Comments on: My Idea for a Meggy Roguelike

By: Darius Kazemi

Darius Kazemi — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 19:43:52 +0000

On my game I had a bunch of 16×16 arrays for the levels. Not sure how big it can handle at once. But yeah, you could easily make it return just by pointing to the previous level array.

By: Fault

Fault — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 18:58:40 +0000

Love the idea of a Roguelike game on the Meggy RGB. I’m just about to build my own Meggy, and was thinking on the same kind of lines as this for myself. Having never programmed the Meggy before, I’m not sure how streamline I can make the code as my programming skills are a little cumbersome.

I would imagine a random generator wouldn’t be to difficult to create for the map, but how big an array can the device handle. Also, if you were to exit one level, can you return to the previous level? If so, can the device handle multiple arrays?

By: Darius Kazemi

Darius Kazemi — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 17:02:00 +0000

Anonymous: I really like that idea. I think I might use it.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 21:00:00 +0000

how about you show how much Energy the monster has, in its design. for example, the monster you showed here has two red dots in it. this would mean he has two points of energy left. if you hit him, one dot disappears and so fort. maybe make the final boss just red so you have to hit him for every dot.

By: Darren Torpey

Darren Torpey — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 03:29:00 +0000

For a game this simple, I think having a finite and rather short length is a good idea.

It fits the whole handhelds-are-good-for-short-games model and if Spelunky has taught us anything, it's that being shorter and finite can add a lot to a Rogue-like game.

Maybe have as many levels as fit using some simple notation (like dots) in the "score" area you mentioned in your first post -- the display that is not a part of the main display. (or maybe I misunderstood that, I haven't read the specs yet, myself)

By: Caleb

Caleb — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 20:04:00 +0000

The issue I see with that is you wouldn't be able to immediately tell the status of the enemy if you didn't see the change to a dimmer value. (Or would you? I don't have the hardware available to view the dim versus not-dim states)

You could cut him down, or "dissolve" him as he loses health.

It's crazy thinking about how to relay information using such a limited output device.

By: Darius Kazemi

Darius Kazemi — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 19:52:00 +0000

That’s a great suggestion Dave. There are actually “dim” versions of every color. In fact, there are three distinguishable levels of dimness for any color, so maybe what I could do is instead of having an HP bar for a monster, he just gets dimmer twice and then dies.

By: David Ludwig

David Ludwig — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 19:39:00 +0000

I wonder how possible and how useful it would be to display monster dots as different shades or hues of red. The Meggy programming reference refers to Red and DimRed as distinct colors, plus there seems to be some room for additional custom colors. Perhaps a strong monster could be represented as Red, while a weak one represented as DimRed. Other shades of red could be used as technically available and desired.

By: Darius Kazemi

Darius Kazemi — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 15:25:00 +0000

Caleb, there is some scrolling text code provided with the Meggy, but there are two problems:

1) It takes up a fairly enormous amount of memory because you have to store an entire font for A-Z 0-9
2) It's not actually very readable! It makes me dizzy to try and read.

By: Caleb

Caleb — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 15:22:00 +0000

For any textual information (story, score, epilogue) you could always try to display scrolling text to the player. Something like this, but with less fidelity, obviously.

http://www.25lines.com/finalists/0812/059.swf