Dungeon Crawlers

In the Gameboy Advance homebrew scene, there's a recent release that's worth your time to check out. (If you don't have a GBA or Nintendo DS with the equipment to play homebrew, don't worry, you can play this in the VisualBoy Advance emulator.) The game is called Anguna, and it's basically an extremely polished mini-Zelda.


Although the game isn't a Roguelike, this is relevant to Dungeon Crawlers for several reasons. First, to point out that Zelda-type games are dungeon crawls too, and it actually is possible to create a randomly generated game that's replayable many times. By using a custom pseudorandom number generator, you can even number the different available games.

I'd also like to draw attention to the absolutely gorgeous pixel art. BYOND is a tile-based engine; games this beautiful should be a lot more common than they are. I've learned some techniques from the Pixel Art guild, and there's obviously still a lot to learn. Take a look at the nuances in the brickwork, including the occasional missing/crumbling section of brick. My favorite PC game ever had pixel art of this quality.

Playing through this game is a rewarding experience, and doesn't take all that long. (Gameplay is closer to 4-6 hours, vs. about 18-24 to get through Zelda.) It doesn't hold your hand or tell you what to do, just thrusts you into the thick of things with a simple, intuitive interface. It's worth seeing especially for the hope of getting your imagination going, which I think the scenery really does well.

Imagine a BYOND Roguelike looking this good. It's not only possible, it's well within BYOND's capabilities. I'm as much a fan of ASCII art as the next guy, but this is the kind of game, in terms of visuals and smart design choices, I'd like to see more of on BYOND.

               _______________________
              /                       \         ___
             /                         \ ___   /   \      ___
            /            RIP            \   \  :   :     /   \
           /                             \  : _;,,,;_    :   :
          /       Dungeon Crawlers        \,;_          _;,,,;_
         |                                 |   ___
         |           was killed            |  /   \
         |     on Monday, May 05, 2008     |  :   :
         |                                 | _;,,,;_   ____
         |               by                |          /    \
         |                                 |          :    :
         |      a lack of enthusiasm       |          :    :
         |                                 |         _;,,,,;_
         |                                 |
         |  Let's see some more activity!  |
         |                                 |
        *|   *     *     *    *   *     *  | *
________)/\\_)_/___(\/___(//_\)/_\//__\\(/_|_)_______

Hear ye, hear ye! By royal decree of His Majesty Lord Noodlebaum CXCVII, Defender of Puffy Pants and Disco, let it be known that all able-bodied men and women and youth and anthropomorphic whatevers (the latter being less encouraged than the formers) are requested to join His Majesty's Royally Awesome Dungeoneering Squadron of Combat Journalism for the princely sum of kudos and applause!

Dungeon Crawlers is not just a BYOND guild; we accept all forms of literature, including roguelike development articles, reviews of non-BYOND dungeon crawling games, and even just little handy concepts for you to include in your own BYOND dungeon crawler games. The goal is to make BYOND a place where anyone can go dungeon crawling with the best of them, but given the shortage of BYOND games of the genre, there's no sense in limiting our material.

If you have some activity in the roguelike or dungeon-crawling world to report, report it here!

Here I am, back again with a new dungeon generator. This one is so much better than my other one. Here is an example of a dungeon generated by it. You'll notice that there are many loops, unlike the previous one.

You can set any of the following variables to change the dungeon created:



I may very well release the source to this. ;)

This challenge has been on Temple of the Roguelike for a while now, but I thought I'd mention it here.

What is a 7DRL?

A Seven Day Roguelike is a roguelike created in seven days. This means the author stopped developing it 168 hours after starting.

The idea behind 7DRLs is forcing developers to finish a showable product instead of adding features endlessly to their grandiose, never to be released projects, a common pattern in the roguelike development world.

Incidentally, they are also useful as a way to test new ideas as non-traditional, experimental, scrapable roguelikes, thus allowing the genre to expand beyond its barriers.

Further details can be found on the site, but what may interest BYOND fans is this rule:

You CAN use external libraries, game engines, pre-existing generic code/algorithms, pre-existing generic art, etc. You can even start your game from an existing game, if you are willing to turn it out into something unique, you must however say what resources were reused.

Well, the first draft of my first attempt at dungeon generation is done.

For an example, see http://www.tibbius.com/users/koil/dungeon.txt

Each dungeon is handled by a /dungeon datum, and each feature (such as corridor, a circular room, a square room, etc) is handled by a /feature datum. The /dungeon holds all of it's /features, and each /feature has a parent variable linking it to the /feature it was connected to. So you could take any point in the dungeon, and trace back to the center.

However, I'm not very happy with it. You see that there are plenty of dead ends, which I don't like that much. It's also a bit slow, and it doesn't make very good loops. Therefore, I am going to write another one that will hopefully be much better.

I'll post about it when I finish. ;)