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Thank you very much for trying another 7DRL from me after your Pointless experience!

I'm quite happy you had a better time with it, but I guess it was a low bar to pass :>

Trying to decide on the right depth for a 7drl is a bit of a challenge, as one doesn't want a 7DRL to overstay their welcome either.  So I was happy to see your playthrough managed to hit the intended length.  A big concern I had was the game would be too easy, so you never quine and just ascend.  Or too hard and you never quine nor ascend.  But as an expert player you hit the three states in the right order; then could correctly tell you have completed the game and move on.

Not being able to tell if anything happens when you wait is a serious flaw I missed.  Usually monsters advance; but I hadn't fully contended with the fact a skilled roguelike player will first wait one square away, precisely when these monsters refuse to sacrifice themselves.  So it just feels like nothing happened.   Idle animations can't help; and because of the nature of the game having a global clock advance won't work as it would then introduce state....   I think maybe having a clock that does a full spin every move probably would have helped make it clear a "turn passed" without adding to the state.  Also tie into the theme nicely...

I'm not apologetic about the lack of explanation for spells though.  As you suggest, I'm in the camp that enjoys figuring out how things work to some extent.  Well, not to a Tower of Babel: "What are the key mappings!", but definitely not a fan of "this spell sends a ray in a cardinal direction for X squares doing Y damage".  This does mean I'm arguably "faking" depth to the game in the guise of poor documentation; but games are Poor UI by design; the trick is finding what parts of the UI to make poor.

Thank you again for giving it a shot and letting me see a window into your experience!  It is very valuable.

Yeah, in my defence I didn't know there was a launcher :> 

I also like to have  one archive with all platforms just to increase survival chance of the source code :>

Any game I can win will be too easy for you :> But I'd also hazard rushing the stairs is part of the point.  I accidentally ended up going for a "non-aggressive" roguelike this year, like we discussed before the challenge.  The main goal was exploring the Quine mechanic, but this led inexorably to a game that highly disincentives the needless violence so common in roguelikes.  

I first didn't want quining too trivial, as if you just go left/right and then game over, that would be very frusturating.  But I wanted it possible, which meant the state space had to be kept tamped down.  That led to the very low hitpoint nature of the game and the elimination of levelling.  But without levelling, there is no reason to kill monsters.  I also didn't want the usual "wait for monster to approach to step up" gameplay, so they are very careful not to give you the first shot if they won't be able to hit back.  This meant normal combat will almost always cause resource loss.  The heal spell seems to provide a loophole; but the quine mechanic locks that down.

I also wanted to justify the looping, which doesn't work well if the monsters have permadeath. This led to a fast respawn clock that makes even killing monsters just a speed bump - thus the teleport or shadow step spells can be as effective as the lightning bolts.  (This is also a power of polymorph, as respawned monsters maintain their identity, so converting to non-aggressive sheep is the only way to permanently lock a monster down)

It still doesn't fully escape the violence of roguelikes, after all, it is the "rogue" sense of sneaking through rather than the more modern smashing through.  But after our discussion I definitely found it cool how it morphed into a game that quietly pushes people away from the usual roguelike bloodthirst. 

Thank you!  I'm happy it worked out that way.  I personally play very fast and loose with roguelikes, so I also "easily" avoid quining.

I agree Feasu did an amazing job in the seven days!  It was very fun as the art updates affected the mechanics, and the mechanics the art updates.

Thank you for the alert!   TIL Itch has a launcher! :>

From reading, I think the right approach is to add a manifest to direct the launcher to the right location.  I want to distribute the love files as that is what you need under Linux, Android and other platforms.  (Technically windows users could also just use the quine.love if they have love installed)

Thank you for playing!

Yeah, I wasn't sure how aggressive to make the quining.   It could be very aggressive where just waiting in place in a standoff ends the game; but that gets a bit frustrating and error prone.

The game-design intent is to encourage more aggressive gameplay.  Roguelikes often have to balance against safe & cautious vs aggressive gameplay.  Usually you can trade time for safety in a roguelike; leading to optimal play being very slow and boring.  Some of the usual brakes on this are:

a) Global count down timer to win the game

b) Non re-spawning resources leading to attrition

c) Players just finding that playstyle boring and choosing not to do it

d) Hunger clocks

Quining is a different take on that limit.  The spell lecterns producing infinite spells makes, in a normal roguelike, the optimal gameplay of one going back to always "refill".  However, if you do that you stand a high chance of finding yourself repeating a state.   Likewise; the monsters don't charge the final step to you if you can instantly kill them.  This means you can do a dance to try and avoid them and reposition - spend too much time fiddling around trying avoid getting hit and you can end up in Chess-Stalemate of repeated board positions.

But if you play reasonably aggressively I think you can easily avoid the quining trap.  I kept the balance on the easy side as well; which probably means you are less driven to seek the cautious gameplay.  But at a meta-meta level, I kind of prefer people being able to "win" a 7DRL than have one that is too well tuned; especially when it is art-heavy and we want people to see the full extent.

Darren as usual provides the concise and correct answer, I can now answer my own thoughts on this matter...  

We try to frame this as the "Seven Day Roguelike Challenge" rather than "Contest" to underline that it isn't something to compete at.  Despite this, we've faced slop submissions before AI was a thing.  Quite a few seem to think great fame occurs by entering the challenge.  Fortunately they mostly submit the first few hours making it simpler to weed, but this is why we have any submission criterion at all.

Speaking personally, I don't mind if your @ on a map is boring and derivative if you "made" it.  

At the end of the day we want to encourage intrinsic rewards.  As Darren says, your own satisfaction is the goal.  

lsdcomputer has nailed the spirit.  They want the challenge of making their own roguelike.   For them, vibe coding defeats the entire point - they might as well just download nethack and call it a day.  Another coder might feel using libtcod is too much a crutch; so for them they had better eschew that.   But that doesn't mean lsdcomputer should avoid libtcod!

But you do ask the interesting question: what part is the part that earns "respect". Despite the risk that I'm now externalizing rewards, I'll try to answer that from my personal viewpoint.

The reason I advocate allowing libraries, allowing using existing assets, and not having a "theme", is because I'm not seeking "game design" or "lines of code" or "pretty jpegs".  I'm seeking Art.

The very first Seven Day Roguelike, Dungeon Monkey, was created as just that: Performative Art.  

And I think that is the part of the process that I most respect.  The artistic process.  Art really has two stages.  One part is your internal vision, what is living in yourself you wish to express.  The second is the external embodiment of that vision.  This is the artifact you present at the end of the seven days, for us to fail to interpret to your satisfaction.  The artistic process is trying to build that artifact - this has an "Embodied Intelligence" component.  When people say that a stone talks to them and tells them what should be carved from it; I don't believe there is actually some spirit in the stone talking.  But I do believe that is the correct way to describe the situation.

Over the seven days as you build a game; the game will talk to you.  As you talk to it.  So having your hands on the game; writing dialog text; colouring pixels; typing semicolons; all that is often an essential part of the process of the game coming to exist.  That often forms the equivalent of the brush strokes of the painter, which lead to the reflection that allows the many micro decisions required to take shape to bring what is in your mind into the world.  Because, if you took a brain scan of me before the 7DRL starts and assume the final game is sitting latent in that space; it isn't; it does result from a dialogue rather than a dictation.

Unfortunately I don't recall the name, but there was one 7DRL I played that had quite a few simple but clever reframings of the genre.  I source dove it out of curiousity and was a quite surprised to see they author had "merely" walked through the libtcod tutorial.  But in the act of doing so they had stamped it with their art and their story.

Fortunately ASCII is respected in Roguelikes; so there is no need to consider image generation.    I'd strongly recommend not fighting with prompts over what your creatures should look like when a simple glyph would suffice - spend that energy in the creature description.

As for vibe coding; I'd believe you can make a great roguelike vibe-coding.   I don't believe it would be "easier" to do so, however.

So, no, there are no restrictions.

Thank you for taking considerable time to try out Pointless.

After spending scores of hours making this, it is nice to see that you were willing to give it a serious try.

Pointless, as mentioned in the game design message you read, has a strong artistic statement behind it.  It is designed to be an attack on the Achiever-focused nature of modern video games.  It seems to have been rather successful in your case, as your final conclusion was that the game doesn't give you any shiny bread crumbs, so is pointless?   But I sort of hoped Achiever-focused players would break out of that loop and discover the joy of being an Explorer instead.   There is a LOT in Pointless for the explorer.  The trick is you have to set your own goals and plans.  The game won't tell you "why" you should do anything.  There are no "Steam Achivement" badges when you trigger strange edge conditions - you are expected to generate that reward internally.

So, like all of my art-focused 7DRLs, I'm left with a strange juxtaposition of success and failure.  I've successfully cutaway the "gameplay loop" achiever playstyle without actually removing any of the actual content (as I could have easily added hand-holding to lead you down a garden path to kill Ba'zlbub - the choice of dropping you randomly on a 1km island is not some accidental mistake on my part; but an intentional device to erase such a path!); but I've not managed to communicate the actual goal to the sort of player I had hoped to reveal another way of enjoying video games.  Normally I just assume people haven't read the README, but I saw you read it, so this failure to communicate is in my court.   I'll have to take solace on the thesis of Omniscient Readers Viewpoint and just continue to write on my side of the wall, however.  Even though you will not read it; I will have written it.

I've carefully watched your playthrough and made notes.  It is always instructive to be able to sit over someones shoulder as they puzzle things out; so thank you for giving me this opportunity.

While not every game is for everyone; I want the barrier to be personal preference, not bad UI or cryptic controls.  Thus the 12 minutes of text on gameplay and gamedesign you found.  I don't really expect everyone to read all of it, more to go to it if they are confused, or are very new to the genre.

My first concern is people find the pop-up menus.  This is something I default off, which is arguably a bad idea as novice users would be better suited to having it on.  But after adding keyboard controls to MAGE I was astonished how much more fluid they are than navigating menus (despite my menus having extensive keyboard shortcuts within them!), so have been obstinately defaulting to keyboard, hoping people can find the bread crumbs to turn it on if it offends them.   I was glad to see you did find them, even though that caused its own problems...

Full screen is another option that I've changed over the years.  I was default full screen for a while; but it is very disruptive to grab the entire monitor on launch (I had one review ding me for just this one year!).  It also is a bit of a mixed bag in Windows - you can see your own recording switched to 1/2 size as you aren't running 100% DPI.   But maybe this justifies the keyboard choice as to adjust that, you also will find the full screen command.

There are two opaque choices there, however, Verbose Messages and Wall Sliding.  Wall sliding dates back to Jacob's Matrix.  When on, if something blocks your way to the east, you will possibly move north-east or south-east rather than just stopping.  This makes it painless to navigate twisting corridors that otherwise require constantly switching your direction keys.  However, if you are trying to play with the message stream rather than the map, this will result in unexpected motion.  So for accessibility in addition to personal preference there is a choice to disable it.

Verbose messages is similar.  If enabled, it will describe every square you step on, not just interesting ones.  It also will do chamber scans to report monsters around you so you don't have to screen-read the map.  This is what caused the crash - I forgot to build without asserts, and as there are no chambers in the overworld, it was asserting an invalid chamber name and crashing.   So if you should ever want to play again, when you turn on pop-up menus please do not turn on verbose messages, at least until I have an update.  Verbose messages is also why you were being spammed with updates on the overworld.

I've also made a note to add help to the options so these don't become blind choices.

Thankfully you persevered, and in the succeeding playthrough didn't turn on verbose messages, so could play crash-free until you were defeated by existential anguish :>

Now, if I were to list my desires for players to find, it was:

a) Pop-up menus

b) How to harvest trees (as this is non-standard)

c) How to make a fire to stay warm

d) That there is something interesting in the central mountains

(a) seems sign posted enough.   (d) is addressed partly by dying - you can always roll a life that starts in the foothills, as you did the second play through, and then see the flint deposits and caves.

(b) seemed pretty fast, which is fortunate.  I got a bit worried about the campfire (c) as you were playing with clubs for a bit, but it all seemed to have clicked within three minutes.   So at this point I had high hopes you would start to look for your own source of dopamine.

To make an analogy to Minecraft, there is a hard-barrier to figure out things like punching trees; and building a pickaxe; to be able to progress anywhere.  At a point you can let the player follow their own discovery pattern; but the first steps are essential.  I was impressed to see (a)pplying torches also came naturally, now I just had to wait for you to survive to nightfall to see their use....

At this point you wandered away from the campfire and wondered where you were.  You are somewhere on a 1km by 1km island, so I really have no idea where you are either.  It is a VERY big map.  (But you also do not need to wander aimlessly...)

But now we get to the interesting bit...  You start to shiver.  Then freeze.  But lighting a fire always seems to be an after thought?  Probably you want to start the fire before you are half dead?  You guess right that freezing consumes food - in particular, at the shivering level you metabolism is raised to stop you from freezing in exchange for emptying your energy reserves.

Keep in mind that you are walking naked through deep snow in the winter.  Maybe being from a cold climate makes these things more obvious to me; but it never occurred to me to telegraph that if you keep freezing to death, you probably want to stick near campfires or light new ones when cold?

I am glad you noticed the loss of toes, though.  Hopefully I get some points for innovation for detailed snow shovelling, melting, and toe-loss technology :>

This pattern repeats; including a death when mobbed by coyotes.  We then get an epic moment that I really had hoped would turn things around.  Facing a pair of ravenous coyotes inbound, you had given up on life.  But some last bit of bravado inspires you to fashion an club out of a stick and attack back - with success!  No longer a passive agent in the world; perhaps now you'll build a hunter role for yourself?

It seems it is not to be - running naked through the snow you repeat the pattern of freezing to death, lighting campfires too late and wandering away from them before fully warmed.... :<  I did appreciate you almost got a forest fire going, I had to do some serious optimization to deal with the number light sources those can trigger!

I was happy to see you try out the lenses.  I think they are a rather cool way to try and bring more data into the roguelike without overloading the normal view.  The elevation one is useful if you want to seek the caves - they are at the center, so you need to find a way upwards.  The snow depth is not a simple function of elevation - there is a snow fall and drift model during world generation to set the snow depth.  This is mostly a pointless window into that mechanic; but also can be useful as you can see places you've carved out by shoveling or melted with your fires.  Unfortunately you didn't try the third lens, the resource lens.  This was part of the attempt to address (b) by making "harvestable" tiles clear to the player.  Reeds, in particular, are harvestable, and are one of the key ingredients in the overworld builds.  I had hoped the F4 lens would draw people to them if they didn't see them on the make menu.   As for the make menu, as you point out it is useful to see all makeables, not just the reduce list currently available.  This is done with *.  With all inventory lists ? lists the "usable" choices and * lists all choices.  If pop-ups were enabled, there's also a separate "Show All" entry to lead you to this.

I find it interesting that you criticize the speed at which you die.  This is not accidental.  You are not expected to figure things out in one play through in a roguelike.  You are expected to learn from your deaths and figure out over many play throughs.  "Keeping warm" is the first step if you want to survive, and if cold didn't kill you fast enough, it would take too long to figure that out.   Allowing you to wander in circles longer before freezing to death would give you fewer iterations to realize that running naked through snow was a bad idea.   A quick death loop is a wall to flag you've got something to surmount.  I just spent 30 minutes re-fighting the same monster in Clare Obscura as I slowly honed my skills.  A fast death loop there was essential so I could try again.  Likewise, the death loop you experienced was tweaked specifically to trigger a similar sort of re-think.

Thank you again for spending the time on this, and I hope you do not mind this wall of text as a reply.  

Thank you!  Glad to hear you enjoyed it, I guess it wasn't a pointless waste of your time after all then :>

I'm always torn with the menu based controls.  I spent many roguelike iterations carefully improving the UX of the menus, so I'm pretty confident in them.  But when I added keyboard controls in MAGE I realized the key controls are just so much better ergonomically, it is almost a crime to let people use menus :> 

This is why I end up with the keyboard default, I figure if we start with menus no one will ever discover keyboard controls as the CrackUI will hook them; but at least this way people will know the other controls are there and may consider them at some point....

But it probably causes many people to bounce off the game right away :<

Good thing I write 7DRLs as a pointless waste of my time, and not to make money, so I can experiment as I wish with these :>

It is always hard to document a roguelike properly, as one of the fun things is discovering the interaction between objects.  But while some, like kicking out fires, might be left to chance, others need some guidance...  Here are the relevant info snippets I hoped to guide people ...

Bottles:

    An empty clay bottle, awaiting filling by some liquid or another.

Mushrooms:

    Growing from trees, these mushrooms come in as many varieties as there are trees.  You can tincture a bottle of water with them to form various magical potions.  Unfortunately, the effect of each potion is one of those things that varies every incarnation.  So consume with caution until the poisonous varieties are determined.

    With the correct substrate, these can be grown underground.

Logs

    The remains of a cut tree.  Useful for building where sticks do not suffice, or for fueling forges or kilns.  Mycologists pay careful attention to the type for growing fungi.

...

The command you need is "Apply", 'a' on the keyboard should include bottles in the list, and you can point to a source of water to get a water bottle.  The water bottle itself can be applied again to tincture it, and it should prompt for any mushrooms in your inventory.

Happy mushroom farming!

Thank you for the nice review!   

The music/sfx is something that is always a hole for me...  For the same reason I stick to ASCII, trying to build _good_ music and sfx is really non-trivial, much like trying to build good tiles.  You want it to reflect the game itself, not just be generic, which requires serious composing skills...  (My composing is worse than my art, and if you've seen the classic POWDER tiles, you'll know the state of my art ability :>)   SFX is also pretty hard to build into a roguelike as they are meant to allow extremely rapid fire turns.  Ambient music is definitely more approachable though.

I am glad you liked the twilight.  It is always shocking how something simple like that can really add atmosphere.  Though thanks to night, I needed lighting on the surface world, which meant that forest fires would kill system performance, forcing more rounds of optimization... :>  But that is what I always like about developing during a 7DRL.  I get to see how the game takes itself beyond my original plans and vision.

Thank you for the nice words!

Kilns are mostly useful if you want to get into mushroom farming.

Since there is no win condition, no one can complete the game anyways.  Or, alternatively, everyone has to choose for themselves what "completing" entails.

No, no, no.  You can't just say you won.  You have to Declare it!  :>

Thank you very much, I am happy you enjoyed the writing!

How many turns did you have left when you won?   I was unsure how tight to make that - I suspect defocus is most important in getting turn count down by avoiding encounters and pre-mapping mazes.  I erred on the cautious side as I'd rather people win and treat final turn count as a high score :>

Darn...  Windows in the last few years started to fail to run my old SDL1.2 code with one of the updates :<   This is clearly affected and I need to port to 2.0 and re-release. 

Thank you for trying it!

Drawing a map is certainly an option.  But Shift+C can also be used to visualize your current room without being confused by doors seen afar.

Spells don't last forever - they will fade from your mind, possibly in an inopportune time.  This is why you want to keep the spellbooks around to refresh your memory.  Since there are no magic points, it is the relearning that gates being able spam spells.

Writing sets need something blank to write on.   If you read a book enough times you will get something.  It is also possible to create blank scrolls, but that's complicated.

If you check the ? keyboard list carefully you'll see [q] Quaff or Drink.  This is a way of ingesting potions without soaking your neighbours.

Map visibility is as useful with the map off as on!  You can use [x] to cursor over the map to recall what you had mapped - after using the scroll it is all mapped for you.  [.] while in this mode will report your current location relative to yourself, in case you lose track.

This source code dates from 2005 with my first 7DRL.  Each year I strip it down and build something new.  But the strip down is never complete, so it accumulates a lot of interesting stuff on the way :>  My first 7DRL used curses and SDL1.2 for rendering, I thus built the gfxengine to abstract the two backends of gfx_curses and gfx_sdl.  Around the time of Jacob's Matrix I switched to libtcod as the backend and just folded it into gfxengine.cpp.  For graphics I mostly treat libtcod as a console buffer, however, so almost all logic is outside.  I do use libtcod's FOV algorithm and a few other neat things though.  So not so much any limitations of libtcod as history...

The most game-related files, as opposed to generic, are likely:

ai.cpp; builder.cpp; item.cpp; main.cpp; map.cpp; mob.cpp; source.txt; text.txt

Good luck in your next attempt!

The 7drl one can be whatever is in your 168 hour window.  So if you get a second build within the 168 hour window, feel free to replace the previous upload.

We request you maintain a 7DRL version of your game for reference.  People judging may elect to play either that one or  the latest.  Change notes can specify what was fixed / added so the judges can take that into account even if they play the latest version.

You can direct people to the latest & best version, however, as we'd want the normal players of your game to have the best experience as possible.

We intentionally semi-blind the review process.  This can be frustrating if they clearly missed some component.  OTOH, this is pretty good feedback to know what impressions are without the chance to clarify.  Most who play will not get the chance to debate the point :>

As for the second reviewer, if I were you I'd not readily conclude that they missed the procedural nature of your level generation.   Procedural level generation is neither necessary nor sufficient to make something a Roguelike.  It is hard for a platform, especially an abstract one, to get beyond "Roguelite".  And for many players out there, even achieving that level is questionable.

Using a real-time speed run approach is very non-roguelike - this undermines the tactical nature of roguelikes making it more twitch play.  I know with Jacob's Matrix I found that merely adding a wall-clock timelimit to a turn-based game completely changes *how* you play it.   The mechanics of Jacob's Matrix are extremely roguelike; but in practice it doesn't feel much like one.

Awesome!  Thank you!

Very cool!  I really regret not having a mac build.  Can you please put the changes on git hub?

Well, I take issue with the statement "like most games"; as if continuous time were the natural default choice in ludological circles; and turn-base some form of exception that requires distinction. :>

Everyone is welcome to explore the boundaries of roguelikes, so the answer is going to be "yes" regardless of what the question is.  The spirit requests that you, yourself, are in the spirit of "roguelike", and you are the only one that knows if that is true.   (It is like Nanowrimo, when someone asks if they can submit 50,000 words of "a".  Yes, you can.  But why?)

As for the issue if discrete time is a requirement for roguelikes?  I personally do not believe so.  I think, however, it is a natural consequence of roguelikes.  Anytime you start to build a tactically focused game, you naturally move to discretization of space and time.  (And of health, esp when taken to the 1hp extreme)

Chess isn't played by turn on a grid because of limitations of a ASCII terminal or lack of continuous input modality.  (My most interesting example of chess is that within Ultima Online.  Chess there was implemented as merely tokens and graphics of a board.  The two players, like with the real world chess, can place pieces where they desire, and at any time, with no space discretization or time discretization present.  But naturally, just like a real-world chess (which plays in a continuous space) one would play it in a discrete manner to enjoy the game.)

One interesting game to look at if you are thinking of continuous time is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeon_Master_(video_game) .  This is a discrete spatial game with a continuous time model.  From a modern perspective one could argue that it is ... broken .. because of it, but it is a very interesting example that we rarely look at.  (Note this is different from time-expiry turn based, like the old Ultimas, or global wall-clock limits, like Jacob's Matrix, as those will alter the world heartbeat to the turns)

Absolutely!

However, *TEMPER* your expectations.  An impressive success for a new developer is the @ - on - a map level of contribution.  Focus on making the absolutely minimal viable game first.   You need extremely few mechanics to have a fun roguelike (especially if you make it yourself, and play it yourself!)  When you get a simple "wander on a random map, smash monsters without being smashed first" game play done; it is time to start layering on the design.  You can keep this up after the 7DRL - for the 7DRL, get the bare bones walking.   It is incredibly important you can play your game yourself early - this is the motivation that keeps you going.  Don't worry about your own spin.  Make it beige-basic.

After a few months, you'll end with a huge ball of mud and realize you should have planned properly in the first place.  So you'll throw it away and start over again and plan properly with engineering principles you learned.  You'll design very detailed documents of how everything should work; and begin on a proper "clean" design.   This will then fail with you never actually getting an @ to walk on a map as you were too busy writing PerambulationFactories to get any actual real code done.

Then, after throwing away the over engineered system that got nowhere; and the under engineered prototype that got tangled up in its own bootlaces; you'll be ready to tread the middle ground :>

Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect

My main complaint is too many people lead people to their second system first.  Your first system should be the ball of mud that gives you positive feedback.  If your first system is the bloated over-engineered system, it is really hard to have the desire to keep going.

Part of the inspiration of 7DRL is to explore where the boundary between "Roguelike" and "Roguelite" exists.

A specific game cares not for genre; it should always be made the best it can without worrying about labels.

All that said, Roguelike is in the title of the challenge for a reason.  This is not meant to be a complete free-for-all; your polestars should have "Rogue" somewhere in the mix.

Thank you for your interest!  The best way to start is KISS: Keep it simple, stupid :>

The apparently natural manner I'm using in 1812 is very simple.  You can find the details in builder.cpp.  Look for the buildWilderness() function.

The 1812 map has the overmap, and each tile of the overmap corresponds to a large submap.  buildWildreness() builds one of these submaps.  Each square in the submap is populated with merely a 

    set(x, y, weight.pickRandom());

where the pickRandom picks tree, bush, grass, dirt at random according to a weighted distribution.  Now, if each submap had its own distribution, there'd be a harsh line between submaps when you are at the local level.  To avoid that, the weights of each submap (that comes from the chosen overland symbol for that submap) is averaged to the corners of the submaps.  Then each submap linearly interpolates the corner values within itself - that is that weight averaging you see in buildWilderness.

So the heart is very simple - spatially-independent weighted selection.  The two next bits are important: how to generate the overmap; and how to set the weights.

The weights are setup in the source.txt, which is a grab bag for all my declarative constants.  Deep in this you'll find DEFINE TERRAIN, followed by the weights for each type of terrain.  

TERRAIN PLAINS
{
    tile GRASS

    grass 90
    bush 10
    sightrange 100
    armyrange 500
}

TERRAIN BUSHES
{
    tile BUSH

    grass 10
    bush 90
    sightrange 40
    armyrange 300
}

TERRAIN FOREST
{
    tile FOREST

    tree 90
    bush 10
    sightrange 15
    armyrange 100
}

TERRAIN WASTE
{
    tile DIRT

    dirt 90
    grass 10
    sightrange 130
    armyrange 600
}

My setup here was simple - I had a sort of hierarchy of terrain in mind, of what valid things are.  The usual ecological cycle in my part of the world is pond -> meadow -> bush -> forest -> pond, so thus that natural grass/bush/forest transition order.

So then comes the question of the overmap.  This you can find in the buildOvermap function in builder.cpp.  This works at the very coarse level, as we are just picking the overmap terrain type.  The system is a simple randomized markov chain on each tile.  However, the probability tables are controlled by the surrounding tiles.

There are two transition tables used, one in the grow bushes, the second in grow forests.  You'll note a comment about GS - that is Gauss-Seidel.  Since we are processing the tiles in a fixed order, you'll get strong biases as the next tile will see the updated values for its upper left neighbours, and the old values for lower right.  Ideally you randomize sweep orders to avoid this, but I was lazy and instead relied on the fact the noise in the transition rules to hide this.  (Noise hides many sins!)

The exact nature of these rules was heuristic, and derived by just generating and tweaking until I liked the results.  The second pass grow forest, IIRC, was added to try and consolidate the forest networks as otherwise it looked too patchy.

....

But back to your question: Where to start?

Make it easy to experiment.  Setup a test harness so you can see your full level, hit a key, see another one, and repeat.  Seeing a few hundred is a great way to get a sense of what your algorithm is doing and how to tweak it.  Try to keep your level generation stuff high level so you aren't messing around with pointers and edge-cases when writing stuff.  In particular, stuff like indexing your map out of bounds should silently *work* usually, because then a lot of this code becomes easier to read.  It is also useful to separate the "Dressing" from the "Bones".  Ie, often you can just do a 25% replacement of tile X with tile Y at random to break things up.  But this can be a post-process, and the earlier stages can just work with tile X.  That builder.cpp has a lot of other random algorithms in it as I've built them across many 7DRL, so I'd encourage reading them and seeing how they work.

I spent a significant amount of time in optimization for this 7DRL.  I could afford more at this point.  The biggest bottlenecks right now:

1) Copying the soldiers from frame to frame.  This could be vastly accelerated if I switched to a SOA rather than the current pointer-chasing format for the MOB class.

2) Registering bullets on the display.  I already restrict this to only the current FOV, but there is an ugly O(n^2) for my event class that wasn't a problem since normally only have a dozen events per frame at most :>

The big problem is I feel it already runs a bit slow even on high end machines... The simulation is currently completely uncapped (so if we ever get faster machines some day, it will be stupidly fast :>)  I'd have much rather if I could have simulated way faster so given you a 1x, 10x, 60x realtime options rather than the current all or nothing.

Thank you,  I enjoyed the video!  It is always so instructive to see people play something for the first time.

My only serious pain point was that I failed to make clear you can move the telescope even when zoomed in - this lets you frame those big battles so you see both halves, rather than jumping in & out.  (The musket range is actually adjusted to ensure you can see both sides :>)

I very much enjoyed your reaction to regiment 7's decision to charge the foe.  That is very much the thesis of this entire game.

You are correct it is entirely turn based at heart.  Their is a turn-by-turn order and square-by-square movement.  But I'd actually disagree strongly that turn based has anything to do with being a roguelike.  It is more like how perma-death appears a roguelike feature; not because it is a feature, but because a more essential requirement almost forces that decision.

"Permanent Consequences", or "No Save and Continue" are the cause of Permadeath and Random environment.  If you let people screw up permanently, you have to put then out of the misery and restart.  And if you keep restarting, you need the start to be interesting,

Tactical game play is what induces the Turn-based, Grid-based, and Non-modal characteristics.  It is very hard to focus on tactics with free movement or real time.  War of 1812 aggressively removes all tactics from the equation as your level of control is too coarse, leaving it with only strategy.  (And how much strategy there is can be debated.  My interpretation of Tolstoy's argument in War & Peace is that there is no actual strategy in the Napoleonic wars)

Totally agree about the UI complaints.  So much of my 7DRL time is spent on polishing UX, and there is always so many more things I could have done!

Thank you!   Very glad you enjoyed it.  I'm also pretty pleased with the result, even though in my imagination there were a lot of other scope that ended up not being accomplished :>   It also very much is something that likely falls out of the definition of "roguelike" (which is fine for me, as finding these boundaries is what I do 7DRLs for :>)

Well, the gigantic room would be 10,000 x 10,000.  Which means storing just a single byte tile value is 100MB!  And storing a single byte flag value is another 100MB!  To make things more interesting, the UI drawing is decoupled from the actual game engine.  So I have to make a copy of the map every update so the UI drawing thread can read the map without fear of it changing while it is reading.  (The alternative is to lock all reads of the map, which would defeat threading entirely and be atrociously slow)  Copying 100MB is a substantial time.  By breaking into 100x100 rooms, each of a more manageable 10KB size, I can use reference counting to only copy sections that changes.  So stuff like FOV flags are only set on the live rooms - the rest of the rooms just have a flag stating that their FOV flag is constant.  The same is for the smoke simulation - I have to store the amount of smoke per tile, but for the vast majority this is zero, so I can have that allocated only where necessary.

Separate rooms is also a very useful optimization for things like MOB look up. Until 1812 I stored monster and item lists per-room.  Usually rooms were small, so to see if an item was on a square it would be faster to look through all monsters to see if a monster was there than track it per square.  (This particularly relevant for stuff like Everything is Fodder which is technically an infinite map as it generates rooms on demand)  For 1812, I had to build a separate VDB-style (https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/openvdb) acceleration structure to swiftly locate all creatures globally.  I ended up with separate tables for both teams and for the officers, so I could do efficient searches for all enemy troops, or all friendly officers.

Separate rooms is a very useful roguelike construction technique as you can piece together "levels" that are usually connected by staircases smoothly.  Vicious Orcs is a good example of this.   The original motivation was Jacob's Matrix where it was just to confuse people through non-cartesian coordinates.  And I assure you, it can be very confusing :>

Ah, true, moving multiple units is a pain.  My original plan was for you to setup formations so you could join multiple regiments together as one unit for the purpose of commanding.  This is pretty much how the AI general works.

My other roguelikes can be found on the http://www.zincland.com on the list of 7DRLs there with every increasing adjectives.  I foolishly didn't provide any links on my itch.io profile :>  I keep meaning some day to recompile them all so they can all be also hosted here.

Thank you!   I did try to optimize the controls.  Most importantly, pressing shift and directions lets you move 5 squares at a time, otherwise it gets very painful to move about.  Ideally it would be a mouse-driven interface, but I didn't have time to build that on top.  (Not to mention mice have always felt out-of-spirit for roguelikes to me :>)

What were the aspects of the controls that made it most tedious for you?

I've made lots of 7DRLs, none of which have been epic combat :>  But they definitely laid the ground work to achieve this.  Notably Smart Kobold had huge work for dealing with solving the problem of having densely packed groups of mobs move in a turn-by-turn fashion, but not get all broken up.  Basically they are able to both delay their turn to see if others will move out of their requested spot, and have a priority scheme for shoving other mobs.  And Jacob's Matrix is where I developed the whole non-cartesian coordinate system that lets me stitch 100x100 "rooms" each with 100x100 tiles together in a fashion seamless to the AI and map code.

Source is all there (and BSD) if you want to look at it for your own epic combat game!

Thank you for catching that!  I sent the text.txt through  a spell checker, but that flavour text was inlined in the C++ so escaped detection!

The spell of death works more like the Angband Potion of Death; so it does not make it a complete gamble.

I have no idea how subscriptions work, but at least if I reply you should be pinged!

I'm afraid I had to ship without it due to Windows defender being over-active.  I have got a build that passes locally, so fingers crossed, I may get out a windows release soon!

You should have seen the earlier versions before I started toning down the terrain!  I had bright green for everything, and * for bushes.

A good point though, I really should have pushed the terrain way down, and then brought it back until it looked good.

Very glad you enjoyed it!

ASCII actually helps, I think.  If you try and have a 100x100 grid of fancy graphics it becomes mush.  To fit that number of tiles on the screen you need to go symbolic. And most people have highly trained symbol-recognition systems for ASCII.

Thank you for posting of your experience!

No need to apologize for the incomplete project.   If you never fail, you aren't trying hard enough.  As you reflect in your analysis, the exercise is good.  There is no such thing as a wasted push-up.

I totally agree with the tendency for technical issues to overwhelm game design issues.  I don't want to think how many hours I spent this week trying to fix key-repeat issues with libtcod.

My planning process:

1) Identify the core minimal product that would achieve my vision.   You want this done as early as possible.  When it is done; it is playtesting & refinement.

2) Identify riskiest tech stopping your minimal product, and address that first.

So if physics based path finding was a pre-req for your game design idea, you really did nothing wrong for planning.  If the game design could have worked with crappy path finding?  Then better planning would have focused on other tech first.

But I feel for your path finding pain.  I was lucky my Smart Kobold systems got me pretty close; it was more about finding proper tie breaker rules than any base tech.

Linux binaries only for now.  Source builds on windows and linux.

Unfortunately it is seems my coding style flags Windows Defender, so I had to delay a windows release until I get a build MS is happy with.

Part of the 7DRL process is to find out what roguelikes are.  The review process people will be judging your "roguelikeness" from 1-3.  But we don't tell people what those criteria should be. 

But keep in mind players of your game will be expecting a "roguelike", so you should try to stay in their expectations so as to not result in disappointment.

Do be careful, however, as your region may be switching daylight savings during the challenge!   It is 168 wall-clock hours from your start; so if you start 1PM Sunday 3rd, you might be able to legally finish 2PM Sunday the 10th.

Likewise, if you are going to fly across the world do not adjust your personal countdown for the time change :>