Hey gang! Seth Coster of But­ter­scotch Shenani­gans here. Our 7DRL game from this year was Quadro­pus Ram­page, and we liked the con­cept so much we decided to take it fur­ther and flesh it out into a full-​​fledged game for iOS and Android. We’ll be launch­ing around June 6th as a free title, so PEEL YOUR EYEBALLS! Here’s a lit­tle teaser trailer we threw together last week:

And here’s the orig­i­nal ver­sion from the 7-​​day rogue­like!

Hi all, today I felt like spar­ing a cou­ple of hours to add a lit­tle fea­ture to Infec­tion, a flash that will warn the player when new traits are unlocked, and then some fixes to bugs that I didn’t even know existed.

You can find it here.

Enjoy your weekend.

Ver­sion 1.1 is released!
Mostly inter­face changes and fixes, the only real game­play change is that mon­sters won’t cast spells on you when you’re a ghost (because it’s basi­cally an unavoid­able insta-​​kill).

Mac Exe­cutable
Win­dows Exe­cutable
If you’re using Linux (or have the LÖVE inter­preter installed), you can down­load the .love file (requires the LÖVE inter­preter to play). You could also try run­ning the Win­dows Exe­cutable under WINE.

Full list of changes:
- Friendly and enemy sum­moned mush­room men are now dif­fer­ent col­ors.
- A new “options” menu, which lets you switch the game to/​from fullscreen, change the res­o­lu­tion, and change the key­board refresh rate.
- You can set your name and gen­der when start­ing a new game.
- Click­ing an adja­cent enemy now attacks it as well as tar­get­ing it.
- Game­play tweak: Crea­tures will not cast spells on you if you’re a ghost (it was just too cheap oth­er­wise).
- Fixes:
- Changed the pathfind­ing algo­rithm so that mon­sters will move through diag­o­nal spaces.
- Fixed var­i­ous typos and inac­cu­ra­cies.
- Mov­ing into a wall no longer wastes a turn.
- Allied mon­sters now attack ene­mies next to them. They still won’t chase them unless the player sets the enemy as a tar­get (this is intended).
- Try­ing to move the tar­get­ing cur­sor through an unseen area no longer resets the cursor.

On this week’s Rogue­like Radio pod­cast Dar­ren Grey men­tioned that it would be inter­est­ing to hear from the authors of some of the 7DRL suc­cesses, as well as the fail­ures. I had been leav­ing my game to speak for itself, but I think it does a cou­ple of inter­est­ing things, so will say a lit­tle bit about them. Mild spoil­ers, in that some things in the game are slightly mys­te­ri­ous, in what I hope is a fun way — play it!

(Down­load here, Win­dows and Linux)

Back­ground

My his­tory with rogue­likes is that I’ve messed with Nethack now and then, and more recently played quite a lot of Brogue, and some Dwarf Fortress. I’ve never made one before. Two things have bugged me about them, that I thought I could try to address: bump­ing into things and watch­ing health bars go down doesn’t feel like fight­ing (although of course it gets bet­ter at deeper lev­els with more stuff hap­pen­ing), and they triv­i­al­ize killing.

I started think­ing last year about how to do a tile-​​ and turn-​​based sword­fight­ing game that felt more like a swash­buck­ling movie, pos­si­bly aris­ing from very sim­ple mechan­ics, like in the old Prince of Per­sia. Then I played Dark Souls, and thought that I could bor­row its mechanic of a recharg­ing sta­mina bar. I made a mockup:

Since the graph­ics would be plain ASCII, I wanted another way to spice up the visual pre­sen­ta­tion, and had the idea of chang­ing the lan­guage. Based on vague mem­o­ries of Robert Louis Steven­son his­tor­i­cal nov­els, and of d’Artagnan being a Gas­con, I made the hero a 17th or 18th cen­tury Scots­man, with in-​​game text to suit. I got as far as get­ting the libt­cod tuto­r­ial run­ning in Python, then put the idea aside, com­ing back to it for the 7DRL.

What went right – combat

This achieved the feel­ing I wanted. Guards retreat and advance as they lose and gain breath, so each fight moves back and forth across the dun­geon, mak­ing the geom­e­try mat­ter tac­ti­cally. Fac­ing mat­ters, but doesn’t get in the way when you’re not fight­ing. The ene­mies move pre­dictably, but you usu­ally meet them in pairs, which keeps it inter­est­ing a bit longer. The pis­tols give you options if you get over­whelmed (and I’m very happy with the shot effects). You die in one hit, so need to pay atten­tion from the start. The guards are not name­less, and do not drop out of play imme­di­ately if they are mor­tally wounded – you have to fight around them (how­ever a lot of the things I wanted to do with this side of the game got cut).

What went right – language

I thought of time spent on this as equiv­a­lent to time spent on graph­ics, as a way of giv­ing the game some extra flavour. Scots is a descen­dant of Mid­dle Eng­lish, very widely spo­ken in Scot­land but ter­mi­nally unfash­ion­able as a writ­ten lan­guage for most of the last 300 years. In par­tic­u­lar, there’s no stan­dard way of spelling it. The main sources I used were the Dic­tio­nary of the Scots Lan­guage and Wir Ain Leed. As I under­stand it, the first of these is a record of Scots as peo­ple have (hap­haz­ardly) writ­ten it, while the sec­ond tries to reg­u­lar­ize the spelling, as part of cre­at­ing a writ­ten form of the lan­guage that peo­ple can learn. The first has “swurd” and 11 vari­ants, the sec­ond “swuird”.

It works for me at mak­ing the game feel richer and a bit dif­fer­ent, and I’ve had some pos­i­tive responses. I hope I didn’t make too many mis­takes. Dur­ing the com­pe­ti­tion, it occurred to me that it also serves as a ver­sion of the rogue­like item-​​identification sub­game. Finally, it had the (delib­er­ate) effect of stop­ping me from writ­ing too much – I wanted to keep to matter-​​of-​​fact descrip­tions of what was hap­pen­ing in the game.

What went right – technology

I used libt­cod and Python. I found Python fun and fast to code in once I got going. libt­cod is easy to set up, has good doc­u­men­ta­tion, and is sim­ple (from the user’s point of view). It was an enor­mous help to have the tuto­r­ial avail­able as a guide on how to struc­ture the game. My worst tech­ni­cal moments were run­ning into an input bug in libt­cod (fixed in newer builds) and spend­ing hours work­ing out how to set up py2exe. So, as these things go, I got off very lightly.

What went wrong

The dun­geon is bare. I had planned to make it look more like the mockup, with chairs and bot­tles to throw, things to trip over, and lighted areas to stay out of. (Although I worked on this a lit­tle after the com­pe­ti­tion, and found that the smaller rooms in the actual game look too clut­tered very quickly.) More impor­tantly, I didn’t leave myself time to think prop­erly about the dis­tri­b­u­tion and num­ber of guards in a level, and I sus­pect that the game is cur­rently much too easy, espe­cially once you have com­bat fig­ured out. I had plans for more kinds of enemy, dogs and big guards, but they didn’t make it.

I had a story worked out about res­cu­ing a young lady (who would reject you if you had killed peo­ple dis­hon­ourably) and escap­ing past your oppo­nents’ ghosts, but this would have been hard to play straight and I felt an enor­mous relief when I cut it on day five. I put in a replace­ment (col­lect three pieces of trea­sure!) late enough that it doesn’t get explained anywhere.

Over­all though, I’m pretty happy with how things turned out, and am look­ing for­ward to try­ing some­thing new next year.

I finally have access to a pc and could reli­ably test the pro­gram. I have fixed it (for real) and it ran on a win­dows vista. So sorry to all of the win­dows users. You can down­load it here I have also updated all down­load links.