The Perfect Roguelike

One of my beta testers for Zonerunners was talking about ADOM in the only IRC channel I visit the other day. I had played the game before but hated it, but I gave it a try one last time and fell in love.

ADOM is amazing, I mean, breathtaking! After playing graphically amazing games like Crysis and HL2 and then stepping into a world filled with ASCII characters and being taken away is downright awesome. ADOM took a lot of work to get used to, and it didn’t take long for me to want more, something I’d like to play.

And then it came to me like all my other ideas do: out of nowhere. What about a roguelike that basically places you in a military setting, like a standoff? Then again, how about just a military theme all together? You get the mission, a set of objectives, and certain amount of ammo and then you’re set free to do your job. I put some thought into and decided to give it a go. I’ll have pictures tommorow.

Zonerunners: Cool stuff

It’s been awhile since I’ve updated, I know, but I have too much free time (seriously) now and keep forgetting to update. In today’s post I’m going to give you a rundown of most of the major features and changes since last time.

Smaller Zones: “What? That’s not a feature! That sucks!” Well, there’s no simple way to say this, but GameMaker just can’t handle large Zones. Half of the main zone was completed (comprised of many small testing areas for certain features) before I found out that GM wasn’t going to agree with me. It felt really awesome starting a new level and using the ENTIRE engine on every area and not just scattered around. I had a lot of fun making the first “real” level, it starts just right after the plane crash at the start of the game. Although I need to spice up the crash site a bit, I think it’s pretty hardcore the way it is, but I feel there should be some kind of grassy area between the crash site and the first outpost you have to raid. Right now it’s like, “Crash, now KILL EVERYTHING.” without any pause, but that might be cool if I pull it off right. Maybe I should have a couple of guards come and check it out, starting off the first real battle. I also plan on giving the player several injuries so they get used to typing in codes FAST (I’ll explain this later).

Level Editor (OpenZone): I know you thought, “Hey, isn’t there already one?” Yeah, short story is that it’s stupid to think that a game and level editor will mesh perfectly the first time. I’m on my third rewrite of this thing and I’m thinking about making a level editor that can edit both Zonerunners and Glider Forever (my other game) levels in Python or something. It’ll be a challenge, but they can already read files and make a level out of them, so I just have to make a program that can make those files. Level scripting is pretty cool, basically every object has three events you can script (A “Create” event, for defining variables. “Step” to perform an action every second. “Draw” guess what this does?). I’m also trying to work out easier updating for the game, by storing the code that might change in these “script” files and just having the user download these changed files and replace them with the old.

A.I.: Once again, the A.I. is going to need a some revisions to be brought up to the first major version (1.0). These things include that ugly bug where they spot you though the wall above you and try to go through the wall/suicide. That’s about it, except for jumping when they see a gap in the floor.

More later.