kolroguelike

[kolroguelike]

Week 3 (and 4) of Roguelike Dev

Made a big post about this, tried to save it, it didn't so I'll make this brief with lots of images:

It's grown up so much! It has color, it has personality, it has UI!! Let's talk about things that are added in and work and things that didn't work: -We can now progress through an endless number of levels

-We can now level up and gain xp endlessly, as well as use level ups to choose a stat to level

-There are multiple useable items and an inventory system. Items have a range of characteristics, though that range is small and simple right now

-Enemy and item spawns and quantity are determined by what floor you are on as well

-I added in a new enemy type who is supposed to be a nice in between the basic orc mob and the scary troll mob

-Enemy AI now will only attack in cardinal directions like the player

--This took a bit and required me to learn how to change the distance formula provided (Chebyshev) to a cardinal distance formula (Manhattan/Taxicab). This took several hours, but it's been working effortlessly now.

Things that didn't work:

-One thing specifically didn't work and it was making items have multiple functions, namely, making a firebomb item do both aoe damage and leave a burning status effect. This took a while and ultimately couldn't get it to work. Plan is to make a separate component to help this out and see if I can make enemies not just wander confusedly, but also take damage and panic when on fire.

[kolroguelike]

Week 2 of Roguelike Dev

Well this week was something special. Finally took off and started building the foundation of this Roguelike. Idk where it's gonna go but starting here has been very informative.

Fortunately, in terms of getting the basic tutorial stuff done, it was easy enough and mostly simple to understand. Learning how to make a procedural generator was... well:

It was a LOT. It did all work though, made a random map generator plus a moving character with collision on walls!

However, the rest of the week was the big challenge. Spent a lot of time trying to learn something that I was simple: Making rooms that are Circular. Just to add variety.

Well, this is how that went for most of the week:

This is but a small taste of the literal days I spent searching for how to do this. I couldn't find anything to my tastes, specifically I wanted to avoid using the Python Turtle library because it requires time for the shapes and rooms to be drawn and I didn't want that. So I search for what felt like forever.

I even started to feel incredibly stupid. Stupider than when I had been trying to learn calculus (Which, didn't go well either btw).

I asked my class mentor if that was normal, a friend who helped me get started with learning python, and even my own father, who introduced me to programming and coding.

The answer was a resounding: This is normal, you're okay.

BUT

After days of searching and taking time to step away from the problem I found it. It took going into a Discord. A channel I knew about but didn't think I would find anything there and doing this search:

And the answer was there. With some further investigating and follow up questioning did I not only find what I was looking for, but the creator of this particular tutorial and Python Library (Tcod) did I get an answer I was looking for.

But why write this all out? Because it was the most frequent thing recommended to me after going through all this. To write it down and remember what had happened. That was, in fact, my father's advice after having found this information: Write it down. Have it somewhere you can find so you can go truly learn from this.

That was my week. We're through parts 0-3 of the tutorial and now this week is 4-7.

[kolroguelike]

Week 1 of Rougelike Development

Going to go ahead and make this blog to track my progress and show what changes happen week by week. For week 1 we're just gonna learn how to set up and start. Figuring out how to work with a Virtual Environment as well as make sure I have Python understood enough to get it working. Doesn't seem too bad! But we'll see how it goes.