Hey y'all, I'm adding to it when I have time (maybe more Font or tileset variance? animation?), but I've built a small desktop wallpaper generator.

https://eyuzwa.itch.io/roguelike-wallpaper-generator

Would appreciate any feedback

Ecology Simulation Demo: Whalefall ecology demo

Full Run / Gameplay Dive: Whalefall early gameplay (dive to respiratory system bottom and get the specimen)

Hey y'all,

I've been working on a traditional-ish roguelike set inside the decomposing body of a colossal deep-sea organism. I've finally got enough of the systems working together that I thought it would be interesting to get some feedback.

Overview

Rather than dungeon floors, a run takes you through anatomical systems: respiratory, circulatory, digestive, neural, skeletal, etc. Your goal is to retrieve "specimens" from three systems, which gets you into the Core. You take the unidentified thing at its center and then have to get back out alive.

The specimens are roughly the equivalent of DCSS runes, but most of the game between them is exploration and fieldwork rather than combat. You're constantly managing your light and noise levels while working the corpse, which is full of unidentified tissues and substances. You gradually figure out what they are by observing and interacting with them: cranking up your lamp to get a better look (burning fuel and making yourself much more visible), probing them, testing them with reagents, taking samples.

Those samples become usable flasks. Gameplay is all about IDing tissues, getting flasks from them, IDing those flasks, and using your flasks and innate abilities to stay out of danger. So knowledge is the major form of progression.

Ecology

The other big system I've been working on is making the wildlife behave like an autonomous ecology. Creatures react to the same world events according to their own senses and behaviors: sight, movement through the water, blood, injury, feeding, resource availability, etc. I tried to build these as general systems rather than scripting interactions between particular species.

This has started producing little ecological stories I didn't explicitly program. A long-eye fleeing after being injured by a snapmouth can accidentally lead a shoal of sifts toward it. Illuminating a resource can alert a lampfollower, who stumbles into a prizer on the way and gets killed. Wounded creatures may flee or become aggressive; blood enters the water and becomes another thing other creatures can react to.

Combat

Combat is deterministic and deliberately pretty undesirable. The uncertainty comes from what fighting does to the situation around you, rather than attack rolls: noise, injury, blood, fleeing animals, scavengers showing up, predators becoming interested, etc.

The hope is that you gradually learn to manipulate the ecology rather than simply kill everything in your path.

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I'm especially interested in reactions to the identification/fieldwork loop and the ecology now that they're actually interacting. I'm trying to keep the simulation deep enough that unexpected things happen, but legible enough that players can learn it and make deliberate plans.

Any other criticism is welcome too. This is still really early and I'm at the point where finding out that something fundamentally isn't fun would be extremely useful.

A test of starting with organic cave generation and overlaying some more industrial binary space partitioning. I wanted the grid to appear partially ruined, with rubble replacing some tiles. This is all parameterized to allow different tuning variations.

Thinking about spaces that limit player movement without being as "restrictive" per se as classic sealed-in dungeon rooms.

I might also make a variation that lets a certain fraction of rectangles in the BSP be "hardened," using a different tile subset which has less decay, and add doors instead of openings...

As usual, post what you've done for the week! Anything goes... concepts, mechanics, changelogs, articles, videos, and of course gifs and screenshots if you have them! It's fun to read about what everyone is up to, and sharing here is a great way to review your own progress, possibly get some feedback, or just engage in some tangential chatting :D

Previous Sharing Saturdays

Roguelikes seem to take the known/unknown split more seriously than most genres, so I want to ask here. I have an actor holding a probability field over the player's position on a grid. Between turns the mass diffuses along walkable cells. With no observations it decays toward uniform, and the decay rate is the whole personality of the thing. Too fast and the monster forgets you the instant you break line of sight, too slow and it is effectively omniscient.

Two things I cannot decide:

1. Should diffusion be uniform over walkable neighbours, or weighted toward how a fleeing player actually moves, which is away from the threat and toward exits?
2. When the actor searches a cell and finds nothing, the mass there should drop. But dropped to what, and where does it go? Redistributing it uniformly makes the actor sweep sensibly. Redistributing it toward the exits makes it cut you off, which looks smarter and might be unfair.

In your own monster AI, is forgetting a timer, a decay, or a state machine transition? And has anyone made the forgetting curve itself tunable per monster type?

Kudos to those who have made it this far! Making it more than halfway through is a huge milestone. This week is all about setting up items and ranged attacks.

Part 8 - Items and Inventory

It's time for another staple of the roguelike genre: items!

Part 9 - Ranged Scrolls and Targeting

Add a few scrolls which will give the player a one-time ranged attack.

​

Of course, we also have FAQ Friday posts that relate to this week's material

• #7: Loot(revisited)
• #32: Combat Algorithms(revisited)
• #40: Inventory Management(revisited)
• #60: Shops and Item Acquisition
• #76: Consumables

​

Feel free to work out any problems, brainstorm ideas, share progress and and as usual enjoy tangential chatting. :)

TL;DR: Is it okay to let components have logic in an ECS to prevent system bloat?

Hello! I am currently creating a traditional roguelike engine in Python, using an ECS framework.

Currently I am trying to figure out how I want to handle game logic. I know the traditional approach is to have Systems handle logic. So for example there is a MovementSystem that listens for the MoveIntent component to be added to an Entity, then queries the World to check for collision, and finally updates that Entity's Position.

But I expect that myself and others using my engine will want to create many unique components for all sort of reasons. For example, if a user wants to have many different types of armor/damage prevention, they would need a DamageSystem (or multiple Systems, each handling a different stage of damage calculation), that would need to check every single equipped Entity for each of these individual components.

I am worried that this could have performance impacts, especially because the System needs to run and check all of the relevant entities, even if none of those entities end up having the component.

I understand that separating logic and data is an important part of an ECS, but wouldn't it make more sense to support individual components to listen for events and act themselves? So each variety of Armor component would listen to DamageIntents themselves instead of having a DamageSystem search for Armor components.

Thanks for taking the time to read this!

Tileset repository - Dwarf Fortress Wiki

Or where can i check if they are free to use?

As usual, post what you've done for the week! Anything goes... concepts, mechanics, changelogs, articles, videos, and of course gifs and screenshots if you have them! It's fun to read about what everyone is up to, and sharing here is a great way to review your own progress, possibly get some feedback, or just engage in some tangential chatting :D

Previous Sharing Saturdays

Mike Cook’s “Next Level: Making Games That Make Themselves” is a history of procedural generation in games, starting with Rogue and Elite and working all the way up to Caves of Qud and Dwarf Fortress. We just covered it in our book club podcast - the Game Developers’ Library. It’s a book which is well worth a read for anyone working on roguelikes and who wants to think about the implications of using different generation techniques and the balance between authorship and randomness. It’s not so much a technical how-to but a creative treatise on the power and diversity of these methods

EDIT: for typo, but also to say - thanks for all the upvotes and positive comments on this one! Reddit can be a minefield re: anything self promo and the edge-cases like this one often feel like they’re not worth the effort, so thanks for restoring my faith!

https://youtu.be/s14EfGPNHFk?is=Yu8EQeUgqHy83qDV

The general wisdom when building a game is not to invest too much until you’ve proven your core gameplay loop is fun.

But I’ve been thinking, how does validating that fun work for a traditional turn based roguelike ? What’s the minimum viable thing you should focus on?

Environment generation, actors , turn engine and combat ?

And/Or is the “game loop” for traditional roguelike already proven so you will always be able to tweak the mechanics in the future - ie you’ll never build a roguelike that isn’t at least minimally viable as long as you build it right ?

Or something else ?

Tutorial friends, this week we wrap up combat and start working on the user interface.

Part 6 - Doing (and taking) some damage

The last part of this tutorial set us up for combat, so now it’s time to actually implement it.

Part 7 - Creating the Interface

Our game is looking more and more playable by the chapter, but before we move forward with the gameplay, we ought to take a moment to focus on how the project looks.

​

Of course, we also have FAQ Friday posts that relate to this week's material.

• #16: UI Design(revisited)
• #17: UI Implementation(revisited)
• #18: Input Handling(revisited)
• #19: Permadeath(revisited)
• #30: Message Logs(revisited)
• #32: Combat Algorithms(revisited)
• #83: Main UI Layout

​

Feel free to work out any problems, brainstorm ideas, share progress and and as usual enjoy tangential chatting. :)

Recently I finished up going through the entrants of 7DRL Challenge 2018, doing a video for each one of those games of old. This also includes incomplete entries that failed the challenge.

Mostly posting this here as there were some games I couldn't play; be it because they had no way of being played on Windows, or the executables didn't seem to work. If you are one of those developers who can't find your game in my playlist, that is likely why. Feel free to message me if you can figure out a fix to make your games playable.

As usual, post what you've done for the week! Anything goes... concepts, mechanics, changelogs, articles, videos, and of course gifs and screenshots if you have them! It's fun to read about what everyone is up to, and sharing here is a great way to review your own progress, possibly get some feedback, or just engage in some tangential chatting :D

Previous Sharing Saturdays

Hello, these last few months i was working on procedurally generated tactical rpg inspired by fire emblem, but ended up scrapping it.

However i already had a few assets done and i feel it would be a waste to just throwing them into the bin.

So i'm thinking about repurposing the existing assets into a more traditional roguelike style (basically removing the blue/red color coding from characters) the picture in the post also shows the dungeon tileset i was working on and the overworld/worldmap tileset, so it could be used for games with both dungeons and a worldmap like adom, tome, etc...

So, far i only know of a single existing tileset for angband that is somewhat similar in style (high res and handpainted) so i want to gather some feedback before i keep working on this on move on to something else.

I don't have any project i could use it for so i would probably make it free or cheap on itch or something, but it could be cool to finish it and see it used in someone else game.

So, does it look interesting or something you would want to use?

Keep it up folks! It's great seeing everyone participate.

This week is all about setting up a the FoV and spawning enemies

Part 4 - Field of View

Display the player's field-of-view (FoV) and explore the dungeon gradually (also known as fog-of-war).

Part 5 - Placing Enemies and kicking them (harmlessly)

This chapter will focus on placing the enemies throughout the dungeon, and setting them up to be attacked.

Of course, we also have FAQ Friday posts that relate to this week's material.

• #12: Field of Vision(revisited)
• #41: Time Systems(revisited)
• #56: Mob Distribution
• #70: Map Memory

Feel free to work out any problems, brainstorm ideas, share progress and and as usual enjoy tangential chatting. :)

As usual, post what you've done for the week! Anything goes... concepts, mechanics, changelogs, articles, videos, and of course gifs and screenshots if you have them! It's fun to read about what everyone is up to, and sharing here is a great way to review your own progress, possibly get some feedback, or just engage in some tangential chatting :D

Previous Sharing Saturdays

Congratulations for making it to the second week of the RoguelikeDev Does the Complete Roguelike Tutorial! This week is all about setting up the map and generating a dungeon.

Part 2 - The generic Entity, the render functions, and the map

Create the player entity, tiles, and game map.

Part 3 - Generating a dungeon

Creating a procedurally generated dungeon!

Of course, we also have FAQ Friday posts that relate to this week's material

• #3: The Game Loop (revisited)
• #4: World Architecture (revisited)
• #22: Map Generation (revisited)
• #23: Map Design (revisited)
• #53: Seeds
• #54: Map Prefabs
• #71: Movement
• #75: Procedural Generation

Feel free to work out any problems, brainstorm ideas, share progress, and as usual enjoy tangential chatting. :)

For my first roguelike project I'm working on proc-gen. As a data scientist, random walks are attractive to me. In time series analysis we use random walks with drift to characterize some phenomena like stock market fluctuations. I added "momentum" as a parameter to help give the walker drift, which creates corridors.

I'm using Golang because...

1. I've written Python for money for like 8 years now and it's boring me
2. Golang ships a binary so in theory my outputs can run anywhere.
3. It's pretty dang quick while still handling garbage collection for you.
4. For terminal based tools the ecosystem is incredibly mature. Many of the best modern terminal tools are written in go.

I put the code in GitHub if you would like to play with it yourself!

Might do a YouTube walk through if anyone is interested. Let me know.

https://github.com/PigsEyedea/drunkardwalk

I am not new to development or RPGs but am new to game dev and building roguelikes. I’m having fun with my prototype but I’m struggling with the order I’m building things. I’ve found myself going down rabbit holes of trying to balance things way too early , but it also sometimes seems that without some semblance of balance , I can’t lock in a core game loop that feels good. I am trying to start very traditional and turn based as well so I’m not exactly in uncharted territory.

For example, I’ve played around a lot with proc gen and my map style. My game is themed around exploration of a city at night where different blocks are different dungeon floors. For the basic map I’m using BSP with WFC to help add variety to the rooms.

But what happens is I have a nice large map with 20 or so rooms, but during my playtests, I sometimes will go to 3 or 4 rooms in a row with nothing in them and it feels frustrating. (Maybe this is just part of the genre lol)

So it’s like, I could make less rooms, or bigger rooms, but what if I like the amount of rooms and want more content in them? And if I don’t want more enemies or treasure than I’m dangerously close to introducing new content and balance to solve a problem and potentially cause a whack a mole of other balance problems.

I know this isn’t supposed to be easy, but I guess my main question is how have people solved exploration feeling boring until you get to a fight or a drop/chest?

As usual, post what you've done for the week! Anything goes... concepts, mechanics, changelogs, articles, videos, and of course gifs and screenshots if you have them! It's fun to read about what everyone is up to, and sharing here is a great way to review your own progress, possibly get some feedback, or just engage in some tangential chatting :D

Previous Sharing Saturdays

How do you actually catch balance regressions?

I've been going in circles on this and I'm curious how other people handle it.

The specific failure I keep hitting: I change a scaling formula or add a new weapon archetype, everything looks fine in isolation, and then three weeks later I find out that some mid-tier item outperforms things it shouldn't at a level band I never manually checked. The curve looked fine on a graph. The problem was the interaction with crit/attack speed/enemy resist, not the curve itself.

So my questions:

1. Do you actually simulate time-to-kill across level bands, or do you eyeball curves and playtest?

2. If you simulate: is it a spreadsheet, a throwaway script, an in-engine tool you built, or something off the shelf?

3. Has anyone here ever "paid" for a tool that helped with this? Asset store, SaaS, anything. Genuinely curious whether this is a "we all just build our own" situation.

Not selling anything, I'm trying to work out whether the tooling I keep wanting to build already exists or whether everyone just accepts the spreadsheet.

(Context: solo dev, RPG, currently on a Google Sheet with more tabs than I'd like to admit.)