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[Chris83]

Hello All,

I released my first game this fall called The Lair of Xar which is a realtime roguelike with pixel graphics.

Here's a link to the trailer (HD):




The project can be found here:
http://www.cniska.net/tlox/

The game is FREE so feel free to download it and give it a try!



Who am I?

I'm a 28 year old web developer from Helsinki, Finland. I work for a company that provides a variety of clients with advanced web applications. I have experience in programming with PHP, JavaScript, Java and ActionScript3. I also have extensive experience in working with frameworks and libraries. I want to improve myself as a developer and expand my knowledge beyond web application development. To achieve this I spend my evenings about learning game development.

Development

TLOX is my first real game development project. The game isn't built on any game framework or library, instead I've written everything from scratch. The reason why I choose to do this was because I wanted to learn everything from top to bottom. The game itself could surely be improved a lot and keep in mind that this is a first version. I have plans to rewrite the engine from scratch using the knowledge that I've gathered during this project in order to improve the code quality. TLOX was developed during a period of one year.

The engine

The project consists of two parts, the engine itself and the game that implements the engine. The engine follows the traditional inheritance pattern and provides the following features among others:

• Separated update and rendering logic
• Event dispatching and listening
• Simple scene management
• Simple tilemap engine
• Simple GUI
• Bitmap fonts

Story

TLOX is an action role playing game with randomly generated content. Your task is to slay an evil minotaur named Xar who has ravaged the villages near his lair. To challenge Xar you must first make your way to the final floor where he resides. Along the way you will find items and power-ups to help you accomplish this task. Are you ready to face the might of Xar?

Thank you for reading.

Please leave your thoughts below.

[Core Xii]

I'm thinking... I'm not playing a Java game.

It's legitimate feedback.

[LDuncan]

So, I tried your game out. I thought it had potential, but I don't think it really worked as a "realtime" roguelike. It became a game of how-fast-can-I-spam-the-arrow-key. I kinda felt like... as a roguelike, it missed the point of roguelikes. Does that make sense? I'm not trying to be mean--I hope this is helpful. Some of the reasons I love roguelikes are the strategy and sense of danger... Anything can kill me and I expect to die. A lot. And I expect it to take me quite a while to learn how best to survive. With the realtime aspect introduced, it lost a lot of the strategy and became mad button-mashing. Stats like DPS didn't make any sense because if I could just button mash faster, I could output more damage. The sense of danger was gone because if I felt I was outnumbered, I could just mash faster and come out relatively unscathed. It just felt like the solution to everything was "mash faster."

And, I suppose the thing that was really telling... I couldn't wait to die. I was ecstatic when I finally died. Because my finger joints were KILLING me from all the button mashing.

Still, I think it was probably a good exercise to try out. I've toyed with the idea of a realtime roguelike before, but I think this highlighted some of the problems inherent in doing that. If you change the turn-based nature of a roguelike, there are other changes that need to be made in order to compensate.

Is this the game that "green" from these forums was doing the graphics for?

[Chris83]

Thanks for the feedback, as I said all feedback is more than welcome.

Regarding the realtime aspect, the weapons do have different attack speeds and you cannot just hit the keyboard like crazy. The amount of blows you do will still be the same as if you'd held down the key. In other words it doesn't matter if you hold down the key, hit it like crazy or hit it as often as the attack cooldown allows you to attack.

If you wish to try this out try to vary between a sword an a mace. The sword allows you to attack once every 200ms while the mace only allows you to hit twice a second. Of course the weapons are different in other ways as well, a sword will provide a constant damage while the mace has chance to deal massive damage.

[deathtotheweird]

not bad for a first game from scratch. found a bit boring though.

it was impossible to tell the difference from a wall and just nothing so I kept trying to move into black spaces even though it was clearly a wall. there was just no indication.

the enemy and player sprites weren't bad but the dungeon was terrible to look at. dull colors, occasionally a broken tile here or there. very boring.

I agree with the others about the real-time bit. I did not enjoy that. Being a fan of rogue-likes this did bother me. The mace was impossible to be successful with, since I kept missing hits and with the slow speed you really couldn't afford to. I found it a lot easier to be successful with swords.

but I only got to level 4. I got tired of spamming my keys and seeing the same thing over and over. so I just ran hoping to make it to the next floor to see if there was anything interesting and I got surrounded and died. There was no sound either so that added to the boredom.

[LDuncan]

hold down the key

Haha, yeah, I didn't even think of that  I guess it's just not something I'm used to doing in the roguelikes I play.

And I agree with allen--it was very difficult to tell what was a wall and what was empty space.

[Xardov]

I like the graphics. 

[Evan Balster]

Important:  think very carefully about whether you'd rather be making engines or games.  If it's genuinely the former, that's legitimately okay.  But otherwise don't get caught in the trap of developing your tech way beyond what you need.

[Chris83]

I can understand that it feels a bit different when its realtime. The reason why I choose to make it realtime was that I planned on implementing multiplayer at some point. I really don't see how a turn-based multiplayer roguelike could work.

About the graphics, I was actually planning on displaying walls around the borders but I ran out of time and didn't have time to figure out an efficient way to do this. This is on my to-do list though and I totally agree with allen.

Thanks for the comments. I really appreciate it.