Airships!

 I love Zeppelins. Not blimps. Airships. Rigid structure, an aerodynamic hull around a series of gas chambers. That sort of thing. Now for the past year or so my older son and I have sometimes dabbled in One Page Rules Grimdark Future FTL Warfleets. The rules are simple enough (two pages, not one, but one may argue that you can print double-sided). But it takes place in space. My son loves it. I like it too. But I feel one could do an airship mod.

Working on it. Of course.

Now airships _were_ used as weapons of war for a couple of years that included World War I. Afterwards there were some attempts to have them in a military role by the victorious powers. The USA built the USS Akon, which was a flying aircraft carrier – although more of a scouting vessel than made for direct sorties against hostile targets. I think the British and French also built them. Germany wasn't allowed the big toys anymore after the Treaty of Versailles so the greatest fans of the technology only built civilian airships.

A little aside on those: The Graf Zeppelin was the vessel which I personally would want to travel on if I ever got my hands on a time machine. Global readers will associate the term Zeppelin with the Hindenburg, however. It was known for two things: Having swastikas on its tailfins and spectacularly (and on camera!) going up in flames. Two things to save the honor of that airship: The Nazis didn't like Zeppelins because by that time airplanes were faster, more reliable and had more range than before and they thought the Zeppelin technology to be of no use for the military. The swastikas on the tailfins were not supposed to show how nazi the ship was but simply the national flag at the time. As for the fireball: The Hindenburg was designed to be run with (nonflammable) helium gas. But pre-war sanctions against Germany meant that the one big producer of helium at the time, the USA, didn't deliver that gas so they had to go with hydrogen, which has somewhat (8%) greater lift and far greater risk.

Alright, aside's over, let's talk about these hypothetical war Zeppelins. An airship is mostly gas-bags and the structure supporting them. The gondolas, both for command/control and with motors, are tiny attachments to that. Yet, an airship cannot carry all that much additional cargo/ammunition/personell. One cubic meter of helium only lifts something like 1.1 Kilogramms. That is not much and the reason, airships were so large.

So if we're gonna make a tabletop game out of this, we'd have to assume helium as lift-gas and ignore fire and loss of lift due to damage entirely. I dislike my games to be bogged down by to many detailed rules. Ships in Grimdark Future have between two (light) and four (heavy) ship systems. I'd go one lower for my airship mod because installing a cannon on such a craft is a big deal. Also, ships in the original game have turrets that become more powerful for the bigger craft. Airships will have a set of machine gun emplacements around their hull which means they all have the same base "turret" weaponry.

What weapons could one sensibly attach to an airship? Bombs (the most common weapon for such craft historically) are, of course, irrelevant in air-to-air battles. But there are other options:

Machine Gun Battery: If you expect to encounter lots of enemy planes trying to swarm you, this would be a sensible option. It simply means that there are _more_ machine guns on your ships - with the respective crews to fire them.

Anti Air Howitzer: I suppose an airship can carry a heavy infantry howitzer like mountain troops used to lug around. 150mm caliber, airburst-ammunition – this would be the king of weapons in the skies.

PomPom Battery: Heavier than machine guns, heavier than even heavy machine guns. The PomPom was a maxim machine gun upscaled to a 1-inch-caliber and did indeed see use as an anti-aircraft-weapon in WWI.

Dumbfire Rocket Rack: Just a bunch of rockets to saturate a distant area of the sky with explosions and shrapnell. The original game already has something like this which barely needs any modifications to work.

Wire Guided Missile System: This is the sniping weapon of the game, I guess. It could be made even though it is more of a WWII-kind of technology. We are doing Dieselpunk here so I guess it'll be alright.

3"-AA-Battery: This is the broadside-weapon in this system. Imagine like two cannons per side of the airship, firing smallish howitzer-rounds.

With weaponry out of the way, what ship systems would seem somewhat plausible?

Reinforced Structure: Your typical armour-upgrade. HP instead of anything actively useful.

Crew Parachutes: Good for morale if you play with such a thing.

Extra Motor Gondola: More speed!

Weapon Swivel-Mount: Choose one of your weapons. It can now turn 360 degrees. I imagine it's hanging below the ship.

Advanced Fire Control: Hit better.

Airplane Support Bays: Helps the swarms of fighters around you somehow.

Turret-Upgrade: Replaces the generic MGs with PomPoms?

Harpoon-Cannons: Entangle an enemy ship. This makes sense if you are smaller and want to hinder a larger craft from participating in the fight more.

This is missing rules for boarding, which I bemoan. I once met a nice oder lady at a lecture on airships who was not only leader of a club of Zeppelin-enthusiasts but also the granddaughter of Germanys only air corsair (the man had, in WWI, actually captured a Norwegian seagoing vessel with his airship). I believe that boarding may be unrealistic but is cool enough that it should be an option (in the base game as well - send over those space marines with boarding pods!). Have to think about it but I fear it would complicate things too much.

Working on: A Rogulike. Made in Twine.

 So for the past year or so I've been (on and off, of course) working on a new roguelike. It's not my first foray into designing one: I've attempted to make them in the form of books (semi-successful: It's a good adventure-riddle but not roguelike beyond having a randomized labyrinth layout), board games (close. But better as a traditional board game co-op experience), text-adventure video games (that's more like it - but alas, I didn't do the coding) and low-resolution retro-games (not the roguest of roguelikes but also close - also a collaborative effort with my friend Niels). Now this time I've done everything myself, using the only platform I can do some coding in - Twine. Twine 1, that is.

Can one make a roguelike in Twine? With some limitations: Yes. I did it. It's pretty much finished, all I need to do is publish it on my Itch-site, which I plan on doing this weekend. Let's do a little post-mortem on the project.

Making a roguelike in Twine

Twine wasn't made for creating roguelikes, obviously. The main strength of the platform is that a layman such as myself, more interested in writing than in coding, can make a functioning piece of interactive fiction without much foreknowledge. Starting from relatively humble beginnings I learned to use more and more of the coding language features until I was able to make first a text-based survival-horror-game and then an hommage to Resident Evil. But creating my roguelike was a totall different beast. It started with a random maze, then I added parts of the combat- and inventory-system from Zombie Mansion, then I made a system for placing random monsters, loot and room features.

Technically, you do the same floor over and over again: There are only 25 'rooms', wich get different walls/passages, features, treasure-items and monsters every time you descend to the next floor. The rules for filling the rooms change when you go deeper though - as do the stats of your character when you level up. The whole thing has a high level of complexity. Here are some stats of the Twine project:

• 160 Passages
• 424 Variables
• 21 Types of Monster
• 7 Character Classes
• 50+ Types of Item
• 12 Spells
• 6 Potions
• 25 Floors total
• 5 Curated floors with boss fights
• 4 Floors where there is a trader to do trade with

In the editor, the whole thing looks like this:

The character classes (on the left) all actually play very differently: You have fighty characters like the Squire, who just stabs enemys with his spear. You have casters like the Apprentice, who can learn spells from scrolls to use them many times. You have utility-classes like the Scholar who will fill her journal with lore about the dungeon when you go deeper - and can later scrounge for scrolls (which kind of makes her a caster class as well). Many items have multiple uses: You can use a thighbone you find for combat or sacrifice it at a firepit for a health-boon. Potions can be drank, hurled at enemies or poured onto things. The seven classes each have a specialty:

• Squire: Offense in combat
• Tribal: Defense in combat
• Apprentice: Magical spells
• Alchaemist: Potions
• Scholar: Lore and nerdery and some spells
• Sacrifice: None, this is the difficult class
• Huntsman: Crafting and cooking

The project started out as a generic dungeon in a medieval world. When I made more characters and enemies, the world started taking a more unique shape. The Swine Pit, the dungeon of the game, became a hellish hole in the ground filled with demon-posessed swine-creatures and their retainers. My fandom of Darkest Dungeon definetly shows in a lot of the descriptions.

I'm also quite proud that the majority of monsters have special moves that go beyond direct attacks: Some may beat your weapon out of your hands, some can destroy armour, some displace themselves, steal your mana or HP or regenerate or steal food from your pack. Same goes for bosses: At the very least they have special attacks and two of the boss fights can be outright avoided if you have the right tactics or items. Speaking of items: Some of them are incredibly powerful and once you master the game these are the ones you want to keep for specific situations such as boss fights. Even the final boss can be two-shotted with the right spell.

What doesn't work?

Twine is, as I said, not made for making a game like this. Besides the total lack of a visualized map (draw your own - the game does provide grid-coordinates in every room), monsters are mostly immobile. There are some exceptions: 

• The second boss enemy moves about in a specific area, a trick that I learned making Zombie Mansion. The process is too complex and unreliable to be used at scale with regular enemies though - especially when considering that the boss level is curated and walls and passages are always the same, unlike on regular floors that are totally randomized.
• The enemy types of Madman and Infected Madman sometimes just "run off into the darkness". I stayed vague on purpose: The game doesn't know how to respect walls in this instance and just places the creature and its HP in a random different room. Works for a creature that is insane and incoherent, but not for other enemies. It can also lower the total number of enemies on the floor because it will overwrite the monster in its target room - so I had to use this ability sparingly.
• There are some mobile monsters on the floor of the third boss but they are rather buggy and sometimes do not move at all.

Twine is also not the best for testing your software. I did make a test-character who can jump to the next level at will and has all possible items in his inventory but even then it's a chore to test, say the final boss fight on floor 25 multiple times. That means that the later stages tend to have more issues with them. As I wanted the boss fights to be special, it was difficult to do QA there.

You can't go back up to a floor you've finished. This is because the floors are randomized during transition. Story-wise I made it so that you actually jump down into the darkness every time and there is no way to climb back up. That takes away some of the tactical options a roguelike might have, such as going back to a trader. But it can't be helped.

There is no way to save the game. I am aware that other versions of Twine have features for that but to be honest, I can't be bothered to learn another programming language after putting all that work into regular vanilla Twine 1. I'm still angry with the makers of Twine 2 going "well, we made it and most of the codes work like programming language X so whatever go figure it out" when the target audience for Twinery is people who specifically cannot code. I got my start with a blog post by Anna Enthropy and learned from there but please, people, don't assume that you make this tool for other coders.

I have another Twine game in the works - a sequel to Zombie Mansion. As the platform is what I've become proficient with, I will likely keep using it as a creative outlet. Also, I'll keep making (more professionally coded) games with Niels. We do totally need an artist though - our pixel art doesn't cut it in the long run.

Evangelion as gaming inspiration

A few weeks ago I re-watched Neon Genesis Evangelion. It came to me that this would be awesome material for a deep roleplaying game: Every player being a board-member of a society tasked with defending mankind against an unknowable and almost godlike foe. Everyone having their own secret agenda. Dealing with the stupid shenanigans of your immature pilots who keep fucking up and making things worse whenever not in the cockpit.

So I started making that game for myself. It's going to be a journalling experience for solo players when it's done – I simply do not have the free time or mental capacity left to make a campaign like that as a pen&paper-RPG for my friends. Thus far I've been testing the combat system and the balancing of the Evas Titans that NERV the Kaijuu Boueigun (Kaiju Defense Force – KDF) fields. Kaiju and Titans alike have an ATP PMS-Field, the Projection Manifestation Simulacrum, which makes things of that size work by de facto magic. The Titans may not be fuelled by anyone's mother's souls (a concept that even my seven-year-old derided as stupid when I explainde Evangelion to him), but they are actually the twin of the pilot (but changed). This is a handy concept because it also explains why the Kaijuu Boueigun sends 14-year-olds to war – that's how long the technology has been around and that's how long it takes for a Titan to reach maturity.

Unlike in Evangelion, conventional weapons can be of some help in my game. Thus, whenever the Titans are damaged or insufficiently armed, the JSDF can be asked to provide support in the form of tanks, air strikes, attack helicopters or tactical nuclear weaponry. These use favour-points though and should thus be fielded very sparingly. Also: These things are weak. A group of 12 tanks has 1 HP, some minor chance of surviving a hit and deal 1 damage. Most Angels Kaiju will soak like 5 damage per round of combat or be completely immune to conventional weaponry.

I've so far played through six encounters with angels Kaiju. Combat seems to work (but I will keep going with that campaign in order to test more Kaiju as I make them up). I'm also working on the social system that is going to be much of the game: The pilots causing trouble, having difficult relationships with one another and then traitorous adults in your ranks like military liaisons pushing for more conventional warfare, industrialists wanting robots instead of Titans and of course the crazy dude who just wants to liquefy all of mankind.

It's actually great fun to journal this sort of thing. Might acutally finish this one and put it up on Itch. Definetly doing to do some play-reports here.

How big does a dungeon need to be?

 When it comes to dungeon sizes in games, the differences are vast. From a design perspective, the bigger of a dungeon you create, the smaller the level of detail you can put into each room. I've been experimenting a lot with world sizes in my games. The trick is to make a few rooms seem a lot bigger. But how do we do that?

Current video game project and Darkest Dungeon

Niels and I have been working on our latest video game. We've successfully collaborated before: I still love Choose Your Own CaveVenture and Low Res Dungeoneer was nice considering the short time we had during that game jam. What we're currently working on still doesn't have a title (CyoCV didn't have one until rather late either). When I first made up the mechanics, I jokingly called it Martest Dungeon, because it is my own take on Darkest Dungeon's excellent design and theme. I do hope, the joke-title doesn't stick though. Red Hook Studios might have something bad or lawyery to say about that.

Anyway, some thoughts on the design. First of all, I like the feel of Darkest Dungeon a lot, specifically the cast of vaguely historic badasses. When I read that some fan at some event asked the devs, what time the game was set in, I thought "What a fool! It's The Past, obviously!" You have a crusader, a dude with a flintlock pistol, a musketeer and a beak-masked plague doctor all fighting alongside. And it works. So I made up my own cast of vaguely historic badasses (although I did copy the plague doctor – you don't get around their iconic masks when going this route).

As my dungeon project started it conceptual life as a solo card game, characters are more simple than those in Darkest Dungeon. Every one of them has a maximum of three *things* about them. As combat is done by the party as a whole (same for groups of monsters), some characters have one of their things being that they add one point to the overall attack value. Roll a D6 on or under that attack value and the enemy party receives a point of damage. Base damage for the heroes is 1.

The party always acts as one: You get a pool of attack points and you distribute damage to whoever you want. You can generally only use one special skill in an action (although there is a character who changes that). Yet, characters interact in interesting ways, a well-composed party will be able to do tremendous effects both offensively as well as defensively.

Every hero only has 1 HP - lose  that and they are wounded. That means they are still part of the group but cannot use any of their attributes. They can, however, be healed in several ways, some of them coming from other party members, some from rooms of the dungeon. Also you can heal a wounded character in the village after you return. Some characters have mana points to fuel special abilities, some have special abilities to refill those for other characters.

In Darkest Dungeon there are a lot of ressources to balance while exploring the dungeon: Health, stress, money, light, firewood, food, experience and some less essential ones as well. Thinking about a card game I simplyfied things for my game: There is health, mana and monster tokens (effectively money). Exploration is linear, there are no branches but you can go back if need be. There is no escaping the dungeon once you entered: You need to make it out on the other end of nine rooms/encounters. There you can decide to go home or go deeper. Do the latter and you get another nine rooms

We currently have a working prototype with some features active, others have yet to be implemented. I do have the problem of graphic assets to solve. If anyone is interested in drawing tons of gothic badasses and creepy locations: Feel free to contact me.

In the pipeline

The year had ended. I have been busy with new responsibilities at work and two kids at home. But yet there is the spark of creativity that creates needs that must be fulfilled. I have crafted some things for my older son but those are of no consequence for this blog. What is however is, what I have in the pipeline: A new video game and the third piece for my cardboard arcade.

Forms of Game and the Roguelike

When I started MadZabGaming, I did so with the intend to go into the full spectrum of gaming. I still hold by that sentiment and can look back on a diverse portfolio of things I have created games-wise. People who know me personally know that I love me a good roguelike. I like to explore and when I create a roguelike, the procedural world-generation can surprise even me as its creator.

Crafting: Cup Quest

When a colleague accidentally destroyed my mug at work, I was distraught: It had been a gift from my wife for my first ever father's day as a dad (which is, what it said on the mug: "DAD". I had defended it fiercely against other people in our office). I had get myself a replacement. I decided to design one myself, like I had done for my son: Get a blank steel mug and etch something into it using my power tool. While his cup got the logo of his then favorite TV show, I wanted to make something gamey for myself.

This is Cup Quest. It's a game you can play on your mug, using, as my son pointed out, just your finger. I even fitted the entirety of the rules onto the cup along with the maze. Now, it's just a maze with several different points you need to go to but my four-year-old likes it and it looks cool enough at the office. Also it's a little show-off in simplicity of game design: You could fit the rules into an original-length tweet three times over.

Now you're in luck, dear fives of readers: In order to keep my meager coding muscles from total atrophy, I decided to make a Twine version of Cup Quest. So you can play the game as well, from the comfort of your computer, perhaps with less graphics but with a lot more words instead. Stay tuned for a release extremely soon!

Crafting: Höhlenabenteuer/Cave Adventure

The basic idea behind this was making a kid-friendly version of We're Going On A Fucking Adventure. Not only did I want to cut out most of the violence, I also wanted to make the game much more simple so that I could play it with my son (who is four years old right now). We both do still like to explore caves and dungeons, so this game keeps the theme.

The game itself is basically a riddle and can be played by one player alone. Sometimes it's difficult to solve the cave, sometimes it's rather easy. And in very, very rare cases, it's actually impossible. Still, it's fun and children won't see the obvious solutions, instead just going for it and generating interesting situations that the four kid-protagonists have to get out of.

The four kids are basic kid-story-archetypes, each having one special ability and one weakness. It's often all about avoiding the monsters and perhaps setting up a multi-player-trap to catch them. The game is completely cooperative and I am quite pleased with it. I entered it into a game developers competition and am as of right now waiting for results. Wish me luck!

Crafting: Der Dornengarten/The Thorn Garden

This game book has been in the making for a looong time. I had written most of the pages quite a while ago but this summer I went and did the drudgery of randomizing the page numbers and still keeping the page jumps intact. I have yet to give the book a true and serious look in order to make sure that there are not errors of style or numbering. Still I'm pround of what I made there:

The book is a non-linear fairy tale. It's basically a classic choose-your-own-adventure but it has a twist: On the inside of the cover, there are markings with letters and numbers that you can mark with paper clips. That way, the book essentially gets RAM:

This means, the book can remember things and have them be obscure to the player/reader at the same time. The thing is: The maze this story takes place in, is different every time you read it. In order to make that work, I needed to craft some tools before writing the actual text:

Every time you read this book, you will need to find a new way through the maze and will encounter other characters and have different conversations. And your decisions matter. At the same time, you can always retrace your steps and the whole thing stays consistent in its topography. I'm quite proud of that working and in theory one could take the structure and put other stories into it, now that the base work has been done. I'm planning on pitching this to a publisher some day.

Crafting: Captain Pischer's Gold

The first little project I'd like to talk about is a small board game I made for my son. The title Captain Pischer's Gold is an insider between the two of us from the early days of his current pirate phase. Captain Pischer, you must know, is a crazy and very dangerous pirate who likes to piss himself because that's just how little of a fuck he gives.

I wanted to make a board game for my son, when I had this little box of chocolate we got for Easter. It was a nice and compact size and I decided to fit a game into it. The game itself is a simple ladder-game: You roll dice and hope to get on fields that go forwards rather  than falling back. The goal is reaching the treasure first. It's completely random but when you play with a 3-year-old, that's the only way to ensure a fair game.

You start on the boat and make your way over the beach, through the jungle, into the cave.

The crafting is, in this case, a work of love: Every third of the foldable game board is made out of several layers of thin cardboard and the connections are made from medicinal silk weave so that they don't break when folded over and over again. The gold chest opens up and there are actual round gold pieces glued into place that I made of the gold inlay that the chocolate was resting on.

This is probably the smallest project of my current crafting streak but it was also the first an I enjoyed making it. If your kids likes something and you enjoy board games: Make a themed game for them. It's not that hard!

Crafting: Analog Adventures

So, some of my fives of readers might be wondering: "What is MadZab doing? Has he stopped creating things? Has family life finally overtaken his creative urges? How do we fix the gaping gaps in societes the world over?" I can answer the first two questions. The answer to the second one is "No! Even if I wanted to, I couldn't!" and the answer to the first is a bit more complex.

I've had several distinct phases of creating things in my life and I am currently in an analogue phase. That means: What I am creating, is nothing that can be replicated and shared as easily as, say, a pdf or a Twine game. I've been writing and crafting. I think this trend started out with We're Going On A Fucking Adventure (which still needs a decently written rulebook but recent experiences might empower me to finally get to that), where my Roguelike-phase came into the physical world.

Now, I've had a fascination for physical objects for gaming for a while. And I've loved crafting since I was first able to hold a pen and a pair of scissors. Over the next few days I'll use this small series to introduce the projects I've more or less finished over the past few months. They include (so far) a mechanical cardboard pinball machine, two board games for my son, and a game book that I still need to proof read and then select a part of to pitch to a publisher. Stay tuned.

WGOAFA: A Dev-Diary of Sorts

So after my unboxing, I've been digging my claws into my board game, trying to get out the last kinks so I can finally click that check-box in the store on Gamecrafter to release it to the public. The errors I have found so far are pretty much all my fault, not the print on demand place's, so I can actually address them by going back into the graphics files and fixing them for a re-upload. Here's what I found and did so far:

WE'RE GOING ON A FUCKING ADVENTURE: Prototype unboxing

Hi everyone, another half-year has passed without a posting from me. That is because life sometimes gets in the way of hobbies. I haven't been idle, however, and we finalized graphics for the board game project I have been on-and-off working on over the past three years. Long time readers may remember it. Everyone else: Take a look at that link and then come back. Seen it? Good, now buckle up and get ready for an unboxing of the first printed prototype of the thing. The artwork by Julia Stein, a good friend and excellent artist, together with good-quality cards from The Game Crafter
have made the following possible:

WE'RE GOING ON A FUCKING ADVENTURE is a cooperative board game for one to five players. It's about dungeon-exploration, monster-fighting, loot-looting and character-upgrading. In the end you fight a dragon – if you get that far. It brings the fun of a dungeon-crawl RPG to a table of people who may have no pen-and-paper-experience and doesn't even require a game master. It'll be print-on-demand so customers in the US are going to be at an advantage for now.

I hope to finalize details and get rid of smaller errors over the next couple of weeks and then it'll become available through the Game Crafter web store. I may at some point do a print-run for the European market but we'll see how things work out. I'm not a salesperson and have no intention to load myself with a basement full of board games. But perhaps another solution will present itself in time.

If you want to give the game a try, I'll be at the next Nordcon where you can check it out.

Free Release: Midnight at Halcyon's Coven 2016

After the One Page Dungeon Contest 2016 is over it's time to revisit my first foray into that competition: Midnight at Halcyon's Coven was a mess so I decided to re-make it. Using all I have learned about making One Page Dungeons, I cleaned it up. Let me elaborate.

The original had three specific problems: Problem 1 was way too much work I put into the 3D-rendering of the bunker and its furniture. Hours upon hours went into coffee-mugs and desk lamps that would be invisible in the finished product. That work however, has been done and this is not a problem for the reader - so nothing's to be done about that.

Problem 2 is that ugly frame. It was supposed to make the whole page look more professionally lay-outed but it makes large swaths of text harder to read. While the new version looks a bit less stylish without it as I have not found a good replacement, having no frame is better than that one.

Problem 3 is the most glaring one: Way, way too much text. I left nothing to the imagination of whoever is running this adventure and that was very foolish. The large amount of text gives unnecessary details and forces the font to a tiny size that's a terrible chore to read. I cut it back to the bare necessity. So, I hereby proudly present to you:

Midnight at Halcyon's Coven 2016

One Page Dungeon Contest 2016 - Sneak Peek

So, the One Page Dungeon Contest 2016 is around the corner. Deadline is May 1st, so there is some time left. This year I'm working on something quite special. Here's a little sneak peek of my work in progress:

It's been three years since my last entry in that competition. Back then I made several rather big mistakes I'd like to address here.

What I've been working on...

So here's, what I've been (next to my new real-life-feedin'-the-family-job) working on: A board-game roguelike. I'll give out some more details after more testing with my hand-made prototype. Here's a sneak-peak at how the game looks in action:

Not the first of its kind. But it's mine.

The game so far features:
-Variable Characters with different race-, skill- and attribute-cards.
-Randomized monsters with different sets of ability- and stat-cards.
-Lots of loot-cards including weapons, armor, spells and more.
-A 5 x 5 tile dungeon to be explored. Featuring obstacles, traps, monsters and treasure.
-A simple  yet elegant XP system that allows for single- or multiplayer-campaigns.

Release: Choose your own CaveVenture

It is done! Choose your own CaveVenture, our first actual PC game, is now available on itch.io!

It's free, so if you're on a Windows-machine, go try out this crossbreed of choose-your-own-adventure and roguelike. Unlike many of the more complicated roguelikes, CyoCV plays using an interface that anyone who reads English can understand and play: Text tells you what the situation is, then you get options what to do. Pick an option, hit the key it says on the screen, enter and the game tells you what happens.

The title-screen ASCII-art - all the graphics in the game.

The Baumannshöhle, my inspiration for the game's cave. Picture is public domain via Wikipedia.

Go, check it out, leave any feedback in the comments on this post.

Thanks!

Choose your own CaveVenture: Announcement!

Okay, here it comes: The roguelike we've been working on for quite a while, with me leaking some thoughts on the design process every now and then, will, baring a disaster of civilizaton-destroying force, be released this coming Sunday, January 12th 2014. Let's talk about what the game does, shall we?

Choose your own CaveVenture, which was the work-in-progress title but kinda stuck, is a roguelike with the classical theme of exploring an underground cave, but with the interface of a choose your own adventure. That means that instead of traditional top-down ASCII-graphics and/or tilesets or a 3D-enine, the entirety of the game will work with descriptions of the player's surroundings and what happens, while the controls offer you options of what you can (attempt to) do.

This may seem like a very primitive way of doing things at first but it does have some advantages over the classical roguelike:

-You do not need to memorize half your keyboard worth of functions. What you can do will be, with some exceptions of general things, always visible on the interface. This makes the game extremely easy to learn, even for non-gamers.

-As description and game-view are the same, you do not so easily miss things like descriptions of audio and such, as may happen in other roguelikes.

-Accessibility. The game can be played by the visually impaired with a screen-reader as those programs are designed to read lines of text.

All you'll need to play the release version of the game will be a Python 2 compatible decompiler, which can be got here (make sure to get a Python 2 version, as Python 3 is not backwards-compatible).

Anyways, come back on Sunday to get the game, while we put some finishing touches on version 1.0!

Making a Roguelike: Magic Systems

As our roguelike nears its grand reveal, let me talk about magic in the game.

Magic needs to be mysterious. Magic needs to be weird. Magic needs to be hard to grasp. Otherwise it's not magic. In our game, as with many traditional roguelikes, magic comes in the form of things with randomized effects. As the main character is an illiterate, mundane person, there are no scrolls or spells to be learned. The three categories of magical artifact are: Potions, shrines, and amulets. Each of these three has a different way of activating them (and none of them can be activated by accident), each may have positive, negative, or mixed effects, and each has a distinctive way of being identified beforehand.

As I wrote before, the main characters illiteracy means that there are no scrolls and thus no typical "scroll of identify" to find out what the item you have found does. As the game is somewhat short and it is unlikely to encounter the same magical artifact multiple times, trial-and-error is a bad idea with potions. Well, it would seem like it is a bad idea to drink unknown fluids you find in a cave anyways but here that is somewhat enforced. Amulets may be a very helpful thing, but they also might be cursed, putting a negative effect on you, preventing you from using another amulet, and being generally nasty (and the way to get rid of them is very rare to be found). Shrines may be the domain of demonic entities, which will make your life harder if you attempt to contact them as praying to them might constitute agreeing to contracts that are not beneficial to you and your survival.