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• StalagRL – End of day 7 – Failure
• StalagRL – End of day 5
• StalagRL – End of Day 4
• StalagRL – Day 3
• 7 day roguelike challenge – “Back Up” Completed!

Twitter: etriumdev

• Taking part in the 7-day roguelike challenge this coming week. http://t.co/zmMWtorpyM 04:04:29 PM March 08, 2013 from Twitter Web Client ReplyRetweetFavorite

@etriumdev

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StalagRL – End of day 7 – Failure Written on March 16, 2014, by danbrown.

Several updates since the previous post but the most important is that at the end of the 7DRL there is not enough gameplay to call this a game, roguelike or otherwise.

There  are two reasons that I can see -

Firstly the planned gameplay needed a ton of custom code. In a standard roguelike you can have a table of enemies and  a table of weapons/armour and very quickly get thousands of interesting fights that can happen as often as you like. In a non-combat game such as StalagRL you have exactly one way to die (shot), and 4 ways to win (tunnel out, through the wire, disguise+walk out, hide in a vehicle) all of which need very specific code written to handle them, and all of which happen rarely enough to be important and often enough to get boring if they don’t have variation.

Secondly was the level of graphics. There are loads of freely usable RL sprite sets out there and we used one last year. But try finding 3d assets with a specific theme (WW2) that are also either public domain or creative commons. In the end I ended up having to make almost all of the meshes we use and I’m certainly no artist. We probably spent around 4-5 of the 7 days just working on the graphics engine side of things and that is still without any polish, just required work.

However, I’m still proud of it and we certainly both had fun and didn’t waste our time.

As for the updates for the last 2 days, we did quite a bit.

I added all the camp activities and the prisoners would obey them all and wander off to the right place on the map at the right time. These activities also governed which areas were out of bounds at specific times.

Guards were added with specific patrol routes around the perimeters and will chase the player if caught out of bounds. When caught they just show a message for now but they should escort the player to solitary and confiscate their items.

The guard structures were added as a single building which made things a bit easier although was one of the things that made us realise that random level generation would not have been easy. I built a large structure with internal rooms for the solitary, storeroom, eating area, barracks, office and commandants office.

I also rearranged the map a bit to add the large exercise area in a separate compound.

Rich got the item use system almost done with custom item handler support that would be needed for most items. The first real interactions were starting to be put in place such as a usable disguise and being able to hide items.

Plans for day 8+

We have spoken about maybe continuing this to a complete game. It might happen or might not. I’d be interested to see how it turns out with decent graphics, animation, gameplay, etc.

[edit]

If you really want to look anyway, you can download it here. The Github project for it is here and is tagged as v1.0 in the master branch.

StalagRL – End of day 5 Written on March 13, 2014, by danbrown.

Finally getting some interactivity in place!

The time system now governs what prisoners should be doing and when. The other prisoners move around randomly within the area they are allowed in at that time and travel to and from zones at the right time.

The item system now allows you to search and pick things up.

I redid the hut a bit to look a bit nicer and have actual beds but got no time left to do the other ones properly.

Plans for day 6 –

Me – Add all activities. Guards and patrol routes. New outside regions for guard areas: barracks, commandants hut, cells, shed, etc. Tunnels if possible.

Rich – Use system.

StalagRL – End of Day 4 Written on March 12, 2014, by danbrown.

Not much added visually but a fair bit done behind the scenes.

Most obviously they are NPCs in the game. These currently just stand still and get in the way but now that we have the pathfinding code finished we can make them move about.

Also added was the time system. This is the core of daily life around the camp and will determine where prisoners should be at any given time (‘free’ time, excercise, meals, rollcall, etc) plus control the guards, spotlights and no-go zones. The first part that this controls has just gone in and is the day/night lighting cycle.

Day 5 plans –

Dan: NPC schedules and movement. Maybe integrate them for trading.

Rich: The ‘use’ and item system.

StalagRL – Day 3 Written on March 11, 2014, by danbrown.

Day 3 summary

A slow day but things are still happening.

Rich made progression adding corridors to the generated map. Not quite there but just needs some debugging I think.

I upgraded the lighting for line-of-sight so I could hide the rest of the level. On the monster side I made them chase the player if they come too close. If they lose the player they will generally hang around near where they last saw them. The monsters can attack the player and vice versa although nothing happens yet.

Goals for day 4

Rich

• As usual. Get corridors added to the map.

Me

• Basic combat system. I’ve put an enemy in the players start room to help with that until corridors are done.
• Zoom the map back in and add scrolling. Currently it is at 50% size to see it all for testing the level generation.

7 day roguelike challenge – “Back Up” Completed! Written on March 16, 2013, by danbrown.

Worked right up up until the last minute but calling this a success although it may turn out on the easy side on a full play-through. Balancing it was the last task so fell a bit short there.

We have everything in that was planned except a class system. Considering the state it was in 24 hours ago due to 2 days lost to GUI confusion, I thought this may have to have been a fail, but we got everything else in that was planned. We even managed to get persistent levels to allow you to go back and finish exploring/killing ones you didn’t do enough on.

The plot remains the same as planned. You are a bored level 35 dungeon boss that decides to retire and live in the human world. So you have to level down instead of up and dump your epic armour in favour of worse gear on the way back out of the dungeon whilst fighting adventurers trying to get in. There is mechanism to stop you going onwards if your gear is too good so you have no choice but to get rid of it. You also stop getting loot if you hit too hard as an extra incentive.

We have no plans to carry on with this although may do a 1.1 release in a few weeks to add the missing class system, a few simple bits we would like to add personally  and fix bugs.

Personal firsts achieved: First 7DRL!, First Roguelike at all, First complete Java program.

Download it and try it out now!

.tar.gz version

.zip version

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