"Give a Soul insufficient faith, and it becomes paralyzed in apathy. Drown it in zeal, and the weight of its duty comes to immobilize it. I strive to walk the line between."

The Games Foxes Play

(complete source code | view all previous posts)

Not as productive as last week, but that did allow me to do some things with my free time than don't involve standing motionless in front of a monitor.

• An animation queue has been added. In the style of Rift Wizard/Cogmind, it memorizes all actions this turn, and plays quick animations for each one. Perfect for laser beams and soul draining!

• Very basic creature "AI" has been added. When it is a creature's turn to act, they will look through all of their available Soul casts. Each one is valued as being "positive" (should be cast on self/allies) or "negative" (should be cast on foes). The creature looks at how many foes it can penalize and how many allies it can boost with one cast, and if nothing is particularly interesting (calculated score does not exceed the threshold), it moves instead, hopefully putting itself in range for a better cast.

• When a creature runs out of Souls by having been drained too many times, it flips over and becomes unable to act. This is not death - death does not exist in TGFP and creatures are never removed. Breathing Souls inside a motionless husk will revive it.

Quick demonstration. There is a little offset in the soul drain animation I have yet to figure out, and the lack of proper pathfinding means creatures tend to get stuck on obstacles. Still, you can observe here Epsilon with a simple beam attack, as well as "Cosmos Worn as Robes" the moth with their beam harpoon, melee drain and occasional dash.

"The gate has opened, revealing the arrays of pistons and tubes within. One seal broken, one more nail in the coffin of the Old World."

• Unraveled Seal description

The Games Foxes Play (github | view all previous posts | play online in browser on itch.io!)

My motivation had been wavering in November, causing a long month of very little updates. How strange, considering how rent free my game's lore and mechanics had lived in my head during that time. This week, I asked myself, "Why didn't I feel like actually putting in the work?"

I figured it out. My game was too disconnected. It had these cool robot snakes, these laser beams, these epic towers with creatures punching the daylights out of each other, but it didn't feel like a place that actually had a physical presence. You weren't exploring some techno-spiritual dungeon, you were solving puzzles clearly labeled as "level 1" or "level 6" like it's some bus commute mobile game.

This week, I devoted myself to fixing this. No, it's not what I had planned in my last post. My lifeblood is chaos and my style is spontaneity. Design documents? Never heard of them.

HyperRogue's Got a Contender

The most important feature was a complete overhaul of the way the game generates rooms. Now, leaving a room does not cause its existence to vaporize out of the program's memory, and every single cube your @ explores is neatly stored inside a World object. This means it is now possible to retrace your steps back to any previously explored location! Consider it the equivalent to this mystical "up-staircase" that befuddles so many roguelike developers.

Additionally, my game is no longer a linear corridor of utter boredom, but rather a twisted, sprawling maze. Each time a door is passed, a new room is generated and added to the world, while the previous ones remain in memory. This means two things: first, the dungeon is infinite, and second, it laughs in the face of the feeble laws of three dimensional space. Going in a loop pattern (→↓←↑) will result in reaching a completely different location than the original room. This latter mechanic is the result of me being too lazy to program an actual room matrix that makes sense reinforcing the atmosphere that the corridors of Faith's End truly embody the meaning of "mind over matter", fitting for its nature as a divinity's dream. I want the player to feel lost, and to occasionally ask themselves "wait, that didn't make sense..." while trying to parse the structure of the dungeon in their minds. For the game's setting to succeed, its world must feel "convincingly fake".

Okay. Maybe I'm just hyping myself up over some "it's not a bug, it's a feature" kind of deal. As I continue development, I will decide whether I want sensible room geometry or not. It would certainly make a minimap much easier to implement.

Dying (my game is still a roguelike, you have very limited extra lives, it's a whole mechanic) will also whisk you off to a completely new location, and delete the World object's maze you met your demise in, replacing it with a fresh one. You will not be returning to that previous location without external help. Right when you start to feel a sense of familiarity and knowing your way around a few rooms, all it takes is a careless battle to go back to prodding in the darkness. I imagine Faith's End as this planetary-sized brutalist complex of dull stone and metal, so incredibly massive each reincarnation draws you thousands of kilometers away from your death point.

As always, demonstration.

This implementation challenged my neurons quite significantly, and it caused a few weird quirks. I am grateful for the commenters from yesterday's thread - thanks to the advice I received, I figured out that the invisible player clones were in fact the player entity getting "saved" alongside everything else in the room just before the room transition actually happens. Now, I made it so the Player entity isn't saved upon leaving a room, which seems to have fixed the issue in a much cleaner way! As for the "player phased out until they move" bug, I realized that this was because the player entity was actually getting placed in the previous room they just came from, and that the real position was only updated after calling the move function. I changed the player spawning function to be based off the level itself instead of arbitrary coordinates, and now it works like a charm!

The Illusion of Choice

Now, of course, there is the issue that in an infinite space, there is no difference between going left, right or forwards. A player who has understood the true nature of Faith's End could simply go in random directions and constantly uncover uncharted lands, never bothering to retrace their steps. While that illusion of choice does fit well with the game's lore, I have a plan to make one's path through the dungeon more meaningful... stay tuned.