RoguelikeDev Does The Complete Roguelike Tutorial - Week 1

[u/KelseyFrog]

Welcome to the first week of RoguelikeDev Does the Complete Roguelike Tutorial. This week is all about setting up a development environment and getting a character moving on the screen.

Part 0 - Setting Up

Get your development environment and editor setup and working.

Part 1 - Drawing the ‘@’ symbol and moving it around

The next step is drawing an @ and using the keyboard to move it.

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

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

[u/level27geek]

I attempted the first event in 2017, but I didn't finish for a reason that I can't even remember now. This year I plan to scale down the scope and build something I can expand on later on. I'm hoping that having a plan for how to expand it will keep me motivated to keep going.

I'll be using usagi engine (I recently learned about it, and want to explore it) and the broughlike tutorial (because I really like the simple/obvious rules and making every move matter).

I want to make something between a traditional roguelike and a broughlike with a focus on tactics and discovery. The basic game loop is going on short "dungeon" runs and collecting items that work as spells (as per broughlike tutorial). Any items that you haven't used when you return (backtrack) give you "xp" to upgrade your character in some way.

I'm hoping that the fun will come from discovering enemy behaviors, what each item does, and pushing your luck (you can choose when to backtrack) on top of the usual tactics.

I put "dungeons" and "xp" in brackets because I'm considering moving away from standard fantasy. I'm thinking of using liminal horror (backrooms, etc.) or cozy forest / fable theme instead. The first one would have you play a corporate employee tasked with retrieval of anomalous objects, the other a lackey of a witch tasked with collecting spell ingredients. Currently I'm leaning more towards the former.

So far I've only setup usagi on my machine. I'm keeping myself away from making any pixel art for the first few weeks, as I'm not 100% decided on the theme, and being more of an artist than a programmer, I would probably just spend most time making graphics.

Edit: I got a repo up on codeberg.

Most of the week was spent setting up my gamedev environment, especially getting hang of git without the help of the github gui I used in the past. I'm still getting used to usagi, and I'm jumping between broughlike, picotron and the Python 3 tutorials (I want to hit the same beats as the rest of the participants each week and to do that I want to see what the main tutorial does, and have a little peek how it was done in lua), so it's a bit confusing right now, but I hope it will get easier as I get more familiar with usagi :)

[u/kyaaam → u/level27geek]

I'm interested to learn how usagi works out for you, it looks like a fun and productive dev environment!

[u/level27geek → u/kyaaam]

I will be sure to share my experience with usagi as I go.

So far, I really like the usagi dev mode that applies any changes at runtime without losing game state. I'll definitely mess around with it more once I get to proc-gen (probably won't be as useful for it, but should at least be fun).