Kleptron 2000

What

• Turn-based ASCII roguelike where you plunder mazes guarded by owners who aren't thrilled about the idea
• Player collects coins to spend on ability upgrades, can use items scattered on map but one inventory slot only
• Enemies are procgen'd by composing them from random abilities/strengths/weaknesses/AI at each difficulty level (for better or worse)
• Base combat is one hit-one kill, basic weapons are single-use (i.e. they break), abilities/deeper levels affect them

Why

The typical roguelike amounts to you taking on the role of a violent xenophobic kleptomaniac committing a multi-leveled home invasion. I'm thinking of how to let the player engage in thie behaviour while shining a light on it, when you die your character become a ghost in the vaults protecting your hoarded wealth in vain. Your high score reflects how much wealth you grabbed before you ultimately died, something to ponder. I'll let future me fill in the details.

How

As simply as possible, I tend to overcode these things and it's not necessary. Really wanted to try ECS again, which made me realize I shouldn't. 

One thing I'll let myself indulge in this jam is animation -- it bugs me how static many roguelikes look while waiting for input. Back in the 80's it had to be that way and that's part of the charm -- but the world feels flat and dead. I started by splitting the game update from the rendering update. The flashing @ is done independently of the game, which just waits for input. When the player moves, the flashing animation resets so you can track the @ and move it quickly through the map. 

I nerded out on this because there will be times where an animation will have to block the game from continuing until it completes (e.g. projectiles or explosions). To do that, the animation will have to deny sending keyboard input to the game, but still update the game so a fast-moving projectile can make several moves over a single "turn".  Something about a fireball paused in mid-flight throwing off smoke and embers appeals to me. My game my rules :P

I've decided I'm going to focus on the aesthetics in the early days so it can sell ME on the potential each day I wake up to it. I do a lot of "gameplay first" stuff and run out of steam, so this is a novel approach for me. We're testing out music and sfx to give us some time to iterate as the game takes shape, audio typically gets crammed in at the end and to poor effect.

For the gif I added a Z-layer when printing characters to the screen -- the transition effect is drawn at the very top layer, and the game is spawned underneath and obstructed until the effect disappears. The player can start playing the game before the effect is gone, waiting for UI transitions is a pet peeve.

Basic collision/gamestate/reloading stuff, just adding one basic piece of functionality at a time. It's the most basic a game can get right now: you lose if you touch the enemy, you win if you find the stairs. It's a shitty game but it's still a game at that. But every visual improvement I add gives me more of a sense of its potential, and if I'm not sold on this thing how am I going to convince myself to sit here and type it all out.

Same code, two different experiences just by turning the lights down

https://brandough.itch.io/kleptron-2000 

Today the goal was to make it a playable game that I can pour content into tomorrow. Something magical happens when you add a score...

This morning I pivoted from a medieval dungeon-delver to a corporate tower-climber, replete with re-skinned quotes from where I won't say:

And some nice words of encouragement on failure:

Tomorrow is fleshing out gameplay with items (office supplies) and stages (mail room, cafeteria, all the way up to the boardroom), I think I'm hitting my stride for the last 36 hours.

Not sure how you're supposed to top the $190 billion high score but I imagine there's going to be a lot of coin multipliers in there :shrug: