I'm gonna start coding my 7DRL now - I came up with the idea last week and wrote down the basic rules. The game's gonna be pretty simplistic, seeing as I've never had much luck with big projects and I'll be busy with work throughout the week.
The concept of Decimation (aka Zero Hero Day, aka The Roguelike That You Can Play With Only Your Numpad) is that you are the number zero, and you wish, as zero does in its nihilistic way, to annihilate all the other numbers. But unlike the other numbers, you have no melee attacks - instead you have four special abilities triggered by the arithmetic operator keys +, -, *, and /, which polymorph numbers into other numbers, the goal being to reduce them to zero. (In case you're wondering what the point of + and * are, numbers "wrap around" using modulo arithmetic when they reach ten or above.)
I'll be writing Decimation in C#. I don't think I'll be using any sort of libraries such as libtcod-net, because the size of the game map is going to be pretty small, but that might change...
Oh, man, I might have set my sights too low... I've accomplished nearly everything I had planned for this little game (still want the enemies to seek the player, and I was hoping to have some MIDI's play when you win or lose, but that wasn't all that important, and I might also want to highlight enemies that can see the player)... and I've hardly spent any time on it at all!
Guess I just overcompensated for last year, when I had hardly any time to work on "Rogue Battalion" due to work, and while I'm working again this year, I designed this Decimation game to be REALLY simple! ;)
I guess I just need to finish these last few features, polish some stuff up if necessary, maybe make a Mono compile if I can, and post it on a website somewhere next week! (Need to get my own web server back up and running... :P)
Oh well, nothing wrong with setting realistic goals! :D
> Oh, man, I might have set my sights too low... I've accomplished > nearly everything I had planned for this little game (still want the > enemies to seek the player, and I was hoping to have some MIDI's play > when you win or lose, but that wasn't all that important, and I might > also want to highlight enemies that can see the player)... and I've > hardly spent any time on it at all!
> Guess I just overcompensated for last year, when I had hardly any time > to work on "Rogue Battalion" due to work, and while I'm working again > this year, I designed this Decimation game to be REALLY simple! ;)
> I guess I just need to finish these last few features, polish some > stuff up if necessary, maybe make a Mono compile if I can, and post it > on a website somewhere next week! (Need to get my own web server back > up and running... :P)
> Oh well, nothing wrong with setting realistic goals! :D
Heh, well done so far then. Maybe you should make 7 1DRLs? ;)
> I guess I just need to finish these last few features, polish some > stuff up if necessary, maybe make a Mono compile if I can, and post it > on a website somewhere next week!
Well, I was thinking of an additional "feature" - maybe there could be multiple levels, so when you clear out all the numbers on one level, a new level appears with more numbers on it?
Oh, last night I set up a new personal homepage... I put in a section for Decimation, so that's where you'll find the game come Friday... man, I really have been wasting my time, I haven't worked on the game since Saturday! :(
I promise though that come Friday I'll at least post what I have so far - the only crucial bit missing is making the enemies seek the player; the rest is just fluff ;)
OK, last night I got the "monsters" (numbers) to seek after the "hero" (zero) - simpler than I thought - and also, monsters that can see the hero are highlighted in red, while tiles that monsters can see are highlighted in brown, so you can see at a glance the "threats" and "danger zones" - something which might be useful for "stealth" roguelikes! :)
Also, I noticed that now that monsters seek the player, the game is MUCH harder than it used to be, such that it was practically impossible to win... so I asked around for some suggestions, seeing as "raise player HP" and such is kinda boring... one guy came up with a clever solution though... previously, I'd had the player gain 10 HP every time he defeated a monster, but that wasn't enough seeing as monsters did a lot more damage than that; this guy suggested that the player gain half the HP he had lost, so if he were at 60/100 HP, he would be restored up to 80/100 HP!
Or maybe the restoration should not only increase the player's current HP, but reduce the max HP by the same amount, such that if you're at 60/100, you get restored to 80, but then if you lose 40 more HP fighting the next monster and wind up at 40/80, you only get restored back up to 60/60 the next time... might be useful in other games to prevent "power inflation"!
> Rather simplistic, but hey, at least I got it done! ;)
Well done! I've just played this, and sent a review to be hosted on Cymon's Games. Overall I'm extremely disappointed that you didn't include more levels, since this is an awesome game! I strongly encourage you to do a little more work on this. Some advice on improvements:
-Limit hp recovery so that it reduces max hp too (like you thought about before). At the moment there seems to be a bug that lets your hp go way above 100. In general it's too easy at present, since it's no sweat to recover any hp you lose - with constantly degrading HPMax the game would be much more fun. -Fix the display a little so that messages aren't lost. Could maybe be simplified to say "1 does 10 damage" instead of listing every single attack. -More more more levels! Even just the same level repeated ad infinitum would be nice, with a score at the end for how far you progressed (something like score = 1000 * number of kills / no turns used) -Needs experimentation, but maybe make it real time - say one turn every second at max. This way you only have a short amount of time to make calculations in your head. -Otherwise measure the time you take and factor that into final score, kinda like in Minesweeper and Solitaire. -Highscore list at the end!
The gameplay is beautifully simple and addictively fun - would be a shame not to see more come from it.
Heh, and it only just occurred to me why it's called "Decimation"...
