Roaming Monsters, Potions, Updated Game Over

by Darius Kazemi on February 21, 2009

in meggyjr

I made a bunch of changes to this build, mostly in the way the code is structured to be a lot more object-oriented. Oddly, making things more OO somehow reduced the code footprint, which I wasn’t expecting. But then, I know next to nothing about compilers and OO.

I did add a few new features.

There can be multiple monsters. Monsters spawn randomly and now move around the maze. If you beat a monster in combat, it dies and doesn’t come back.

There are potions that randomly spawn. You can pick them up, and to use them you press A on the map to restore 1 HP.

There’s a new game over screen, adapted from Skull-A-Day.

Overall, it’s really starting to come together as an actual game. I still need to figure out how the player will advance to subsequent maps, and I might implement a character leveling system — though that implies stats for a character!

{ 6 comments }

Darren Grey February 21, 2009 at 4:11 am

Very nice! Stats could be hidden, as is fairly common anyway, as long as the player has a simple way of gauging character and monster strength – the idea of using brighter lights for both character and monsters as they level up seems good. Different dungeons levels could be different colours to represent difficulty too.

Darius Kazemi February 21, 2009 at 4:31 am

The problem there is that there are really only two or three discernible levels of brightness on the LEDs within a given color. I could technically use more, but you can only notice the difference between the finer gradients when they’re next to each other. It wouldn’t really work for evaluating the strength of a monster or your character by itself.

Ian Schreiber February 21, 2009 at 6:38 am

Very nice so far, and coming along amazingly fast!

The doors really do need to disappear when you use a key, otherwise it’s too easy to walk through one and get trapped on the other side.

I think three levels of brightness is fine. For monsters, this can represent weaker/equal/stronger relative to player. For player… well, if there’s only 10 dungeon levels, how many times is the player realistically going to level up anyway?

Andrew February 22, 2009 at 3:35 pm

I’ve enjoyed seeing this go along :)

Seems like a fun portable experience akin to any other rougelike.

The limits of the setup seems fun to work around :) Maybe you can use sound to show how difficult a monster is. Player levelling up would be as simple as adding more health I guess.

Trevbot November 21, 2010 at 9:39 pm

That’s a great idea like a deep sound could represent a big buff monster but a whiny high pitched one would sound like scrawny little pipsqueak.

David Ludwig February 23, 2009 at 1:19 am

The game looks nice. Congrats on the work! :-)

For level transitiona, I wonder if using a Gauntlet-style exit block would make sense, one where you step on them to teleport to another level.

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