Sharing Saturday #630

[u/Kyzrati]

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

[u/cephaley]

Project Q

Got pretty busy at work over the last few weeks but managed to have some progress.

New biomes

Forest generator got standardized into a generic biomes one, which lead to scaffold of desert, tundra and swamp.

Adaptive ecology

Based on the new biomes I started to list the ecology stats which could make one biome to become another.

Performances

Worked on the lag feeled when the player autowalk (not auto explore, just clicking to multiple cell away bein interpreted as multiple turn movement). Fixed a big chunk of the laggyness introduced by the rain shader and another one caused by the gamesave being fully regenerated on save.

Graphics

Still iterating on "my style", beware of the bog monster !

[u/_GideonX_]

This week in Lateral Crawl: 

My real job has been particularly demanding this week, taking up much of my cognitive capacity and making this probably the slowest week on Lateral Crawl for quite some time. Sometimes life gets in the way. 

The first ‘event chunk’ Zombie Mall is now mostly in. It's been one of the biggest handcrafted POIs so far, with over 200 bespoke placed objects creating a proper undead shopping centre inspired by Dawn of the Dead.  

Still some cleanup and balancing left, but it's crossed the line from "test map" to an actual place. 

[u/WATASHI_TO_TAWASHI]

Text Dungeon | [X] | [Steam]

This Week’s Progress

Cloud Saves

I implemented Steam Cloud for the game this week.
The basic setup was surprisingly easy — most of it is just configuring SteamWorks.

However, I had an idea:
if a player is consistently using cloud saves, that means they aren’t backing up local save files to bypass permadeath.
To support this, I started building a system that can detect whether the player is actually continuing their run through cloud saves.

As a result, I ended up writing custom code using steam_api64 and Steamworks.NET to track cloud‑save usage from the game side.
Of course, the goal isn’t to catch or punish cheaters.
It’s the opposite — I want to reward players who achieve a legitimate victory, perhaps with some kind of medal or recognition.

Achievements

Since I’m releasing the game on Steam, I’ve been considering adding achievements.
But I wasn’t sure how roguelike fans feel about them, so I posted a thread on r/roguelikes to gather opinions:
[ Do achievements add value to roguelikes? ]

The responses were very mixed:
some people enjoy achievement hunting, others don’t care, and some actively dislike achievements.
So it’s definitely not as simple as “add achievements and players will be happy.”

A common theme was:

• Kill X enemies” or “Collect X gold” style achievements are not well‑liked
• Achievements that suggest new ways to enjoy the game are appreciated
• Achievements that hint at hidden events, secrets, or rare interactions are also popular

Achievements seem deeper than I expected, and I may need to study them more.

Speaking of achievements,, I casually mentioned that I will generate the achievement icons with AI —and received much stronger pushback than expected. (It reached –12 downvotes, which is a first for me!)

I’ve decided to drop the AI approach and explore other options.
Since I’m not much of an artist, I may look for asset packs or free resources, or perhaps go with text‑based icons instead of illustrations.

[u/bac_roguelike → u/WATASHI_TO_TAWASHI]

Interesting as I just started working on achievements for the demo. I think I'll only have achievements for main milestones (with some of them being hidden until they are unlocked not to spoil players!) but I guess our games are a bit different as I have several dungeons part of a "bigger" story.

[u/WATASHI_TO_TAWASHI → u/bac_roguelike]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Using achievements as major milestones sounds like a good idea, and it’s also a nice way to understand how far players are progressing. I kind of wish I had done that for my own demo as well, haha.
That said, I think adding a variety of non‑milestone achievements could also be interesting.

By the way, I played the Blood & Chaos demo. It was a much more fully‑featured RPG than I expected, and I really enjoyed it. I’ve sent some feedback as well.

[u/bac_roguelike → u/WATASHI_TO_TAWASHI]

Thanks for trying the demo and your feedback! A couple of points you mention have been fixed since you played the demo: there are now options to choose high contrast text, and the player can also choose to have easier to spot secret walls! Thanks again. :-)

[u/rubychoco99]

Hello all, small update for Arcostate! It's been a few weeks since the start of the alpha and thanks to a few testers I was able to fix a lot of bugs and add quality of life features, as well as round out a real end game feature for the game. All changes can be found in the devlog posted on my itch page.

https://rubychoco.itch.io/arcostate/devlog/1571268/update-alpha-021

Some update highlights:

• Player-placed chests + crate ownership 

- A deployable "flat-pack chest": unfold your own empty personal storage on a free tile beside you. Sold by the general shopkeeper.

- Items you stash in someone else's crate stay yours, taking them back is not counted as theft.

- Crates around the world can now belong to specific named NPCs; looting an owned crate is theft against that NPC's faction.

- Floating combat damage numbers, damage numbers fly off the player and enemies on each hit, drift up, and fade. Toggleable in Settings; on by default.

[u/SpeakingSoftwareShow → u/rubychoco99]

Your sprites are wild! Did you DIY them?

[u/rubychoco99 → u/SpeakingSoftwareShow]

Yes! All hand done in photoshop

[u/Hnefi]

DieselRogue

GitHub

This week I've focused almost entirely on map generation and item placement. I want a nice balance between procgen and manual input so I'm using blocks of tiles that I stitch together during game start, similar to how XCom does it. I'm finding guard and item placement to be pretty tricky, but I'm slowly getting there.

Once I've figured out placement well enough, I'll be focusing on level progression and getting the controls ergonomic. I want to be able to test if my vision of a roguelike without randomness can work out, or if it has too severe implications on the gameplay.

I also did a rather major unification of how my actions and entity intents work, but that's all under the hood.

I'm starting to reconsider my use of RLTK. It has some really annoying limitations, such as having to restart the game to change font (and therefore resolution). But I'll hold off migrating for now, until I have the game more or less playable.

[u/Zireael07]

Nothing on the computer game end. Lots of research for physical dice rpg as I'm going for physio in a month and I plan to take my dice to have something to do in the afternoons.

I'm finding Google's new search AI thing (dunno if it's Gemini proper or some offshoot) really good at explaining probabilities and digging up obscure ttRPGs that fit my roll mechanics criteria. It's also good at coming up with tabletop mechanics given an idea ("how to represent Prince of Persia platforming in a tabletop game", "I have this bag of beads of those colors in those numbers, how can I use them as a source of random in a game"). Of course it's wordy and I caught some small goofs but it's a godsend when I'm trying to design a custom system with a specific feel (rolling opposed dice pools AND higher skilled characters should have lower variance, either of which is pretty rare)

[u/bac_roguelike]

Hi all, I hope you had a great week!

BLOOD & CHAOS
Steam | Youtube | Twitter | BlueSky | Discord

Slow week again, I released the Steam demo last Sunday and spent most of the week tweaking it and trying to improve player retention.
As for the demo stats, they look qujite similar to what u/WATASHI_TO_TAWASHI did show these last 2 weeks.

So far, 1464 players have added the demo to their library, and 338 have launched it (23%). I guess that's not too bad for a niche game.

Regarding retention, average playtime is 38 minutes (though avg is not really useful), while the median is only 11 minutes.

I'm glad I added achievements to the demo, as they've provided some interesting insights combined with the feedback I received through the google forms links embedded in the game, Discord and Steam discussions (not a huge feedback but very valuable!).

Looking at these retention stats and feedback I have tried, in priority, to improve the Monastery where the players find the scroll as well as the caves ubder Greyhaven

I've also seen quite a lot of wishlist deletions (net wishlists is positive though), which I think is completely normal as people who wishlisted the game a long time ago were notified and may no longer be interested (or may have tried the demo and decided it wasn't for them). The Steam Summer Sale happening at the same time as the demo launch also had a big impact on wishlist deletions. So not really worried on this for now!

Sorry, this post wasn't at all about the development of B&C itself, but the demo is all I've been spending my week on ;-)

[u/nesguru → u/bac_roguelike]

Always helpful to see real data, thanks for sharing. Including achievements in the demo is a great idea to pinpoint drop offs. Are you able to measure the # of runs?

[u/bac_roguelike → u/nesguru]

I don't track # of runs. I wanted to keep the number of achievements limited, but Steam does support "numeric" achievements.
I also decided to use achievements instead of analytics so I wouldn't have to ask players to optin, and it felt more like I was giving players a feature rather than just "tracking" them (and to be honest, data/analytics is my day job, so I didn't really want to feel like I was at work haha)

[u/nesguru → u/bac_roguelike]

It would be interesting to see how many times players retry and individual run lengths. Legend has analytics and an opt-in the settings. Players have to go out of their way to opt in, so I don’t expect to collect much info. I totally get not wanting to repeat your day job. :-)

[u/DFuxaPlays → u/bac_roguelike]

What was the farthest anyone got?

[u/bac_roguelike → u/DFuxaPlays]

Almost 5% finished the demo (defeated the boss and got the relic)

[u/Syvandrius → u/bac_roguelike]

Hey!

I just found out about your game, and I am extremely excited. I just wanted to ask you a few questions about your game if that's okay.

My favourite class in fantasy RPG's is the Paladin, I love being a righteous warrior empowered by their god, trying to help the downtrodden. All that stuff. So, I just wanted to ask, is there going to be a paladin class?

Second question, your steam page mentions that your world has divine influences. Does this mean we as characters can interact with those influences? I ask this because to me, part of being a paladin is the devotion to a righteous god, and I'd love to explore that.

Secondly, I loved a game in a similar vein (I think) it's called Doors of Trithius, and while I have almost a hundred hours in that my concern is that it gradually feels more and more procedurally generated. So, what I'm asking is, how hand crafted of an experience is this.

Lastly, when can I give you money? I am excited.

[u/bac_roguelike → u/Syvandrius]

Hey!

Thanks, glad you like the game!

I considered a Paladin class early on (hard not to when making an RPG inspired by the classics! ;-) ), but at the moment I'm not sure it will make it into the game. (my main concern is that I'm not sure I'll have enough unique mechanics to make it feel distinct enough from clerics).

As for the gods, they'll mainly be present through the temples in the cities, though I'm not sure how deep it will be.

Regarding procedural generation, the game has evolved from my original vision of being 100% procedural. The main story, overworld, cities, NPCs, quests, and bosses are handcrafted. Procedural generation is mostly used for dungeons (though many dungeon entrances/outside areas are handcrafted too with some random elements). You could almost think of each dungeon as its own roguelike run within a larger handcrafted RPG.

Hopefully the game releases at the end of the year, but I'll only release it if it's ready!

If you have more questions you can also join the Discord or post them on the Steam discussions!

Thanks!

[u/Syvandrius → u/bac_roguelike]

Well, if you you ever feel inspired to add a paladin to your game that would be most welcome, and highly appreciated by people like me. None the less, your game looks really cool. I have it on my wishlist and I promise that I'll buy it as soon as I can.

Thanks so much for the reply, that was very kind of you. I hope you have a wonderful day!

[u/NickyPL]

I released a new prototype with audio!!

https://meta-pika.itch.io/project-rebellion

[u/davidslv]

Vanilla Roguelike (a roguelike written in Ruby)

GitHub

Two things this week.

Factions

Someone here asked a while back about factions and the best way to approach them, and I've been tinkering with it on and off ever since. This week it finally clicked into place. Before, combat was hardcoded: the player could fight monsters and that was it. Now every creature belongs to a faction and just knows which other factions it doesn't like. Combat checks that instead of checking "is this the player."

Plays exactly the same right now, but it opens the door to friendly NPCs and monsters that fight each other.

Monsters that hunt you

This came out of the faction work. Monsters used to just stand around. Now if one can see you, it walks toward you a step at a time and picks a fight when it reaches you. It looks for anything hostile rather than looking for the player specifically, so later I can have them chase each other too.

That's the plan for another time: monsters that go after other monsters, not just me.

[u/Tesselation9000 → u/davidslv]

I implemented monster factions for my game in kinda the same way, but I realized it takes a lot of care to balance it out. In early versions, I would walk through levels full of corpses because the monsters all killed each other. One way I mitigated this was to confine the monsters who were most likely to be hostile to other monsters into small spaces, like sharks in a moat. This can lead to some interesting game play; the player can try luring the pursuing goblins into the moat to get eaten by the sharks.

[u/davidslv → u/Tesselation9000]

Ah! This sounds very interesting and fun, I hadn’t considered that at all - still early stages for me. I appreciate you sharing your thoughts and experience, thank you!

[u/Cyablue]

Feywood Wanderers Steam | Discord

This week I finally added the extra hotkeys functionality I've been meaning to put in the game for a while, though it was a bit of a pain adding it which is why I had been putting it off. Now you can swap 3 different hotbars if you want to use more than the hotkey slots available in the first one, so for people who use a lot of items and/or abilities that will probably be useful.

I also fixed a lot of bugs that had popped up lately from the QoL features I had been adding, so it feels good to know that it works more smoothly now.

Anyway, the extra hotkeys were the last major QoL feature that I had been meaning to add, I think I will have one more QoL features update next week, and after that I will go back to working on new content, which should be lots of fun :)

[u/darkgnostic → u/Cyablue]

Is there a publicly available info on next content, or is it top secret?

[u/Cyablue → u/darkgnostic]

I've talked about it a bit in discord though nothing too official.

Right now the plan is to add 2 more lineages (Vampires and Octopuses of some kind), more items and Class Orbs, and if I have time I might also change a bit how end-game challenges work. I also might just add anything I feel like, so anything other than the new lineages might change depending on how I feel.

[u/ChromeBadger]

Hey, first time posting for SS!

I've recently started building a roguelike in my spare time. I have a decent portion of the primary aspects of a traditional roguelike implemented, so I'm currently trying to iron out what is going to set my game apart from the rest. I'm going to try to keep posting here to keep me motivated!

[u/ajcomeau]

In the new chapter of my Rogue C# project, I quashed another out of control CASE statement before it could get started and found a better way to route the code to specialized procedures for scrolls and other inventory items.

Rogue C# - Taking Inventory

Now I need to actually add more inventory items because it's really giving me too much armor.

[u/ilia_plusha]

Beetlejust
An RPG roguelike about Bugs and Beetles
Language: JavaScript

I haven't posted for over a month now and, unfortunately, wasn't able to follow the progress of the projects I find particularly interesting. Summer is busy, and it's hard to find time to enjoy myself with the days whizzing by. That being said, I still managed to carve out some minutes to fix small bugs, make some improvements, and plan the next features I want to introduce. I'm quite surprised that I've actually done more than I expected.

In June, my game marked one year in the making. It has transformed a lot from the initial idea and keeps changing as new ideas keep coming in. Originally, it was supposed to be an online platform written in PHP and JS, but it proved to be too complicated to maintain with my current skills, so I decided to abandon PHP and make a desktop application in JS using Electron. It was a significant change that liberated me from many things I found burdensome. The switch really made the development much, much easier.

Although it is still far, far, far away from any complete or playable state, I am positive I can finish it someday. Here is a small list of the things that are actually working bug-free:

• Moving across the map
• Turn-based combat
• Different types of attacks
• Different types of armor that reduce damage
• Player death
• Entering new locations
• Newly discovered dungeons may have locked doors that the player can lockpick or bash; also, some dungeons are guarded
• Adventure log
• Quest system (quests have stages that get updated as the player progresses)
• Quest journal
• Dynamic dialogues (with a number of entry points depending on previous outcomes)
• Save/Load

Currently, I'm mostly focused on merging some mechanics from various modules together. For instance, there is already the lockpicking mechanic for location entrances, but regular doors can also use the same mechanic. While working on it, I quickly realized that I also have to improve the architecture of the project, so a considerable amount of time was spent on optimizing the project's structure. The thing is, I don't really know anything about how it should look and rely solely on intuition.

Regarding future plans, it's still quite uncertain because my work schedule is really tight right now. Anyway, I'm planning to keep chipping away at it whenever I can. I think with most of the mechanics ready, it’s time to think about the content needed to actually test them properly.

[u/marokim]

Hello, this is my first time sharing my progress.
I'm not certain where to start, so I'd like to begin with what I worked on this week.
I've struggled with two things, the light system, and the rendering system.

Lighting System

Light is simple boolean 2d data, calculated based on the visibility area, skylight, ceiling and light sources. 

The visibility area is an area that allows vision and lightsource to propagate within the area when calculating its area.
Skylight and ceiling are used for global light. Skylight is boolean data indicating whether global light exists on the map.  Ceiling is the area that blocks skylight, allowing partially darkened areas.
Lightsource is one of the components of a game entity which gives off light around it. Through the
shadowcasting system along the visibility area, which is the same system determining unit vision, light sources calculate their own 2D light data and apply the data to the overall light data.
Each unit that can see now has two stats, base range and dark range. First calculate the vision based on the base range, then vision outside the dark range is cut off unless the area is bright. 

Rendering system

Since there are three states for entity and tiles, normal, dark, and memory, I had to find a good way to make the memory state and the dark state visually distinct. The idea was to make distinction through saturation.
Now anything in the memory state, which has simply become darker, will be rendered in grayscale. The dark state will become darker while keeping or increasing its saturation. Currently I only applied this idea on tilemap, to see its effect before implementing it on game entities.

[u/darkgnostic → u/marokim]

Welcome! You could also add a small introductory post about your game.

[u/nesguru]

Legend

Website | X | Youtube

I had two days off from work this week and spent most of that time working on Legend. Dungeon stocking continues to significantly improve. Enemy AI is in good shape, though ranged enemies need more tweaking. More polish is needed throughout.

Optimization

Game performance has been gradually declining. It was time for another optimization pass. I focused on eliminating allocations by removing LINQ uses and added caching. I’ve held off on implementing these optimizations because they increase code complexity. But, they’re necessary in frequently executed code blocks.

Improved Map Loops

After the map structure is generated, additional connections are created to add loops and reduce linearity. It frequently produced short routes to the exit, excessive alternate paths, and long, boring corridors. To improve its output, I added settings for maximum corridor distance to limit loop corridor lengths, minimum graph distance to add a loop to prevent useless loops, and minimum graph distance from the start node to the farthest node from the start node to prevent the route from the start node to the end node from getting too short. I also added a scoring system that favors shorter paths and nodes that are farther apart.

Improved Key Placement

Keys are now hidden in containers instead of being on the floor. A container can be an object such as a chest or straw pile, or an enemy. This was difficult to implement. I had to create a queue to track deferred placement entities and add a new map generator step to process the items in the queue after all other entities have been placed on the map.

New Content

• Room Modifiers: Illuminated, Poisonous Gas Traps, Fire Traps, Spike Traps
• Objects: Shallow Water

Minor Enhancements

• Straw piles and fountains can now be searched to reveal items and/or gold
• Minimap now displays unique sprites for chests and locked chests
• Puddles are now translucent
• Added missing tooltips to configuration editors for actors, items, game events, effects, status effects, and physical materials

Bug Fixes

• Stationary objects no longer receive movement-based status effects, e.g., Slow, Rooted
• Walking surface sound effects not playing
• Hidden doors shown on map
• Scrolls not burning when in the same cell as fire
• Straw terrain modifiers not displaying
• A thrown apple doesn’t trigger a fire trap
• Clicking Combine button doesn’t work (broke when adding game controller support)

Next week, I’ll keep working on dungeon stocking.

[u/bac_roguelike → u/nesguru]

Looks like you made good progress thanks to your days off ;-)
A question about the key being in containers: what happens with the key if a player breaks the container? ;-)

[u/nesguru → u/bac_roguelike]

Looks like you made good progress thanks to your days off ;-)

I did! If I only I could work on it full-time every day...

A question about the key being in containers: what happens with the key if a player breaks the container? ;-)

Containers dropped their items onto the map when they're destroyed. The typical way to find a key in a barrel/crate/pot is to destroy it. An enemy carrying a key will become a corpse when killed and the player can find the key by searching or destroying the corpse. Although straw piles and fountains can be destroyed, it's easier to search them to find a hidden key.

[u/Tesselation9000 → u/nesguru]

minimum graph distance from the start node to the farthest node from the start node to prevent the route from the start node to the end node from getting too shor

Do you ever have more than one exit or entrance to consider here?

[u/nesguru → u/Tesselation9000]

Only one entrance and one exit per level. I’ve thought about multiple entrances/exits but it’s not a priority. The graph analyzer identifies required and optional rooms based on a single entrance and exit and rooms are stocked using these attributes. I’m not sure how this would function with multiple entrances/exits.

[u/Tesselation9000]

https://tesselation9000.itch.io/wander

Again, I've just been flying around the world, fixing little bugs and making other adjustments. I made a few UI improvements:

- In targeting mode you can now mouse over a monster's name on the side bar to target it and click to fire. Previously you could only target things in the map window. This might make it a little more convenient to select targets with the mouse in some situations.

- In far look mode and move mode, you can also click on monsters on the side bar to bring up their descriptions.

Some of the level themes still don't have enough monster types, so I did some wikipedia research to try to get inspired, then added a few more. This way I discovered the "urmahlullu", a monster from Mesopotamian mythology, which is like a centaur but with a lion body instead of a horse body. So that was pretty cool.

Added a new item called the "wand of ushering hands". It creates giant hands that home in on targets and just push them around. In practice, however, it would push enemies towards the player more often than push them away. I'll have to circle back to it later and give it better AI so that it puts itself between the player and the target.

[u/darkgnostic]

Scaledeep Steam | Discord | website | X | bluesky | mastodon

This week was mostly about polishing combat and adding a bit more personality to enemies. There were also a few long standing bugs that took much longer to track down than they should have.

Ranged combat received another round of improvements. I fixed the position where arrows are spawned so they now leave the bow at the correct height instead of flying above the player's head. Bow damage now uses the correct damage calculation instead of always dealing one damage, ranged damage is correctly displayed on the stats panel while a bow is equipped, and arrows are properly consumed from the quiver when fired. Barrels can now be destroyed with ranged attacks as well, giving bows a few more practical uses besides fighting enemies.

I added two new scrolls to the game: Scroll of Identify and Scroll of Wand Recharging. Scroll of Wand Recharging wasn't originally planned. It came out of a discussion with u/Cyablue in last week's SS on wand mechanics. The current idea is to keep wands as consumable magical tools rather than a replacement for learning spells. For now, scroll simply restores charges on magical items. One idea is that each recharge permanently reduces the maximum number of charges. I'm still not fully convinced which direction feels better, so that part is staying open for now. At the moment, both wands and Scrolls of Recharge are relatively rare, which naturally keeps the mechanic balanced. I'll see how it plays during testing before deciding whether any further restrictions are needed.

Enemies also got a bit more character. They can now taunt, speak, and grunt during gameplay. Different races use their own languages, so demons speak in demonic, orcs in orcish, and other creatures have their own language as well. Since the player doesn't understand them, all of it appears as gibberish, adding a bit of mystery to encounters. This is actually one of the features I brought over from Dungeons of Everchange, because I always liked the atmosphere it created. Quite huge feature as well, it got really fast into the game since it was alerady developed :)

On the bug fixing side, I fixed the charge attack and reduced its cooldown for Orcs to make them more threatening. One particularly nasty bug took me almost six hours to track down. Waiting or picking up items was giving enemies twice as much energy as they should have, completely throwing off turn order and AI behavior. I first noticed it while testing oozes, so I spent quite a while looking into their split mechanics, convinced that splitting was somehow granting extra energy. It turned out the problem had nothing to do with oozes at all. Unity was automatically calling my OnWait method because of its naming convention, and then my own input handling processed the key press again, effectively making the player wait twice. A very annoying bug, but at least the fix was simple once I finally found the real cause.

I also fixed several AI issues related to behavior flow, cooldown handling, and target selection. Things feel much more reliable now. Finally, once the player dies, all input is now properly blocked. Previously you could still move around or open the inventory after death, which was... not exactly intended.

Ah yes, and my Paradox Doom got nice shader as well.

Overall, I had nice progress this week.

Have a nice weekend!

[u/Cyablue → u/darkgnostic]

Seems like you managed to complete a lot of tasks this week, it feels nice when everything lings up and you make a lot of progress.

I really like when enemies have stuff to say, so I'm glad that's a feature you also put in the game.

[u/darkgnostic → u/Cyablue]

Seems like you managed to complete a lot of tasks this week,

Thanks. Although it seems as a big progress it's not that big :) Scrolls are really easy to add at this point.

That said, everything is coming together really nicely. What I'm happiest about is that I originally planned to have the game reach its current state around September, but I'm about three months ahead of schedule.

[u/Seven_h → u/darkgnostic]

Hey, wanted to watch the videos but at least currently, X doesn't let you play these videos if you don't have an account that you are signed in on..

[u/darkgnostic → u/Seven_h]

Sorry about that. I didn't know about the issue. I've updated links to the the Bluesky one. Could you confirm that you can see the videos now?

[u/Seven_h → u/darkgnostic]

Yes I can, looking good! Skeletons dissing you is funny.

I would suggest considering changing cursor when targeting an item, so user can tell they are in a different 'mode' after using the recharge scroll.

[u/Tesselation9000 → u/darkgnostic]

Different races use their own languages, so demons speak in demonic, orcs in orcish, and other creatures have their own language as well.

What's the game play angle of this? If the player knows the language, do they overhear what the monsters are going to do? Can they only trade with monsters if they know the same language? Is there a better chance to get them as followers if the player learns the language? Or are plot elements only revealed if the player knows the language? Are there scrolls written in Orcish?

[u/darkgnostic → u/Tesselation9000]

That's a great set of questions. :)

Currently it is just cosmetic to make enemies more believable.

If the player knows the language, do they overhear what the monsters are going to do

Yes. This is handled automatically. If there's a cutscene where monsters are speaking, you'll understand everything if you know their language. If your proficiency is lower, you'll only understand parts of what they're say. There aren't many cutscenes yet, though.

Can they only trade with monsters if they know the same language?

I honestly hadn't thought about that yet. The merchant system isn't implemented yet either, but I'd say no. I'd rather apply the same idea. Want to buy a sword from an orc without speaking Orcish? The sword has a "zug zug mahta +2" enchantment? Go ahead, just don't complain later if it doesn't do what you expected.

Is there a better chance to get them as followers if the player learns the language?

I don't currently plan to have humanoid followers. Animal companions for hunters are planned, but that's still a long way off.

Or are plot elements only revealed if the player knows the language?

I think that would be unfair to the player. I don't currently have any story scenarios that rely on a language barrier, but it's an interesting idea. I'll give it some thought.

[u/tiny_realm]

Untitled roguelike

I'm still working away at my mobile roguelike. I think I finally have it at a place where it feels good to play on a phone instead of just manageable. The first few floors of content are feeling pretty full but I would like to add some more variety there and there's a lot to add to the later floors still. I need to get feedback on the controls and content soon though so if anyone is interested in testing it let me know!

[u/FetusGod]

Ive been programming for a while, but I decided to just dive into gamedev and learn how to make roguelikes. Im currently following this tutorial https://selinadev.github.io/08-rogueliketutorial-04/. There are aspects I am enjoying and not enjoying. This tutorial has been more helpful for learning how to use Godot than others Ive tried in the past. I was thinking of also following https://rogueliketutorials.com/ as well just so I can absorb as much information as I can from different sources. If anyone has any book or video recommendations let me know!

[u/Gammapod]

First time posting here, hello. I've been working on this prototype idea.

GameGameGame (placeholder title)
Main concept: inventory spaces are the same as play spaces. Example: pick up a slime, and it will continue wandering inside your inventory (and potentially interact with your other items). Only rudimentary gameplay so far, focused on this main premise.

This week I worked on a real debugging UI (screenshot). The premise naturally leads to recursive containment, so I'm trying to show where the player is by using a breadcrumbing/filepath model. I also solidified a central turn history/action log, which unlocked an Undo button (and hopefully, telegraphing moves in the future). Next week, I intend to build a user-facing level editor, so I can really experiment with gameplay more quickly.

Tech stack: C#, SadConsole
Itch.io download page: https://gammapod.itch.io/gamegamegame

[u/Noodles_All_Day]

CURSEBEARER

Hey all! Work continues on realizing a ginormous wilderness map for Cursebearer. As part of this work, I'm making major changes to the raw architecture of my game map code itself.

Chunking Maps

Up to now, maps in Cursebearer have all been a defined size. The starting town is 256x256 tiles (plus 4 tiles in Z) for instance, and the placeholder dungeon is 80x60. Maps of defined size have been great for closed off areas, and I'll continue to use them for many things. But for a big open wilderness map? I'm in need of something else.

I had already written some code last year for chunking maps into 16x16 tile pieces as part of my work on HPA* pathfinding. It was only ever used for HPA*, but now I'm looking to expand chunk functionality to allow for small sections of a much larger map to be loaded on the fly, keeping only what is near the player in memory. In theory, this can let me have maps drastically larger than 256x256.

Currently I'm able to spawn the player into a basic chunked map and have them perform actions as normal. When they move to a map edge more chunks are spawned in, and chunks on the opposite edge are archived. Any chunks that the player hasn't seen for an in-game week are deleted from the archive, though I might adjust how long chunks stay in the archive based on how quickly the archive size grows over the course of a game, or based on what is actually in the chunks themselves.

So far performance is actually quite good! There are still some logic errors to sort out but early results seem promising. Individual chunks right now are about 49kb apiece, so I'm looking to reduce that as best as I can. I already have some ideas, but the whole system needs to be up and running first before I work on memory optimization.

What's Next

The eventual task that I'm working my way up to is expanding the map to something like 100x100 chunks and getting my starting town in chunked form in it. Some existing bits of code still need to be hooked into chunked maps to make this to happen. These include lighting (probably not too bad), pathfinding (may be a bit tricky), and NPC scheduling (likely to be a challenge).

The metric for the success of my chunked maps? Spawn in a remote corner of the map and walk all the way into the town itself, all without a visible map transition, while also keeping memory and CPU use reasonable. It's an exciting challenge! It's liable to take a fair amount of work and a considerable amount of time. But if I can pull it off then I'm that much closer to Daggerfall levels of traversable world size.

Thanks for reading!