armor have a chance to be generated with a prefix and/or suffix. These tend to give them special abilities; for example, a sword of chaos will have its damage multiplied by something between 0 and 250%. The deeper you go, the more likely you are to find magical equipment. Otherwise, two of the same piece of equipment will generally be identical. Numerical modifiers (+1 sword) are relatively rare.

Also in the category of things that are rare: rings. You probably won't find every ring in a single playthrough, but rings have powerful effects that can really define your build. A ring of vampirism suggests a strong melee build, while a ring of the cat lets you pass over traps unharmed, which lets you take a more tactical approach to the game, luring enemies over the traps that don't affect you.

Scrolls and potions are more or less interchangeable in most roguelikes. Here, there's an important difference between the two: whereas potions are single-use items, tomes contain spells that your character can eventually learn. Reading a tome will let you cast its spell for free, though, so even spells that you already know are useful in tome form.

Consequently, the more powerful effects are stored in potions, including effects that you traditionally find in scroll form, such as equipment enchantment. Potions are risky, though, since many potions have negative effects. Throw it or drink it?

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Mega Tact v1.1
Super Penguin Chef
Wizard Blocks

I like the replacement of scrolls with tomes; all very solid.

Sounds like this will be more of a roguelike than I expected. In what ways will it be more of an RPG than a roguelike?


You forgot newts :(

Short answer: battle system.

Long answer: that's a false dichotomy and I'm surprised that you would ask that.



Newts is not items

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Mega Tact v1.1
Super Penguin Chef
Wizard Blocks

Out of curiosity, how are you going to do this? I thought scripts couldn't generate items? Or are you going to be doing something really cunning scripting that doesn't use the built-in item editor? I wanted to do something like this for Legacy as well, but my script-fu is not quite up to par so I settled on making all the items in a spreadsheet and importing them using TMC's tabulate.py tool.

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Being from the third world, I reserve the right to speak in the third person.

Using Editor version wip 20170527 gfx_sdl+fb music_sdl

You can create unlimited items, but since there's a small character limit on item names, I will be scripting the item handling. I will probably still use the built-in item functionality behind the scenes, though.

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Mega Tact v1.1
Super Penguin Chef
Wizard Blocks

I actually already totally forgot about the battle system.

OK, it's true that features of RPGs are not excluded from roguelikes, but I meant the other direction; several roguelike features are somewhat precluded by JRPGs.



I'm guessing that the equipment is the only reason to bother with this?