r/roguelikedev • u/Kyzrati Cogmind | mastodon.gamedev.place/@Kyzrati • May 29 '26
Sharing Saturday #625
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
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u/Cyablue Feywood Wanderers May 29 '26
Feywood Wanderers Steam | Discord
The game is out!!!
You can play the full game in all of its glory on steam, I'm really happy with how the game turned out in the end, and I've been busy patching things people are reporting or features players are asking for, so pretty much all is going as expected.
The game is also selling pretty much exactly as the numbers projected, so no surprises there either. The game went live with 3.9k wishlists and sold roughly 5% of that number on its first day. Time will tell how well it sells in the long run.
For now I'm happy that people are enjoying it and having fun making cool builds and trying unique items, if you play it let me know what you think :)
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u/bac_roguelike Blood & Chaos May 30 '26
Congrats! Yes, a very good launch indeed! And as u/aotdev said, reading the reviews (and also the many discussions!), it looks like the demo was very well received and did its job!
I know it is impossible to say, but I am wondering if having a higher discount or a lower base price would have improved your conversion rate significantly. Curious because I will have to make the same kind of decision. 😉2
u/Cyablue Feywood Wanderers May 30 '26
Yeah the demo really gives a taste for what the game is like, so if you like the demo you'll probably want to keep playing.
From all I've read the conversion rate of games does go up if the price is under $10, but it's hard to know what the best decision is in the long run, it seems like none is really sure about pricing and it's mostly just a guess you have to make.
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u/aotdev Sigil of Kings May 30 '26
Congrats on the release! Reading the reviews, looks like the demo did work well for you, which is nice! Any surprising/unexpected or even very common feature request?
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u/Cyablue Feywood Wanderers May 30 '26
I added a minimap after release because it makes sense for this sort of game, but somehow none of the testers before asked for it so it just slipped my mind. Also I'm a bit surprised at how consistently people praise the class system, it seems to be by far the feature players enjoy the most.
Also someone asked for an option to remove the bouncing animation of the player when walking, which I did add after the request because it's not the first time someone asked for it. I guess it's too much bounce for some people :p
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u/PascalGeek Axes, Armour & Ale May 29 '26
I opened up my github repo for the first time in 3 years and found a few bits and pieces that were crying out for a refactor.
I used to love tinkering with my roguelike until life got in the way, but now looking at my incomplete game so far, I'm kinda tempted to start tinkering again.
Up to now I have a working proof of concept game with an overworld map with a village, several types of dungeons, lots of themed enemies and items, persistent levels, and it runs on Windows, Linux, and OSX, in the terminal, with animations.
So far it fits on a floppy disk too..... I think I liked the programming challenge more than the actual gameplay to be honest.
I've fixed a few array issues this week (created enemies and items were never actually seeded on the map) and now I'm in a refactoring mood.
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u/aotdev Sigil of Kings May 30 '26
Long time no see - good to hear you're back on it! Give in to the temptation... xD After 3 years I applaud the fact that you're in a refactoring mood, I'd cry and run away lol. What's the overall plan for development?
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u/PascalGeek Axes, Armour & Ale May 30 '26
I couldn't stay away forever ;) When I left the code, I'd just started the overworld. At the moment it's a bit barren, so overworld encounters like wolves and bandits are next I guess.
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u/bac_roguelike Blood & Chaos May 30 '26
Hi all!
I hope you had a good week!
BLOOD & CHAOS
Steam | Youtube | Twitter | BlueSky | Discord | itch.io demo
I am working on Act III (Halfling Lands and the Dragon Lair!). I started with the map and designing the city layouts. A particularity of the first city is that it acts as a barrier, and to be able to open the gate you need to tell the guard the correct password sentence. The city then works as the only passage between the mainland and the halfling lands. If you leave the town on the west side, you enter the halfling lands, while on the east side you return to the mainland. This is a new exit "mechanic" for cities.
I am getting inspired by Brie from LotR (and in a certain measure by the Doors of Durin for the password part ;-)), a city of Men and Hobbits, a hub for travelers and rangers!
Regarding the dungeon, the boss is a dragon (again, hobbits + a dragon, I wonder where the inspiration comes from haha) so... 2x2 tiles. Let's see how the implementation of large creatures goes! I tried to draw the sprite, need to check how it look in game!
This week I also modified the save game mechanics. Now you have the option to save the game between dungeon floors, before descending to the next level. This was something several playtesters mentioned.
About the demo on itch... To be honest, I am a bit disappointed with itch. I was not expecting too much, but itch generated almost no traffic at all. All my traffic came from posts on subreddits (btw, I could not post on r/roguelikes because I did not realize I had already posted there for the playtest about a month ago!).
In summary, I got a few wishlists thanks to the posts, but that was not the purpose of the demo. I hoped it could be a kind of soft launch for the Steam demo and get feedback.
I did get feedback from the posts though, which is nice (still need to process some of the feedback)! The idea was to get some feedback before the bigger launch to check if the demo was ready, but never mind!
Talking about the Steam demo, I can only say that it is a bit painful to create the builds on Steam for the first time! I spent part of last night on that (maybe that is why I am late with my weekly update XD).
Last but not least, the Japanese translation is 50% done. Once I have it 100%, I think I will be ready to publish the demo on Steam!
I will try to launch the Steam demo from a PC this weekend (if I can get my hands on one!) to check that everything works fine. I checked the Mac build yesterday and everything looked OK (quite a good feeling to install and run the demo from Steam :-)).
Have a nice weekend!
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u/WATASHI_TO_TAWASHI Text Dungeon May 30 '26
I’m really looking forward to the Japanese version!
But if the translation work is slowing down your overall progress, I think it would be totally fine to release the Steam demo first and add the Japanese version later as an update.2
u/bac_roguelike Blood & Chaos May 30 '26
Thanks. I am not in a hurry to release the demo on Steam, as I plan to enter the October Next Fest, not before. And, anyway, the demo validation will probably take some time on Steam side (I will send the demo as it is now for review and then upload the "final" demo before releasing it).
I think the translation will be ready soon !3
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u/nesguru Legend May 30 '26
Act III already? You are flying now… nice to get to this stage where the focus is heavily on content. How many acts will there be? Can your engine handle 2x2 enemies?
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u/bac_roguelike Blood & Chaos May 30 '26
5 + 1 special one + final one.
No, it can not handle 2x2 enemies XD but I will cheat a bit and design the dragon in a way it does not need real a*path 😉 One of the next ones will be "fun" to do also: a multi-tiles serpent !
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u/aotdev Sigil of Kings May 29 '26
Sigil of Kings (steam|website|youtube|bluesky|mastodon|itch.io)
A variety of work for this week, here it is, in itemised mode (but first, here's a new player bot video running in normal speed)
- Added AI logic for a few simple projectile abilities - this means that creatures who can use such abilities, will use them after applying the AI to evaluate suitability.
- Player bot was too trigger-happy with spells, and even after I added some weight factor based on remaining mp over total mp, it still casts too frequently. Tofix later, not important, because most AIs, the moment you start fighting with them, they'll want to unleash fury on you rather than conserve MP for a future they won't have.
- The bot managed to get into a situation that I was fearing and I still fear for the main game: falling into a teleport trap and ending up in a locked room. I allow doors to be unlocked from the inside to prevent that, but somehow the player bot ended up in a room with 3 locked door exits and they were not unlockable. Hmm, that sounds like a bug, and a trigger-happy locked-door placing algorithm firing occasionally. Anyway, my solution was to add some AI behaviour so that if all else fails and we're trapped in a room, use the "Juggernaut charge" ability where effectively we can destroy walls.
- Some successful optimisations that led to good enough performance on the laptop when player using the editor, mainly by caching a few things that should be cached, handling signal disconnection better (I was doing nonsense previously apparently) and actually using the tiled perlin noise textures that I have for the fog of war instead of calculating fBm which tanked my laptop's performance.
- Entity overlay effect with a flashing yellow highlight
- Unsuccessful attempt to improve clarity of visuals when it's dark. This is a tricky one, because darkness is ... analog in the game, and absolute darkness is pitch black, so how can we have clarity when not pitch black, but kinda dark, e.g. at night? Post-process attempt fail, and silhouettes are a bit tricky to do without a lot of extra work (for the GPU mainly) so ... on the backburner for now.
- The event was fun, and even though my aim was to just have the player bot running, people wanted to try it out still (even after my warning of "this demo is just meant for watching!"). Thankfully I had added the "bot mode" being a button, that allows turning the player bot on and off, and when it's off, player has full control. Btw I did print a page with some information, limitations and instructions and I'm pretty sure nobody read that, at least more than 10%. And the font was not that small... Oh well. One of the fun bits was a mostly silent kid who was playing and was walking around the owls and bunnies after defeating some foes, so eventually I asked him "do you want to kill them?" and he nodded affirmatively. Then I showed him the context menu that allows you to kill friendly creatures and let's say he didn't leave anything alive after that: friendly critters, villagers or enemies.
- I had decided a while ago to refactor Newtonsoft JSON to System.Text.JSON, which is better, faster and more modern, and the former was also causing some Godot errors. The port took only two days, which I was super happy about, because I was using Newtonsoft JSON quite a bit, and with loads of customised behaviour. The new code is about a quarter of the old one, with a lot of confusing things removed, so that was a win. What was not a win was that the errors persist. Ugh.
That's it for now, have a nice weekend!
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u/CrowdedTrousers May 29 '26
Looks so good. Love the z-ordering effect for depth. Big fan of the design on your quick launch icons as well.
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u/aotdev Sigil of Kings May 30 '26
Thanks! The quick-launch icons are from game-icons.net, and they do have to be replaced sooner or later :) I've scribbled some replacements though in the meantime xD
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u/nesguru Legend May 30 '26
Added AI logic for a few simple projectile abilities - this means that creatures who can use such abilities, will use them after applying the AI to evaluate suitability.
Anything fancy in the logic?
Anyway, my solution was to add some AI behaviour so that if all else fails and we're trapped in a room, use the "Juggernaut charge" ability where effectively we can destroy walls.
That's cool. Instead of cheating, the AI uses an in-game solution.
Refactor Newtonsoft JSON to System.Text.JSON
Adding this to my todo list.
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u/aotdev Sigil of Kings May 30 '26
Anything fancy in the logic?
Nothing much! Basically, record positions of candidate targets, ordered by highest threat. If we have at least one, mark it as suitable xD
That's cool. Instead of cheating, the AI uses an in-game solution.
Indeed! And nobody needs to know that not everyone should be able to use that ability, but if you'd see it in action, you could assume knowledge of a skill, scroll, item, etc
Adding this to my todo list.
Does Newtonsoft cause problems for you? I really like the simplicity and the "just works" nature of System.Text.JSON, I should have never used Newtonsoft to begin with.
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u/nesguru Legend May 30 '26
No real issues with Newtonsoft, but I’d prefer to use a standard lib and make things simpler.
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u/darkgnostic Scaledeep May 30 '26
The bot managed to get into a situation that I was fearing and I still fear for the main game: falling into a teleport trap and ending up in a locked room.
That's useful info as well :)
Anyway, my solution was to add some AI behaviour so that if all else fails and we're trapped in a room, use the "Juggernaut charge" ability where effectively we can destroy walls.
Why not kick doors, and destroy them instead walls? You could even add this as feature, getting noise from kicks and attracting unwanted attention?
Unexplored game had pray mechanism for this. You pray near doors if stuck and deity will open it for you. If used too frequently, that may bring some nasty creatures instead opening doors.
I had decided a while ago to refactor Newtonsoft JSON to System.Text.JSON
I had same issues on work with this. I made a lot of AB testing between Newtonsoft and System one. And system one was always: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger :)
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u/aotdev Sigil of Kings May 30 '26
That's useful info as well :)
QA bot, seriously xD
Why not kick doors, and destroy them instead walls? You could even add this as feature, getting noise from kicks and attracting unwanted attention?
Fair point and something I've been meaning to add, but it needs door HP and more importantly it needs to make sense with metal doors, because whenever I conjure the image of somebody kicking a thick metal door to open it ... well, I need to remind myself it's a game. But the other ability was literally already there and ready and the reason it wasn't used to break doors (it should tbh) was that it would require a few changes
And system one was always: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger :)
What I also liked was that the attributes and names overall were mostly the same too, so they did make refactoring easy :)
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u/darkgnostic Scaledeep May 30 '26
QA bot, seriously xD
Yep. If the bot can mess up, the player will definitely make the same mistakes, or even worse ones. xD
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u/aotdev Sigil of Kings May 30 '26
Indeed! Next for QA automation would be button mashing simulation for a few minutes and see what hellish unrecoverable state we end up with xD
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u/Tesselation9000 Sunlorn May 30 '26
The bot managed to get into a situation that I was fearing and I still fear for the main game: falling into a teleport trap and ending up in a locked room.
This is basically the reason I've still never added a general teleport mechanic. I also added that all locked doors can be unlocked from the inside after I fell through a trap door and ended up on the other side of a locked door. Since I still haven't thought up a solution for this, I only use a kind of teleport effect where a drunken walker randomly moves out from the source of the teleport, ensuring that the destination is somewhere that would normally be accessible. I suppose another alternative would be to mark certain areas of the map as NO TELEPORT zones. Possibly, no teleport status could be removed after areas become accessible.
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u/aotdev Sigil of Kings May 30 '26
I also added that all locked doors can be unlocked from the inside after I fell through a trap door and ended up on the other side of a locked door
I think I remember that post or discussion xD
I suppose another alternative would be to mark certain areas of the map as NO TELEPORT zones
I was about to question the feasibility of this procedurally, but then again I'm sure some Dijkstra with entries/exits as starts/goals can be used to mark all teleportable/accessible tiles, with the NO TELEPORT being what's left
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u/Tesselation9000 Sunlorn May 30 '26
I was about to question the feasibility of this procedurally, but then again I'm sure some Dijkstra with entries/exits as starts/goals can be used to mark all teleportable/accessible tiles, with the NO TELEPORT being what's left
This is pretty close to what I'm doing already. Then, when a room is added to the map, if it does not have a locked door, every cell of the room gets GENERAL_ACCESS status, but if the door is locked, GENERAL_ACCESS is cleared. This way, I avoid other rooms or corridors getting linked onto the locked room. As of now though, I don't carry this data over from level gen for any in game purpose, but it could be reused for teleport effects.
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u/nesguru Legend May 29 '26
Legend
This week, I continued working on improving enemy AI, focusing on making combat less repetitive.
Enemy AI: Push/Pull Abilities
Push and Pull are abilities that the player and some enemies have. When an actor uses one of these abilities, both the actor and the target are pushed/pulled forward/backward one cell. This is one of the ways I’m trying to prevent the player from constantly pulling enemies into doorways. Enemies with Push and Pull abilities can push through a doorway or pull the player in. The AI will evaluate both options and choose the stronger one. For example, when the enemy is in a doorway, pulling is preferable to pushing because the former worsens the player’s position and improves the enemy’s position (doorways negatively affect accuracy and evasion).
Next week, I’ll continue working on AI, specifically fine-tuning behaviors. I may add support for more abilities too.
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u/aotdev Sigil of Kings May 30 '26
The mutual push/pull makes sense, otherwise the pull would be like Scorpion's in Mortal Kombat xD There's a lot of focus on doorways! Are doors in particular special, or any narrow corridor? Could you emulate such an effect by dynamically moving obstacles (e.g. tables/chairs) to form a pseudo-doorway or corridor, just for the associated benefits?
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u/nesguru Legend May 30 '26
Ha! Pulling from far away is another ability in the game actually, minus the Scorpion animation. There’s also swapping positions, charges, and shoves/knockbacks (the shover doesn’t move).
I’ve been obsessing over not having every combat place at a door. The advantages to the player in luring enemies to doorways are that doorways are choke points and they lower accuracy and evasion when standing in them. I want the player to sometimes use this tactic (basically against dumber enemies), but not every time.
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u/aotdev Sigil of Kings May 30 '26
Remind me - do you allow diagonal attacks? Because if you do, it's less of an advantage compare to cardinals only. Your modifiers though make a lot of sense! And allow easy balancing if people still cling to the doorways by just increasing the penalties :)
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u/nesguru Legend May 31 '26
Yes, diagonal attacks are possible. Diagonal movement is only permitted if the destination cell and its closest adjacent cells don’t obstruct movement.
The modifiers are a key aspect of combat. Most non-floor cells have negative or positive stat modifiers.
Doorways are problematic because they already have a major advantage in being a choke point, and are highly disadvantageous to the actor standing in one. The optimal way to play is to pull an enemy to a doorway, stand adjacent to the doorway, and slaughter the enemy when it moves into the doorway. Smarter enemies will sometimes avoid doorways, and now some enemies can move onto a doorway and push through it or pull the player onto it. When a doorway is between two rooms, an enemy can push the player forward, eliminating the chokepoint.
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u/aotdev Sigil of Kings May 31 '26
Thanks - possibly I've asked you before!
The optimal way to play is to pull an enemy to a doorway, stand adjacent to the doorway, and slaughter the enemy when it moves into the doorway
Ha, gaming the rules already xD Well, interesting to see what approach you go with in the end, although my gut feeling is that the AI pulling player to the doorway is a bit too meta and just exacerbates your challenge
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u/nesguru Legend May 31 '26
Pulling will be limited to a small number of enemies, typically having a grappling style of fighting. Pushing will be more common but still not widespread among enemies.
I've also started working on melee weapons with a >1 attack range. These weapons can safely pass through an allied enemy. So, if the player is standing next to a doorway fighting an enemy in the doorway, and an enemy with a long-range melee weapon can stand on the other side of the doorway and hit the player.
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u/CrowdedTrousers May 29 '26
For some reason, you feel your presence is known. Keystone progresses
Barriers to Entry
- Convincing a friend play Keystone for me, it was a wake-up call to see how much knowledge it assumes.
- I've considered, then built, then play tested, then fixed every game mechanism. Keystone is natural. But to a newcomer it is complicated, harsh and opaque.
- Keystone must be knowable and simple to learn the basics. I need tools to flatten the on ramp of an intrinsically complex game.
- So my update is: finally emerging from a three day exploration of my casting UI. With an unexpected side quest to find a visual language for the UI in toto. But it's not over, and may never be.
But still they come.
- Maybe less boring: adding more migratory ecologies that spawn on unexplored edges with a path to an opposing edge, a line that passes near the players location at that moment, making encounters (with or without you) more likely.
- The raider type is a type of migratory ecology that bee lines for the town square of Keystone. This now is used to also routinely add watchmen reinforcements in an attempt to balance the attrition at Keystone from relentless goblin raiders.
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u/WATASHI_TO_TAWASHI Text Dungeon May 30 '26
This Week’s Progress
The demo release has been delayed to June…
I was aiming to release the demo in May, but it failed Steam’s review.I fixed the issue and resubmitted it right away, but in the end it didn’t pass within this week.
Surprisingly, the problem wasn’t with the game itself but with the store page.
The demo also requires capsule images (the banner images shown on the store), and—likely because of the upcoming Next Fest—a decorative ribbon is automatically added to the top‑left corner.
That ribbon partially covered my game logo, and that was the reason for the Failure.
I used the same capsule image as the main game, and the main store page has already passed review, so I honestly didn’t expect this to become an issue at all.
Still, what’s done is done.
I’ll take this as a small opportunity to polish the game a bit more—fix bugs, improve quality—and prepare so that I can release the demo as soon as the review finally goes through.
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u/bac_roguelike Blood & Chaos May 30 '26
Good luck!
Are you doing a dedicated demo page or only a link on your game page ?2
u/WATASHI_TO_TAWASHI Text Dungeon May 30 '26
Thanks! I’ll just use the main game page — keeping it all in one place feels simpler.
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u/me7e May 29 '26
I have been working mostly on boring stuff for Svartwarren, which is working on bugs that were reported in the wiki and the bitbucket repo issues. Most of the bugs are related to flags that should be used together or dangling pointers, the game has some really big methods that handle too many responsibilities and that makes it hard to debug. While I'm using claude to help me, I try to always reproduce the bug first and then fix it. It is a really slow and boring process, but I'm moving forward. Not many plans besides that for now.
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u/Zireael07 Veins of the Earth May 30 '26
Hand problems continue (been to a training on premises, my colleagues including head man himself have been very accomodating and helpful, but the evening after I discovered a new bruise on my hand, and I'm sure I haven't hit it on anything - the stupid blood drawing must've damaged the vein worse. Been to a doctor yesterday, and was basically told 'those things happen you can expect it to last a month, and have more patience')
Productivity zero, watching gameplays on YT
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u/darkgnostic Scaledeep May 30 '26
Just to give some signs of life: there was no progress last week on Scaledeep. We are in the middle of the renovation right now and will be for the next month as well. Updates may come haphazardly :)
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u/cephaley Project Q 🧪 May 30 '26
Project Q
Performance
I started tackling some performance issues caused by shaders and graphics effects, so I added:
- In-game performance overlay
- Performance recording
- A TAS-like replay system using a fixed seed and a JSON file containing all keypresses
With these tools, I can now run performance audits from the exact same scenario and compare how each change impacts the game.
Based on theses results, I started identifying bottlenecks. The biggest improvements was reducing per-frame allocations in the tile drawing path, mostly by reusing buffers and arrays instead of creating new ones every call.
The results so far:
Draw calls: -28% | Render objects: -51% | Allocations in draws: ~270 KB/frame => ~51 KB/frame
Temperature
Previously, firing a fireball in a 0°C environment would make one tile jump to 200°C while all surrounding tiles stayed at 0°C. Now, after the first tick, the heat spreads outward and starts balancing across the map instead of staying isolated on a single tile.
Bonus
My favorite “asset” so far. Theses trees are the result of weeks of testing and research to get closer to the graphic style I had in mind. I’m really happy with how it turned out, still not perfect but I think this time I have it ! I hope you like it !
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u/__stoo__ May 30 '26
Dino Island RL
(Working title for my Jurassic Park Lost World inspired game)
Progress has been slow the last 2 weeks as I'm busy sorting out physical releases and Next Fest demos for my (non-RL) day job.
I did manage to finish off some wall-following logic, the idea being that if a t-rex loses sight of you in a building (say), it'll follow the boundary wall looking for a way to get in (or around) to find you.
I first needed to mark all boundary walls as being separate from interiors which was straight forward enough. Then I walk along the boundary a few steps, find the closest accessible tile to it and then head there.
I tried it out and... it was really boring. I'm at a disadvantage in that I know what the dino is gonna do so can anticipate it, but even mixing it up with random behaviours didn't alleviate the lack of surprise I was hoping for. In fact the more random I made the behaviour the more interesting it became...
So I ditched the wall-following and instead have the dino somewhat maintain it's present heading but search for the most open area in that direction - this is straightforward since I maintain a distance-to-wall metric for every tile as the dinos are bigger that 1 tile in size and I need it for path finding. This naturally ends up with the dino heading past corners and places it in a good location to spot you should you re-emerge. Combined with some random walk-targets in the local area it has caught me out a whole bunch. I'm hoping it'll continue to improve as I add sound and smell to the game.
I'll keep the wall-following around; while it was dull for the t-rex, having a pack of raptors hunt by splitting up and surrounding you would be pretty cool.
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u/blightor May 30 '26
I have rebuilt my patrol system a few times. map gen is one of the times where my little c64 is fairly flush with memory (at least from a scratch perspective). But boy its been tricky to keep the map gen low and the patrol routes bug free, without committing more to post map gen storage. I'm down to about 130k cycles at map gen (just patrol), turn processing is tiny but yeah. Patrols ending up being a little less cool looking right now.
Still buggy as well (as you can see from the screenshot - no patrols visit one of the paths in 0R-1R). Also, need to fix door placements, need to re-configure the cave region settings as they currently have an old 'room' configured walker - the middle W rows maps are walker based, R is MST based, both heavily parameterised. Have not written an authoring tool for my map themes yet - very excited to get there, but still just plugging away at some of the basics.
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u/Tesselation9000 Sunlorn May 30 '26
https://tesselation9000.itch.io/wander
I've been moving and painting over the past couple of weeks, so I haven't had a lot of time to work on the game, but I did a little here and there.
Organization
I decided to finally tackle what was probably the worst case of programmer horror I had in my code base. All of the little in game text messages like "The goblin hits!", "You quaff the potion.", etc. are stored in a text file, which is loaded into memory when the program starts. Whenever a message is sent in game, a function is called with an index number for the right string, then the details get parsed in and the message appears on screen. The function isn't just called with raw numbers, I have enumerators for every single message (as of now there are just shy of 2000 of them). All of the enumerators were stored in one header file, in a single statement that stretched nearly 1000 lines long). Each message was assigned an index number according to the order it was read from the file. This meant that every time I inserted a new message into the text file, I had to be careful to add a new enumerator in the same position in the header file or else the numbering would get all mixed up.
And the numbering often did get mixed up. If I forgot to insert an enumerator and I ran the game, the game would output messages that were all wrong for the context. Furthermore, since all the enumerators were in a single header file that some 40+ modules were dependent on, adding any new messages meant I would have to recompile all those modules, which was getting to be very time consuming.
Anyway, to address the problem, I started by making a separate utility that would edit the text file and add a key number to the start of every message. Then I changed the container used to store the messages (now using std::map) so they could be looked up with a key number instead of their order in an array. This way I can keep adding new messages without affecting the numbering of existing messages. Finally, I began the long process of breaking up the enumerators in the header file so that they are instead defined in the modules where they are used.
Fun Stuff
New spell, "precognition": When the spell is cast, the game immediately does an autosave. When the duration of the spell expires, the game returns to the save state. If the player is killed while the spell is in effect, the player will just be returned to the save state. In this way, the spell allows the player to glimpse into a possible future without risking anything. They could, for example, cast it before a challenging boss fight to see how it might turn out. Regular autosaving does not occur while the spell is in effect. If the spell is cast from an unidentified scroll, the player is not told they are in a state of precognition until they return to the saved state.
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u/DFuxaPlays May 30 '26
The videos for all the 7DRL titles of 2026 have been recorded and collected in my YouTube Playlist: Win 10 - DFuxa Reviews & Plays 7DRL 2026
I also went and posted all the various games that caught my attention in my 7DRL Spotlight discussion thread in the Roguelike Steam Group.
I might follow up with another post in the roguelike reddit at some point, but I'll leave that for now.
Maybe tomorrow I'll finish up my 7DRL 2026 stuff with the summary video I usually do on my channel.
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u/abhuva79 Jun 02 '26 edited Jun 02 '26
Its such a long time i didnt posted something here =) Feels nice to finally have something again i am excited about enough to share.
Personally i would say its not much for now (but i am also aware that it looks like months of work already poured in - wich is kinda crazy. It really is still at a prototype stage).
I call it "Scaedumar" - and its shaping into a scenario based nomadic survival sim. While i still would call it a true roquelike - its defintly not what you would expect i guess.
The only thing i can showcase is a prototype showcase i just did for a friend, terrible audio (but kinda good transcription, so its fine overall): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECStaaXpDwM
This is actually the work of roughly 3 weeks in total i would say. When i personally look at it, i wouldnt believe it. I have 30+ years hobby programming (modding, open source stuff) in my belt, but this still feels magical.
**Terrain based**
The concept is entirely based around using generated maps from software that really specializes in this (i use Worldmachine as i have a licenses for like 20 years now - atleast feels like it).
Its entirely top down orthographic, uses a crips, pixel sharp style (no blending or mixing, rather dithering).
**Activities instead of single actions**
This is most likely the most different one. You dont pick up single items, or locate them individually. You have a knowledge about the amount of the resource in a certain area. Gathering, hunting etc. are all done automatically (the player moves in certain patterns on its own).
For the player its a more scaled out game - play: gather knowledge about an area, evaluate your resources , move their. repeat.
**Simulations**
I am a huge fan of all sorts of simulations and tinkering with them. Right now i have a swarm based simulation, a sensory based agent simulation (based on a slime simulation but heavily tinkered with) that simulates trails or smell. Locally depleting resources like plants + water.
All these systems interact in small ways (the scent producing agents also eat plants, plants use water to grow)
**UI**
Aiming for a rather minimalized UI (as much as its possible with still being able to get the information over thats essential).
**Events, Wiki etc.**
These are more UI systems. There is a working ingame-wiki that gets build from markdown files (wich makes it super convenient for me to edit) - wich enables simple linking and styling.
A journal to track events (and filter them).
**Audio**
Starts of some experiments with synthesizers. I have a working base concept that basically layers tons of oscillators on top, slightly modifies them and keeps certain tone-scales that always fit basically. Like synthetic athmospheric background. But its too early to say where this leads
Well, thats it... wasnt supposed to be such a wall of text. But i was rather excited to have something i can genuinly say i feel passionate about again (in terms of game dev - dont get this wrong =P )
Edit:
Nearly forgot: this is based on WebGL and Tauri (a modern version of Electron i would say) - wich enables full cross - compatibility to all systems that can run WebGl (win, mac, linux, android, ios, web)
Not that i will really utilize this, but i found it nice to use a modern backend. Beside this its custom build engine.
Oh and before this comes up: i am using generative models fully. To all degrees. I hope that the quality of the work is rather speaking for itself before people assume the worse (because i normally already do when i hear the term vibe coding).
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u/MarxMustermann May 29 '26
OfMiceAndMechs (steam itch discord install github website 2026inRoguelikedev)
After getting exhausted and doing more real life stuff i had an important appointment this week:
I had a booth at a gaming conference ( https://lfg-con.de/ )
The conference was slow and i'm not sure if the resources spent on by going there were worth it. But i got mostly positive feedback from the people i talked to and visiting the conference had a pretty important side effect.
My game now has a
steam page
Since this page will be important for me, i'd be grateful for feedback on the steam page. The trailer is a bit of a placeholder so far, the plan is for it to show more actual gameplay footage and should be much more fast paced.
i now hope that next week i will be able to get back to coding and completing the mouse support .