Python importing is giving me a headache. I can't work this out without circular importing, unless I want to pass a list of ubiquitous variables in every single function every single time.

Toying around with the Pygcurse library. While it's convenient, all the fonts I've tried so far look incredibly ugly. Forced anti-alias and absurd spacing, which is disappointing for a text-based library.



The good thing is, it doesn't seem to demand massive rewriting if I chose to use it.

Very interesting in a nerdy way. Sometimes it can be surprising how much thought there's gone into what seems like trivial details. One of those cases of "if it's done right, nobody will notice it's there".

Most of the boring stuff is rewritten, and it seems to hold together so far. You can explore the world, talk/trade with people, use alchemy, plant some herbs. After this, it'll be time to brainstorm the gameplay more precisely.

I'm going to think out loud a bit: You start in a cave with some ready-made potions in your inventory. It works as a sort of combat tutorial, but in the loosest sense of the word: I don't mean pop-ups and "now move over here", just a short glimpse of what it's like. It throws you straight in the action, which is fitting because you'll have to start over regularly, and it also increases the 'wow' factor when you find out there's more to the game than dungeon dwelling. I figure caves wouldn't go down/up like in the usual roguelike style, they'd be connected in 1-4 cardinal directions. That style hasn't been explored in roguelikes very often, so there's a lot of new ground to cover and quirks to invent, such as enemies holding keys to the doors in each direction. In the end you'd arrive at the overworld with the two villages I mentioned earlier.

Each village has privately owned farms. You need to book yourself in a village, which will allow you to farm/sleep/store items there. Certain villages only support certain plants depending on the climate and some other restrictions - as for the first two villages, one only accepts Rhoadasin and the other only Hyazine. Their culture revolves around farming, and they have a love-hate relationship. Before the nearby bridge broke down, they were frequently under attack, and they needed each other's products for defending.

The first thing to do is to rebuild the bridge so you can reach the first "real" cave. Enemies don't invade villages until the bridge's up; it makes sense plot-wise and reduces the amount of mechanics thrown at a new player's face. A merchant travels back and forth between the villages, bringing one town's goods to the other. His business has been slow without the monster attacks, so he secretly wants an outsider to rebuild it. He'll sell you some black market bridge-building equipment once you have enough valuables. The economy is purely trade-based, so you'll have to learn how to grow and mix stuff before you can proceed.

I'm thinking of the design in the terms of an average player and a hardcore one who goes for self-imposed challenges. The first could acquaintaince themselves with the villages, talk to the people and so on, the latter might just want to speedrun for the bridge by growing stuff in the starter cave (which is risky and requires more micromanaging but is more productive). Rather than hard-coding a "normal" and a "hard" mode, I'd like to embed the choices in the gameplay that way.

I've posted quite a few teaser screenshots, but I'm hoping to have something playable up soon.

The Archer devlog is a good example of an interesting devlog. Regular updates clearly showing the author's thought process.

It's a curses library that uses pygame, so it would be a totally different approach and would require you to also learn pygame, but might scale easier for a large project AND would allow you to manipulate your graphics like images instead of text: meaning easy manipulation of size, rotation, added color, alpha values. 

Ah, I'm actually quite experienced with Pygame already, it's my default choice of library when I'm doing games or graphical stuff with Python. As for Panacea, I'm using it for real-time keyboard input and music playback.

I like to do things the hard way, since self-imposed limitations tend to boost creativity, but sometimes I'm not sure myself if I'm just being stubborn. Pygcurse could come in handy though (I'm looking at the colored text and non-flickery output), so thanks for the heads-up.

Struggling with bullshit errors, such as classes refusing to behave like OOP and prompts being displayed inconsistently. Structure-wise, the new code is cleaner and generalized, so I guess the net sanity will be positive. I think I'll just work around them for now.

Some song stubs here.

File A contains classes, File B creates an instance of one of those classes and sends it to a function in File C for processing. Somewhere along the way, the class loses its elementary __getitem__ attribute and throws an AttributeError. However, File D succeeds where File B disappoints me.

Apparently I've stumbled on some really obscure and equally frustrating error, I can't find relevant info from Google.

It bugs me when people lump all arcade games together as "just tryin to steal them quarters!1".

I think it would be interesting to see a modern arcade game with micropayments. Maybe it'd cost a quarter, and you'd get 10 cents back for each completed level. Just brainstorming.

are you using a curses library for the ascii graphics?

No. But I probably should be.

I think I've got a good working title for this game.

Panacea, the Greek goddess of healing, and the name of a cure-all medicine alchemists sought. It rolls off the tongue, sounds somewhat mysterious, and is quite fitting. I gave a shot at making a stylized ASCII title for it.



Rewriting my pathfinding code at the moment, and working on some music loops - nostalgic, classy, a bit on the JRPG side.

I guess I'll make a devlog after all. Mainly to keep track of my checkpoints, so you probably can't expect frequent updates.

So I'm working on this text-based game in Python. I've got a clear outline of what I'm going for. The concept is that everything revolves around farming herbs and mixing potions out of them. For example, you don't wield items or use magic, combat is handled by drinking/throwing potions. Different species of herbs multiply by the rules of different cellular automata, and selective breeding is required to get the most out of them (increases in effects, fertility, resistance to weather conditions...).



You start from two villages, each focusing on an elementary herb, one growing Rhoadasin (a healing herb) and the other Hyazine (a poisonous herb). As you proceed, you'll discover new herbs and potion recipes. The progression is clear: For each friendly region, there's a cave filled with monsters and a boss enemy, and passing through brings you to the next area. Monsters from these caves attack the nearby area at night, and protecting your farms is part of the survival.



A lot of the challenge lies in the strictly limited amount of potions you can carry. It's not possible to conquer a cave simply by manufacturing a ton of cannon fodder potions, you'll have to farm and mix efficiently. Villages can be defended more easily, as you have the townsfolk to help you. Doing your duty to guard your current residence also improves your trading opportunities there. (But of course, hardcore players would farm in the wild alone, with more room, no taxes, better soil & weather.)



During the weekend, I've made some progress after a while, mainly working on inventory management, alchemy and menus.



Right now the project is roughly 1700 lines of code spread across 7 files, but I'm going to have to rewrite chunks of it.

Graphical menus? In my roguelike? Well, sort of.



That just feels like oceans of space. Those tables can hold at least 4 rows (=48 items), so their length is pretty excessive. By cutting them down a bit, I bet I could fit in a portion of the actual game window and still have room for a third table (possibly for the dialogue/item descriptions).

Also, looking at this, I just realized that when you add an item to a table, that item should become the selected one. Not making another .gif, though.

Sounds really interesting! You would happen to have a devlog for it, and if you don't, would you inform when you do?

Just listened to Les Rallizes Dénudés - White Waking; and yes, I know Space Funeral used it.

I've been thinking of making a devlog. It's just that it'll probably be updated sporadically and thus won't be all that interesting to follow.

Also, I didn't expect to see another Les Rallizes Dénudés listener here.

A roguelike inventory+crafting system. Surely someone can always find room for optimization and trimming, but it's smooth and general enough, which makes me glad my project is inching forward.

Working on trading and dialogue trees now, although I'm not as excited about their code. The characters aren't just supposed to be signposts, they'll comment on recent events and treat you like you treat them.

Found an interesting blog post on Reddit: http://accidentalnoise.sourceforge.net/minecraftworlds.html

A roguelike inventory+crafting system. Surely someone can always find room for optimization and trimming, but it's smooth and general enough, which makes me glad my project is inching forward.

"A zero rises to a hero and fights an evil organization. Everything he does is justified because he's the one being oppressed and anyone who opposes him is clearly rotten." This is a pretty typical template in popular culture, and could be subverted well in a game format.

Three powers govern the world: Mind, Body, and Technology. Followers of the Mind element come from a bloodline that is capable of using psychic powers. They used to rule the world for centuries. Lately, a power shift has occured: a group of rebels harnessed the power of ancient Technology and eventually managed to take down the Emperor. The world has changed a lot since. There are no more godlike rulers and people are more prosperous than ever, but Technology has destroyed traditions, suffocated nature, and promoted greed. The Mind culture has been reduced to a pathetic village.

You control either a grunt of the Technology faction who believes this is a golden age, a youngster from the Mind village who's sick of the new world, or a Body elementalist (one of "the common people") who gets dragged to their fight after a major event. You play through the same story from these three viewpoints. Every character thinks they're the hero and the others are out to destroy the world.

Darwinia, Edge, Defense Grid: The Awakening, AAAAAAAA!!: A Reckless Disregard for Gravity, and Psycho-fucking-nauts.