This is my first roguelike, it utilises console output, and it’s realtime, not turn-based.

The innovation is that the world is actually 3D and you have 3 viewports (top, front and left).

You have managed to activate the ancient space-time machine on Mars and successfully transferred to Earth, 7119 B.C. in order to prevent Alice’s death.

Download Martian Deep 3

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

You can find it here.

Enjoy your weekend.

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.

(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.

There is no new content here beyond what was in the original 7DRL version, but a lot of tweaking and re-balancing has gone on to make what was there play a bit better. This new version should be a bit more of a challenge.

I’m also working on an android port, but that needs a little bit more love and attention before it sees the light of day.

So give yourself a pat on the back and have this lovely image to print out and stick on your lapel and/or dispaly on your game download page. If you have a roguebasin page, be sure to update that too! Here is a link which you are free to use as the image source:

http://roguetemple.com/medals/Medal_7DRL_2013_s.png

The above is sized to fit next to all the past medals, but if anyone wants a super hi-res version click the one below! Its huge!

Well done everybody

-Numeron

The current version features an infinite desert randomly populated by scorpions and straight-faced goons, and a skill system that will hopefully prove interesting with some further development.

As always, Minotauros

https://sites.google.com/site/tetrogue/downloads/latest

This time all 3 platforms are ready.

I’ve spent 10 extra minutes to improve crafting a little. Now it is possible to pick placed pieces back.

I decided to playtest this a little, to avoid further embarrasing, and played 3 games. One by Wizard, one by Rogue and one by Warrior. And won all three! Warrior was the hardest. I nearly died on the last level, which is optional once you found stairs down, I decided to increase score a little. Greed is bad.