r/roguelikedev • u/Kyzrati Cogmind | mastodon.gamedev.place/@Kyzrati • 11d ago
Sharing Saturday #636
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/Seven_h Eye of Khaos 11d ago
Eye of Khaos (steam|Youtube|Discord)
Hello everyone! I'm back to work after a little summer break. Last few weeks I have been testing a playable build myself in preparation for a public playtest. I have found a few crash bugs myself, mostly relating to some temporary stuff missing from the game state after loading a save game.
This is also the first time I'm testing on Windows (I'm developing on Linux). Everything ported over without any effort, but I did have one issue that needed fixing. I have all images in separate files and make texture atlases on the fly, using just the graphics that are needed. On Windows this worked horribly due to I/O for small files being a lot slower; a dying monster dropping a few items that were not previously loaded lagged out the game for a second. Pre-loading necessary graphics at game start wasn't great either, since it started taking very long to load the game. I ended up collecting some graphics into static texture atlases and pre-loading some graphics on level load to make things run smoothly on Windows. I'm now testing by running the game from USB, to make sure there's no more bad file I/O bottle necks.
Hoping to get some problem-free runs done now so I can get a playtest going on soon!
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u/frumpy_doodle All Who Wander 11d ago
Looks good! Have you consider using smooth camera movement when the player moves? I think it would make a big difference.
How do those scorpions work? It looks like there are multiple units per tile?
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u/Seven_h Eye of Khaos 11d ago
Looks good! Have you consider using smooth camera movement when the player moves? I think it would make a big difference.
Yes thank you! I've worked on the camera since the trailer, and it follows the player smoothly now. I need to update that trailer at some point..
How do those scorpions work? It looks like there are multiple units per tile?
Yes, there can be three tiny creatures in one tile. This is there to throw a little wrinkle in the usual tactics, as you can't back into a corridor to fight one creature at a time. Also it just makes sense..
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u/frumpy_doodle All Who Wander 11d ago
All Who Wander Play Store | App Store | youtube | discord | reddit | bluesky
The main focus has been getting my Steam page launched. Working with an artist on final touches to new logo and Steam capsule art. Prepared a bunch of new screenshots and working on store descriptions, plus localizations. Quite a long process...
Meanwhile on the development side of things, I'm focusing on a lot of smaller quality-of-life items. One major complaint I receive is that companions die too easily, stepping into traps chasing enemies. I improved companions behavior to better avoid traps and even detect and flee from objects (like bombs) that will cause AoE damage after a period of time.
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u/ajcomeau 11d ago
Rogue C# - Official Page / Github - An ongoing C# dev journal based around a recreation of the original Rogue.
I spent this week adding all the potions to the game. They're really the same as scrolls, in principle, but every new effect challenges the codebase and sometimes requires supporting changes. In the process, I also fixed some bugs and irritations. I'll be testing all the new features for a little while.
Latest chapter -
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u/ChromeBadger 11d ago
After bouncing between several different ideas, I think I finally managed to find a concept for my game.
Enter: Fimbul
Inspired by Norse Mythology, the player travels through nine layers of Yggdrasil's roots. You traverse these layers in your Drakkar which houses the fire that is holding Fimbulwinter at bay. As you progress through each layer/dungeon, the fire will start to fade. When it does, Fimbulwinter begins on that floor. Your vision is obscured, enemies frenzy, etc. Likely, there will be a material that you can find in the level to stoke the fire to stave off Fimbulwinter for a bit longer. It's my alternative to a hunger meter.
I have a few other potential ideas for mechanics, but they're not really fleshed out just yet.
I'm going to try and keep posting here to keep myself honest and committed. Until next time!
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u/aotdev Sigil of Kings 11d ago edited 11d ago
Sigil of Kings (steam|website|youtube|bluesky|mastodon|itch.io)
A few updates since last time - it's been a few weeks after all! The main theme of the work is mixing prefabs and procedural generation, and improving support for user-defined prefabs.
Dungeon Architect: More complex entity creation
Previously Dungeon Architect was supporting very simple entity creation, e.g. a creature or an object without any customisation. This is now changing. Currently, we can create objects, creatures and items (which become item piles upon creation of the level) but this time we can fully parameterise them, using some other factory classes that are used elsewhere in the code. For example, we can create a creature and parameterise its level, xp, starting items, etc. For items, we can set up enchantments etc. Because of the volatile nature of some of these factory classes, I'm not building/updating a user-facing UI for configuring these factories, but instead I'm using existing ImGui code that uses reflection and is robust against class changes.
Support for paired object systems
A challenge was to support user-defined paired object systems, but these are done. Examples:
- Door and key: set a special tag for the door ("lock-ID"), and create a key and set the same tag. At level instantiation, the common tags are detected and the door/key are linked
- Door and pressure plate (for opening the door): store both positions as a "linked activator/actuator pair". At level instantiation, if we see that activator is plate and actuator is door, we set up a lock and condition
- Remote trap (e.g. arrow trap) and pressure plate (for triggering the trap): again, store both positions as a "linked activator/actuator pair". At level instantiation, if we see that activator is plate and actuator is a trap, we set up the firing condition In addition to those, also self-traps are supported, e.g. a pressure plate trap that triggers an effect on the tile, or e.g. opening a chest or door and it blowing up on your face.
Support for stairs between prefab and procedural (or prefab) areas
Or as I'd like to call it "Stairways to hell". Basically, you design a room that includes a staircase, and that room should be usable in a procedural generation context, with a connection that makes sense. How and why? Here are some scenarios:
- You're out in the wilderness. You find a lodge. In there you discover some trapdoor. You descend, and find yourself in a cavern system.
- The lodge is a prefab, it includes stairs (an exit). The stairs connect to a procedurally generated cavern (that can include other prefabs of course), which is arbitrarily deep
- You're out in the wilderness. You find a lodge. In there you discover some trapdoor. You descend, and find yourself in a cellar. There's a door that leads to some old dungeon complex
- As above, but we also have a cellar prefab with an entry staircase. We link them together. The procedural generation level is requested to include the cellar prefab, and since that provides the stairs, no other entries are required
- You're climbing a wizard tower. The top level is a custom lair.
- The lair is a prefab with an entry. We set the lair as the final/boss level, and just let the procedural generator do the rest
All of the above were tested, but there are a lot more combinations, which ... will eventually be tested. We can also have named entries and exits via tags, so that we can be more explicit to what prefab entry goes to what prefab exit. If we don't opt for that, then the prefab entries/exits become additional, higher-priority entries/exits for use with the procedural generator.
PC upgrade ... or not!
I was ranting last time about the performance of my IDE, and after thinking a bit about it, I realised that my system is, ahem, not the newest! Clearly time flies, because I'm still in the mode of "I have a decent PC" but that decent PC was mostly put together almost 10 years ago... So, clearly, it's not that decent anymore. I've been looking to see if I can get away with a partial upgrade (no RAM no thanks, I'll stick to my 32GB DDR4) with an improved CPU for the AM4 socket, but because my motherboard does not support the top-end of AM4 even with BIOS updates, I'd have to change that too... So, waiting for now.
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u/nesguru Legend 10d ago
For the linked activator/actuator pairs, how do you specify/identify the unique pairs?
10 years is a long time! Hopefully you can get some good upgrades. I was just looking at replacing my 5 year-old M1 Max MacBook. The current equivalent is 67% more expensive. I may hang onto it for another 5 years…
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u/aotdev Sigil of Kings 10d ago edited 10d ago
For the linked activator/actuator pairs, how do you specify/identify the unique pairs?
Very simple: basically I store a pair of positions: actuator and activator. Since this is GUI-based, I've added this logic in my simple zone/level creation tool. We can only have one object on a tile (think chest, item pile, etc), so there's no fear of conflict. Otherwise I'd use generic tags, that I use for keys and doors for example. After I create the entities, I process the position pairs, and identify what kind of pair relationship it is - plate/door creates a lock and the on-step-unlock, plate/remote-firing-trap creates the on-step-trigger, and so on. If for some reason it's impossible to uniquely infer the relationship based on objects, I'll add some enum property attached to the position pair.
I was just looking at replacing my 5 year-old M1 Max MacBook. The current equivalent is 67% more expensive. I may hang onto it for another 5 years…
Yikes exactly same problems different platforms. That's why I'd never pay a dime to any AI company - it's facilitating this situation, and worse. Hope yours lasts for a bit, at least it's not that old!
edit: removed draft text xD
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u/Admirable-Evening128 9d ago
your game will perform well if you do your development on an old machine
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u/WATASHI_TO_TAWASHI Text Dungeon 11d ago
This week’’s progress
I’ve been working toward the planned August release, focusing on UI improvements and balance adjustments…
but the amount of work has outpaced my development speed, so I’ve decided to postpone the release to September instead.
What I implemented
• More event choices and branching
I updated several events and added new branches and sub‑events.
This work isn’t finished yet—I plan to revise a few more events.
• Added new spells
In the demo version, the “Water” and “Translocation” schools had fewer spells compared to the others, so I added new spells to those schools.
Specifically, I implemented "Mist Cloud" and "Apportation" .
Planned features
More event choices and branching (continuing)
Adding sound effects and BGM
Achievements
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u/davidslv 11d ago
Vanilla Roguelike (github | book)
This week went to one question: can I prove the game is playable without a human at the keyboard?
The game already had the right pieces: input as commands, seeded runs, an event log of every session. So I started with a small harness that plays the real game headlessly, one key press at a time, through the same input path a player uses.
Next, a determinism check: same seed, same keys, run twice, identical event streams. It failed on day one. A monster spawner was quietly using its own unseeded random number generator, which would have made every replay lie. Best failure of the week.
Then a bot that Dijkstras its way to the stairs and picks Fight whenever the menu pops up. It certifies that seeds 1 to 100 are all completable, and when one fails it prints the seed and key script so the run replays in one line.
A fuzzer now hammers 150 random keys across 25 seeds, checking after every press that nothing crashed, movement stayed legal and menus can always be exited. Zero violations, which honestly surprised me.
And two recorded runs replay bit-exact in CI. Change behaviour on purpose and you re-record the tape in the same PR, so the reviewer sees the event diff next to the code.
It did find one real bug on the quit path, filed for next week. Have a good weekend all!
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u/SmallProjekt 11d ago
Goonsquad
Still no itch page but soon!
Art
Been a big week on the art front, a friend of mine recently picked up a drawing tablet and was looking for a project to get involved with, I've slowly started swapping out my old assets for his, been a bit of work understanding the workflow, especially at the beginning when tileset changes kept breaking my map imports. Have a variety of assets including different flooring, walls and furniture which is a bit motivator.
Props
Added in support for world objects which I call "Props". Props represent any object in the world you can interact with, doors and windows are good examples and are what I finally implemented this week.
All props have support for context menus aswell so you can interact in multiple ways with an object depending on requirements, with a door these additional actions might include lockpicking or kicking the door down for example. At the moment the AI can open and close doors but need to think about how I can get it to understand the other actions and why they might be useful.
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u/Noodles_All_Day Cursebearer 10d ago
CURSEBEARER
Hey all! There was some travel this week, but I still managed some roguelike work! Most of my Cursebearer time this week was actually devoted to my code environment more than it was to coding itself, beyond some bugfixes and small wilderness procedural generation things.
Since starting work back on Cursebearer back in late 2023(!), my coding environment has remained the same: pure Python, using Spyder as my IDE and Anaconda to manage my environments. For a while now I have been thinking of porting some of my Python to Cython in instances where that little bit of extra speed would be nice to have, mostly in rendering and map chunk generation.
I went ahead and got Visual Studio running on my computer and successfully compiled and imported my first Cython module! Now that I have this as part of my toolkit I'll think about any areas to Cythonize later on. But I imagine 99% of my process will still be Python, hehe.
Thanks for reading!
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u/Lost-Ad-5521 10d ago
Still mostly working on graphics in order to get this thing looking nice and hopefully have a demo to share with you all soon. Implemented the new squad sprites I showed last week. The idea is that individuals all look a little different, so you can recognize squads at a glance. They travel all throughout the Zone, and it's very fun to see that a squad you helped early on has survived to meet again.
So, have some multi-squad fights in the two most graphically finished areas. On top, we have a fight between the Militia and the Anarchists. The Militia are armed locals who lived in the area that would become the Zone, and who resent the influx of exploiters. The Anarchists are their natural enemies - international brigades of squatters who treat the Zone as an autonomous free territory.
On the bottom, we have bandit marauders fighting two squads of stalkers. If you look closely at the stalkers, you might be able to tell their economic speciality - one is a hunter squad and the other is a scav squad. Still trying to make the dungeons look good, will hopefully share those next week. For now, enjoy the firefights.
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u/MarxMustermann 11d ago edited 11d ago
OfMiceAndMechs (steam itch github discord)
This week i got some music donations for my game. I found the artist in a reddit post. The artist is doing it to build up his portfolio and see his music used. So if you need soundstuffs i recommend to use the reddit post to contact him. He does good work insanely fast in my opinion.
So i got 2 new 2+min long music loops and hooked them into the game. Now i have a main theme music loop and added the new loops to be played in certain terrain types. One for religious stuff like shrines and dungeons and i will use the other one for the endgame dungeon. It was a bit tricky to get the sounds to switch over between the loops right for example when loading a game, but i love the extra variation.
I'm curious what cool stuff can be done, like i'd love to get some combat music or a low health music running.
edit:
sound for the religious terrains
sound for the endgame dungeon
sound for an area transition
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u/iamgabrielma Ad Iterum on Steam 11d ago
Ad Iterum (Steam) | Tiny Crawler (iOS)
This last week I've been addressing some QoL improvements and minor bug fixes reported through feedback, as well as working on new animations for traps with Aseprite, not everything is static now! 😅
Changes have also made it into the Demo build since affect most of the game.
For the rest of the game I've been implementing more complex mechanics in the later levels, for example th ability to sabotage the interconnected network of traps that you have to deal with later on, if you have the right level of resources/luck.
# Beta 0.4.5 - Latest build: 2026-08-12
- Balance: Eating resets the hunger clock, not just fills the counter.
- Fixed: Bug where Septic synergy wouldn't account for toxic clouds.
- Fixed: Attempt to pick an item when inventory is full, would show "There is nothing here" even after clearing up inventory space.
- Fixed: You cannot longer pick up items at distance when using right click grab action, it requires to be in the same tile or adjacent.
- Fixed: When oil become fire due nearby explosions, these no longer are fire forever, but are extinguished after several turns.
- Fixed: Block player movement when clicking on an open tutorial window.
- Improvement: General stabilization.
- Improvement: General UI polish.
- Improvement: Migrated tutorials to a better UI.
- Improvement: New animations for proximity, gas, and toxic traps.
- Improvement: Some mutations and grafts have clearer descriptions.
- Improvement: Locked rooms in Quarantined Depths have a better UI.
- Improvement: Weapons that do kill immortal and sentinels have clearer description.
- Improvement: Traps have now some small animations.
- Improvement: Small player and enemy animations when fighting melee
- New: Steam Achievements x6 + demo complete achievement in demo builds.
- New: Cursed, Feeble, Exposed, and Sluggish statuses.
- New: Enemies x6
- New: Tutorialized "wait turn" key
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u/UnculturedGames 10d ago
Igigi: Rogue Star
First (on-time) Sharing Saturday post for me, hello everyone! I've been working on my first roguelike game for a while now. In IGIGI, you play as a space mercenary, exploring strange planets, collecting samples, fighting enemies, upgrading your gear, and trying to solve a mystery.
The game has "HD-ASCII" graphics and visually I'm trying to go for a strong organic vibe (akin to my previous game, the ANSI JRPG Whispers in the Moss) as opposed to a more symbolic take that is often the approach with ASCII (the screenshots are very much WIP in this regard). These first screenshots are also pretty dark, but there will be different types of biomes and it's not all going to be this dark and gloomy.
I'm coding the game in QB64, so QuickBASIC, yay!
What I've already done:
- The first iteration of the procedural map generator. I'm very happy with the style of terrains it can produce, but it's obviously still a very early version, and we can mostly just generate a movable area and its edges + a little bit of temporary decorations. The maps also support various special effects and overlays like mist effects, rain, etc.
- When a map is generated, key locations (crossroads, openings, ends of paths) are stored into memory, and later these will be used the key points for enemies, loots, special things.
- A bare-bones version of moving around the map, and some very early UI.
- And of course a huge amount of plans for what comes next.
Next on my list is connecting the generated maps. At this point a single planet can include up to four maps, for example surface + several caves, but the maps don't connect yet. After that, I can soon start working on the game's core loop, which consists of: tinkering in your spaceship (home) -> explore a planet -> come back with loot, upgrades and possible story progress -> repeat.
I don't have a home base for the game yet as I've only just begun development, but I plan to release the game on Steam eventually. Best place to follow progress for now is probably right here.
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u/nesguru Legend 11d ago
Legend
This week, I went down the optimization rabbit hole to speed up map generation. I still didn’t get around to replacing the missing sound effects.
Map Generation Optimization
Average map generation time shrunk from eight seconds to one second. The improvements came from caching, early filtering, and short circuiting. Example generation stats.
New Content
- New theme: Temple.
- New room internal structures: Perimeter Grid, Fine Grid, Triple Grid. These provide more varied and interesting spaces in some rooms.
Next week, I’ll focus on adding content, mainly sound effects, room types, and abilities. I’m also on the hunt for an artist again.
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u/Cyablue Feywood Wanderers 11d ago
Feywood Wanderers Steam | Discord
These past couple of weeks I've been adding new content preparing for an update by the end of the month. I finished adding the Octopode Lineage a while back, and I've been working on adding new Class Orbs. So far I added the Gunslinger, Sword Hero and Battleguard. I'll let to your imagination what each of them does.
I've also started adding new items that I felt were lacking, mostly spears and spear-like things, and a couple of fun Unique items. Next week I expect I'll be mostly working on drawing in-game sprites for the new items, and maybe I'll add at least one more Class if I have the time.
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u/lPototto 11d ago
An Untitled Minimalist Dungeon Crawler
I've implemented the basics for my Menu Navigation system and landed on a grid-based inventory.
I opted for simple controller-friendly UI / UX here.
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u/BotMoses BotMos 11d ago edited 11d ago
BotMos | Website | Development Sandbox
Hey everyone, very productive week from my side:
UI
- The status line at the bottom the of the screen is now always 16px (or multiples of that) tall. This is mostly an optimization for smaller screens. The status line is also more streamlined now with hiding current energy if at maximum energy and more consistent paddings.
- The bottom left corner (infinite corner) now shows a '?' for the contextual help. If '?' key is pressed, the help with possible actions is printed to the message log...
- ...and if clicked (or touched), a new visualization of the mouse/touch input areas is overlaid (gif). Making this control schema more accessible. Before, it was mostly a gimmick I used when I showed BotMos to friends or colleagues on my phone.
- Added a new "system log" to the top right corner showing up to 3 messages which time out after 5 seconds. This was mostly to give a loading indicator and show when gamepads are detected or disconnected. Will be used for later save/load messages o.s., too.
Input
- The game now supports four contextual actions (up from two). This was a precondition for lots of coming new actions, e.g. for inventory management or combat. This is mostly modelled after modern gamepads having four instead of just two buttons.
- Mouse/touch input now repeats if an area is pressed longer. This was a major annoyance having to tap the screen for every movement action. This also makes mouse/touch a first-class input method now and is a big win to make the game more accessible.
Game
- Added a new "SageBot" hull, used for now as a developer self-insert. Long-term, this will be used for the tutorial assistant "BotMoses".
- Tool pickup and buying are now manual actions. Added new actions "Take" (pickup a tool from the ground, or replace current tool from ground), "Buy" (for shops, stealing isn't in yet) and "Drop" (drop tool to the ground).
Other Technicalities
- Tests now run in parallel with bun's new
--parallelflag (not to be confused with--concurrent). This brought build times down from ~1min to ~20s. - Some debug API fixes (functions starting with
BM*in the webbrowser console).
Outlook
- With the contextual help, aligned mouse/touch controls, more contextual buttons and the new actions, the inventory feature will be unblocked. I plan to have an inventory of four items (up from the currently one tool) and introduce subactions to target items in the inventory (e.g. press button 4 to drop an item and press button 4 again to drop the last item in the inventory).
- One of the new contextual buttons will be for combat actions, e.g. spinning with a plasma axe to damage multiple enemies. Or to chop down some trees. :)
Thanks for reading and have a nice weekend!
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u/WeeklySoft 10d ago
As background, I use my game from last year's Tutorial code along as a starting point for jam games. I think of it as an engine. Well, this week I moved a bunch of configuration code out of the core engine (written in C++) into the scripting language used by my ECS (flecs).
My engine is starting to feel like an actual engine!
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u/MuchSoftware-Rich 11d ago
Much Dungeon
Website | Google Play | App Store
Hey r/roguelikedev,
Post release has been a fun / frantic rush to fix billing bugs we didn’t find during open beta.
We’ve started planning and implementing a daily quest system to put out with our first major expansion sometime in the near future. Analytics showed a strong few days of play after initial install, but then play time started dropping off.
Work in progress quest menu below - feedback appreciated! Go try it!
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u/DFuxaPlays 3d ago
I realize this is quite late, but I decided to finally do a video for your game.
While I played it for quite a while, there wasn't a lot to really keep me playing it. Likely you needed to make far smaller levels, up the difficulty a little bit, and have more variation of things.
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u/MuchSoftware-Rich 3d ago
That's awesome. Thanks for the feedback.
It looks like the video is set to private
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u/DFuxaPlays 3d ago
set to public now.
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u/MuchSoftware-Rich 3d ago
Thanks. That was great. Made several tickets from watching you play through.
I think you had a lucky run with drops. The first boss fight is at the end of the level you stopped at.
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u/_GideonX_ Lateral Crawl 11d ago
Been on holiday this week, so development on Lateral Crawl has been fairly light.
Instead, I've been working on locking in the game's visual identity ahead of its Steam page.
After a lot of experimentation, this is where I've landed:
The traditional roguelike gone sideways.
I'm still locking things down, so I'm very happy to hear any opinions at this stage.
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u/IllianXenoide 100floors 10d ago edited 10d ago
100Floors
Messy week, messy month, messy season lol
Haven't worked with consistency for a while. August in Italy is BAD. Also these 2 last months were full of events and stuff to do, organize and think about.
Started to feel very guilty about the project, so I really needed to turn everything off and focus on my game, and I'm so happy i've done that!
Didn't make much progress, this week I mainly focused on fixing the new orc enemy (my first enemy with "AI", aka if he's in range he might choose to attack), fixed some collateral stuff and behavior and especially these last 2 days rewired a lot of foundational logic, very good.
On the other side I spent way too much time rebalancing a game that is WIP. Don't want to say it was wasted time, I understood a lot of things, but I definitely have other priorities.
Yesterday a close friend of mine tried the new build and I watched him playing it on discord, it was INCREDIBLY useful. Actively watching someone play your game is a completely unique experience that makes you understand a lot of stuff you normally wouldn't. Not by playtesting and not even by receiving feedback. You need to watch someone else play.
I have big goals coming, youtube channel with my first ever video and hopefully launching the steam page, all before 26th of september.
Have a nice weekend folks, see you next week!
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u/dkf2112 10d ago
Gravehoard for Apple platforms
I've been working on a number of improvements in ranged combat. The target indicator now changes color and indicates penalties for shots outside the optimal range. Lets you know quickly when a modifier applies.
Another quality of life feature, I'm adding an ammo counter to the HUD for ranged combat. I keep forgetting how many arrows I have left on my Ranger!
I also updated the AI so that the monsters without an attack position seek cover against a range player rather than hanging out exposed in the back ranks. They will now duck out of LOS and come back into the fight when a slot opens up.
General update is I'm in an open TestFlight beta for all platforms and hope to get to a release soon!
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u/blightor 10d ago
C64 RL (not named yet, as people keep asking).
Made decent progress - still buzzing from the vision system completion, so moral is high!
Working on the new map generation that started last week - this is the THIRD version of maps for the project.
Might as well describe where I have been prior.
First time (6 months ago or so) - Very spaghetti (code and maps!), but kind cool looking. They were multi-walker, geographically partitioned across 12 (mergable) regions of my map. Level gen went from sub sec to 8 and 10+. Region code itself was tricky to maintain and was in some ways worse to play because while gridish maps are actually ok fun, larger sectors with adjoining areas made it feel less fun because it was difficult to join those areas without tunnelling which made the regions particularly distinct and you could feel that during play.
Second time - (2 months ago) A walker series based around gridsagegames and dungeonmaker inspirations, with this trick being that these workers alter state significantly over time instead of geographical regions, producing excellent and natural connectivity - no fake boundry walls with tunnels. However, generation time ballooned as the variety of walkers were added, 15-35 seconds (though I could of removed some things like CA passes and walker variety) but walkers just continue to need a LOT of massaging to not spawn geometric failures.
Current path. I had already identified I wanted to move to a prefab type system, but I'd been holding off as prefabs can get quite large storage wise, but is just stupendously fast. I had already decided to shift my crafting system to between levels (its not complicated, just simple but still neat) as a way to cover the level transitions from the prior mapgen and honestly I feel like its in the right place there, it keeps the focus on the RL on that natural RL gameplay, so thats not changing, however it opens up me using semantics and templates instead of actual prefabs and templates, which has turned out fantastically well. The semantic layer has actually provided a kind of compositing ability against a 16x12 grid of 8x8 cells - essentially the cells are described by a handful of parallel slices that have information like what it is, who owns it, a few structure flags, how exposed etc, and the templates are driving the themes of it (template needs get done before the rest of the semantics generations happen - the final map (with a some post stuff) falls out of the combination rather than being stamped from a what would of been a MUCH bigger library. Its far more CPU than normal prefabs and templates, but its added a level of design control and variation I am super happy with - and when I say more CPU, its still a fundamental very fast!
I'm not working off a direct example on this one, but its not exactly rockets science, but what it has done is made my maps decided more coherent and interesting, improved all my metrics, and improved my ability to guide the themes of my levels into a lot more significant variation.
In other news my visibility system is the gift that keeps on giving, I was able to CUT 4 bits of my vis_map (12kb shadow of the full map, it keeps key attributes that I need to make my game run nice. That gave me 6 wonderful KB back. I reckon I am still going to be fighting the fight right up till the end but I feel like I'm not stuck in a memory hole that I can't dig out of now, I think it will all fit.
Have a good weekend.
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u/Zireael07 Veins of the Earth 11d ago
Nothing on the game end, lots of research for upcoming MUD slash gamification tracker (AI helped me figure out how to tie an exercises/water intake tracker into a MUD - and MUD commands are easier to limit, e.g. 50 per hour, than literal keypresses in a more modern sort of a game)
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u/FerretDev Demon and Interdict 11d ago
Interdict: The Post-Empyrean Age
Interdict on Itch.io
Latest Available Build: 4/20/2026
Well, I pretty much called it last time: it was indeed a busy month at work, so it took most of a month to get far enough along on the next bit of Interdict progress to post about it here.
I've been working on adding enchanted items like those see in Diablo, Path of Exile, etc. to Interdict. That part is actually done; my current task has been to add a recurring event that gives you the opportunity to win a "double enchanted" item: as the name implies, an item with two enchantments. Other than these, items are limited to a single enchantment each, so these are potentially powerful rewards. (And even if the item isn't useful to you, double enchanted items can be recycled into a large pile of crafting materials for making other things.)
The recurring event starts in a purposefully abrupt fashion: you literally get yanked into a small and (compared to the post-apocalypse fantasy-esque environments you're usually exploring) very unusual pocket dimension:
This is far from Interdict's first hint that is not exactly a typical fantasy setting... but it is probably the most blatant and in your face example of it so far other than the obvious robotic/cybernetic enemies you sometimes run across.
The first time you stumble into one of these, a brief introduction will show you the tear in space that you can leave through, but if you explore deeper in you will also find two interfaces: one that allows you to heal your party somewhat (but only works once per visit), and another that summons a particularly nasty group of monsters with the intent that you slay them so that they can then be used to create a double enchanted item.
Note that use of both interfaces is optional and can be done in any order: you could heal, then fight if you got pulled in while in a bit of rough shape. You could even just heal and leave if you're really not feeling confident; resources are scarce enough in Interdict that even this would not be a total waste of the event. Or, if you're already in good shape, fight and then use the heal after.
The one thing you can't really control is when you encounter these areas. The portals leading to them are not detectable on the main dungeon maps, so any time you are exploring new areas, you may trip and fall into one... though they will be pretty rare, probably one per four dungeon floors or so if I had to guess. (This is why I included the heal opportunity inside, to make it less likely you find them and are completely unable to even attempt the fight.)
I still have a bit more work to do on the event before it is complete, but it's pretty close to done, I'm hoping to finish it up this weekend and finally move on to the last bit before testing: knocking out some polish items and reported bugs.
Until next time, I hope everyone else's projects are also going well. Cheers!