7DRL: Pit of Hate

[Walter Landry]

Greetings Everyone,

I am throwing my hat into the ring. The unique part is that things will
be

BBB I GGG
B B I G
BBB I G GG
B B I G G
BBB I GGG

[win]

How big, you say?

[Walter Landry]

win <ander...@gmail.com> writes:

Well, here is a screenshot.

http://web.gps.caltech.edu/~walter/Pit_of_Hate/Pit_of_Hate.png

Essentially, a plain old hack-and-slash but with variable sized glyphs.
The game is based on the TV show "Samurai Jack" that ran a few years
ago. The main villain, Aku, is Godzilla sized. As Jack weakens him,
Aku gets smaller and smaller until he is the size of a frog. The
screenshot has Aku as 10x10 while @ is 3x3. A demonic minion is 2x2 and
a robot beetle drone is 5x5. The plan is to eventually make Aku start
much bigger and to have even smaller, 1x1 monsters (e.g. cobras and
rats).

It is now 12:43 AM PST, so it is pencils down time for me. I don't have
much to show beyond the screenshot. You can walk around, but the
monsters don't. There is no combat.

I think part of the reason I did not get too far is that I tried to make
it too much of a learning experience. Specifically, I tried three new
things at once:

1) This is my first roguelike.
2) I decided to use a completely new build system for me (waf).
3) I decided to write it in a completely new language for me (D).

It also did not help that it took me quite a while to figure out how to
get multiple sized fonts working in libtcod (an otherwise superb
library). So I did not get the @ walking around until this morning. It
was still a useful experience for me. I would recommend 1) and 2) to
anyone, but 3), not so much.

At this time, I will not continue writing it in D. Sadly, the
libraries, tool chain, and documentation are too immature for even this
not-so-serious work. There were also a number of annoyances in the
language itself that killed some of the joy. I am an old hand at C++,
so the sub-second compile times were fantastic. But other than that, it
was largely an effort in frustration.

However, C# is also a new language to me, so I may try porting it to C#
and running it under Mono.

Cheers,
Walter Landry