7even Day R@guelike (2019)
My entry for the 2019 7DRL.
Controls:
- Move with Arrow Keys
- move into creatures to attack
- Skip a turn with space key
Survive as long as you can in the dungeon. Items picked up will replace current items if they are better. The old item will be discarded.
Notes:
*** 1.1 Update ***
- fixed collision on left side of entry room
- Fog of war locks down before the screen fades back in on level load now
- Items retain visibility on the map if not picked up
- removed RPGMaker style status windows that pop up when pressing escape
- monsters remember player for a few steps after the player goes out of sight
- monsters can walk over objects
- tuning the level transition logic to make it smoother
- ask player if they wish to go down the stairs
- player visibility tracked separately than monster visibility. (Player can see much further)
- increased player starting health
- ensure monsters don't spawn near the entrance to each level
- increased power of healing potions
- make sure monsters don't take a turn until the player has fully completed their move(should fix issue with monster attacks when picking up items)
The challenge I embarked on was to see if I could strip RPG Maker MV down to it's barest essentials and develop a simple vanilla roguelike with it by replacing some the core systems. I was able to achieve the following:
- turn-based movement
- on-map combat
- on-map item pickups
- procedural dungeons
- procedural monster and item placement
- field of view and line of sight
- permadeath
It's not as polished as I would have liked, but I think it can safely be called a roguelike.
Download
Development log
- Post Jam 1.1 updateMay 03, 2019
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Thank you for the update! This time the difficulty just feels right. I finally managed to win and wished there were some more levels. :-)
I still like the look and feel of your game. I played with headphones and the sound effects are just great - very intense and saturated. May I ask where you got them from?
Glad you liked it! I think I've got some good foundations here to start moving some of this functionality into re-usable libraries. Hopefully that will allow me to get a good jumping off point for next year's 7drl :p. I did spend a little too much time trying to force rpgmaker to behave this way and not enough time on content and gameplay.
Those sound effects are all stock RPG Maker sound effects that come with the package. I looked at some other sound effects, but those seemed to fit the bill nicely.
i'm looking forward to your next years 7DRL. Now that you have your game-engine in place I expect it to be quite good. I will definitely play it! ;-)
This game is incredibly hard! I nearly always died on the second monster I encountered. In cases I managed to pick up a health potion I died on the third fight.
I like the automatic item replacement. Having no inventory juggling makes the game smoother to play.
I am not familiar with the RPG-Maker. How can it be combined with rot.js?
I think I may have gone overboard with adjusting the monster stats. :( During most of the development it was WAY too easy and I wanted to make it more of a challenge...of course this decision happened at the last possible moment before publishing.
RPG Maker MV switched to JavaScript for it's logic engine which makes it possible to bring in additional libraries... Rot.js being what I pulled in to assist with some of the low-level roguelike mechanics. Typical RPG Maker games have a real-time map screen with all battles taking place on a separate turn-based side-view battle screen. I eliminated that and modified the map screen to be turn-based so everything happens on the same screen. A lot of work this 7 days was getting it to work like a traditional roguelike with pretty much the last day and a half spent on items and monster definitions.
Well done! I just like the look and feel of it. :-)
Quite impressing. You somehow created your own roguelike game engine as a hybrid of Rot.js and RPG Maker MV.
What would you say are the main benefits from the RPG Maker part?
That's a really good question... I'm still using RPG Maker to define the weapon and monster stats via it's database and also visually creating some events that I'm using as "prefabs" that can then be dynamically cloned to populate the levels. It allows me to create a static level that I can populate and test out the interactions before turning on the procedural generation. Also, even though the built-in battle system is not being used, that logic is still all present and the damage routines can be called individually which is what I'm using to resolve combat and potion effects. I think if I continue down this path, I'll mainly be using RPG Maker more and more as just a library of routines instead of how it's normally used.
Also, even though RPG Maker has it's own built-in level designer, I've switched over to using TileD for designing levels in some of my other experiments since it has more versatility. In fact, the procedural generation in this roguelike are actually populating TileD level maps that are being rendered with the RPG Maker engine via a third party plugin.
Regardless, I think RPG Maker provides a real nice jumping off point to get something going quickly, but it also exposes all of the code so you are able to really customize it way beyond how it was originally intended to be used. Also, with this last version (MV), it's finally cross platform and web-enabled. It was pretty much a non-starter for me before that point.
Thank you for the detailed explanation!