Game Goals

So, here is an outline of what I want my game will consist of and what I want it to achieve.

- RPG elements

• Heroes have RPG style stats, gain experience, level up, etc.

- Party Based

• Diverging from true roguelikes, I want my game to have you manage a party of heroes on each run into the dungeon

- Tactical, team based combat

•  inspired by Hoplite, so hex based, and only movement based attacks. No mashing the attack button
•  keep stats minimal
• keep RNG minimal in combat - so far my plan is to have largely deterministic combat, but with chances to roll extra damage depending on weapon.

- Perma death

• So here is a roguelike feature
• Also influenced by the Darkest Dungeon or the Fire Emblem series

- Hybrid RPG/Strategy

• Since you are managing a stable of adventurers rather than a single PC or group of PC's
• Heavily inspired by Darkest Dungeon
• More on the RPG side than Fire Emblem
• I imagine somewhat similar to XCOM but I've never played.

-Procedurally generated dungeons

• Purely roguelike in this respect

- Minimalist Inventory

• I don't like micromanaging inventories especially if you have a whole party of heroes
• Heroes won't have equipment with the exception of variable weapons
• In general the principal is macromanagement over micromanagement

-Theme

• The setting is low magic, sword and sorcery over epic
• Adventurers are desperate lowly individuals not lofty heroes (as in DD)
• Fairly traditional class system but with lower tier starting class ex: early adventurers are peasants and cultists who find better equipment and graduate to mage apprentices, witches, thieves, hunters, militant religious zealots, etc.

-Dungeon

• emphasis on exploration, rationing resources, avoiding difficult encounters and traps etc

So this is a very disparate and incomplete list, but I don't have much more in me right now. It should give a clear enough picture of what I'm aiming for.

Progress Part I

This is a bit late start for a design blog. I've been working on the code for... I'm not sure now. Maybe two months. Maybe one and a half. The first month of that was simply the map generator. I read lots of fantastic articles on the ol' web. I joined reddit to look at threads about roguelike dev. It was fun. Ultimately, what made it most difficult was that I was adamant that my map would be hex based. I feel like a square tile based dungeon would have been far simpler. But it was neat.

I kept the output very simple at first. My program simply generated a 2 dimensional array that held all the tiles of the dungeon. After I was done modifying the array I'd save it as a text file so I could visualize what was happening.

After the map generator was largely complete - complete enough to generate an acceptable dungeon 99 times out of 100, I started in on the graphics. I like doing pixel art type stuff in microsoft paint. Cool, huh? Things are coming along fairly well. Below is an image of my current program's output.

ThyDungeonGame Blog

The internet tells me I should write a design blog. I want to design more than I want to blog, but today I don't much want to design any way, so I thought I might blog.

I am getting ahead of myself.

I am making a game. A computer game right now, but I would like to make it an android and iOS app if possible later. It is sort of rougelike-y. It is heavily influenced by the excellent 7drl Hoplite, and the kickstarted Darkest Dungeon.

Almost immediately after trying Hoplite, I thought of making a board game using the the hex based movements and attacks that are so elegantly implemented in it. Much more elegantly than that sentence was implemented. It went on the back burner of my brain soon after, but it was there.

Then my kickstarted key code for Darkest Dungeon came in the emails. I. Loved. It. It blew my tits off. But I started surfing the forums and peoples complaints about the elegance of the battle system rung true to me. I couldn't keep playing. It felt like an unbalanced mess. Which isn't fair because it is a super neat, challenging system. But there are nagging things about it. It has all the ingredients for fantasticness, but falls short. Good thing it is still in early access. Fingers crossed they fix it.

But anyway, Darkest Dungeon left a void. I wanted to make the game I thought it should be. The game I really wanted to play. And so my dungeon game started.

I had to start from scratch. I learned Object Oriented Turing in highschool, but that had severe limitations that put a stop to my programming hobby. I wasn't inclined to learn new systems then. I am now.

I worked through some python tutorials after some research. It was fun. I am having fun. It's just what I need. I like making scripts do things quickly and seeing if they work or not. I have lots of problems with my code, I am the first to admit it. It is gross sometimes. But ultimately I just want to make my game, and it's getting made so far.

I started learning Pygame. It is perfect for me too. This is a fun hobby. Sometimes my brain explodes. Sometimes I feel like a rockstar. Mostly it's just fun.