This is my first Ludum Dare, so I’m keeping the design relatively unambitious, in the vain hope I might be able to finish it to an acceptable standard.

Description:
Real-time, rogue-like, top-down shooter. The player will move around procedurally generated levels, trying to find ‘artefacts’, killing enemies and – ultimately – descending to the next level. All to earn a hi-score.

Along the way, there *may* be some ‘elite loot’, different weapons and/or terrain deformation (grid based, I’m afraid) via dynamite or drills. Depending on how productive I am.

To consider it finished, it should have:

1. Player can shoot enemies
2. Vaguely intelligent AI
3. Procedurally generated levels
4. Multiple levels
5. Pick-ups and Hi-score

I’ll be using Python and Pygame.

Hey Game Jammers, for those of you who love to JAM, here is a new one that is extremely cool and is going on all this week.  It is called the 7 day roguelike challenge and is a great game jam held once a year.  Roguelikes are the very pinnacle of gameplay vs. graphics, and have a lot of soul.  If you’ve ever heard of nethack, moria, angband, dwarf fortress and the like, then you know what a roguelike is.  If not, be sure to drop by the following pages and learn about one of the coolest game genres around.  Enjoy!  http://7drl.org/ http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=7DRL http://twitter.com/#!/search/%237DRL Good luck.

The 2009 7DRL is happening in a few weeks. The goal is to make a roguelike in 7 days (which is like years for hardened LD48ers like us ). The event takes place March 7th to March 15th.

Info here

I finished my entry. Random and unedited thoughts follow.

Quick instructions: You are the “@”, use the nethack keys to move (hjkl and yubn for diagonal movement), t to toggle your light. Run into a wall to dig a tunnel with your pickaxe, make your way to the surface (“<” are the up stairs) collecting valuable gems on the way.

I didn’t get enough balancing in so chances are it’s too easy / hard. I wish I’d added an in game help thing (as it is pressing F1 will just tell go to go rtmf). I feel I did capture some of the original game’s essence (run away from the guards and don’t let your flashlight’s battery run out) so I’m pretty happy as far as that is concerned. Hopefully the learning curve won’t be too hard, which is a risk with roguelikes I think.

Codewise, feel free to look but it’s probably worthless except as an example of how not to make good software. One part I feel could have used more time was the cavern generator, it runs quite slowly (but not enough for me to take time to fix it) and I don’t fix the results for connectedness which is why I included the digging feature. I’m not too happy with that. :S

Anathema RL Python + Pygame