Hope there's the ability to die of dysentery!

Oh come on, what kind of game is that where you can't die of dysentery?! A kind of game not worth playing, I says!

I did some nature pixeling this morning. I knew I was going to struggle with drawing the fir/pine trees so I'd been putting it off for some time now. I tried it before and couldn't get the shape right. I was trying too much to draw the separate branches instead of just the general shape. Still took me way longer as expected. Pushing pixels is difficult and I envy the people who can (seemingly) do it effortlessly.

Here's another idea, if you don't mind me editing.

I think that's a fair amount of work to get done in that time.

I've done much worse. "What does this button do? Oh, YouTube!" ... hour and a half later my new character class still has no implementation.

Anyway, time flies when you're programming. Mysteries of the universe. Go figure.

The inventory looks good but I think it'd look better if you left-aligned the button labels right next to the icons. Centered titles with different lengths do not look right in a group.

1. I use my own bitmap fonts
2. Palette is defined in code and is dynamically applied to an grayscale image on load. Just like you do.

That is not the problem. The problem is, that some widgets don't quite look right by just replacing the colors. The window in the screenshot for example. If the background were to be white, then the outline and the corner details would need to be pulled inward to leave an white border, otherwise it blends in with the shadow on the bottom and on the left. Then the list with construction options would have to be a few pixels narrower because it should fit between the outline (the black one). Things like that. Makes supporting either color scheme a bit tedious. Could be remedied with some dynamic adjustments implemented for widgets but I don't feel like it's the most urgent thing at this point.

I admit, light text on dark background isn't the best design choice for reading, but I'm not planning to have screens full of text anyway.

Thanks for the edit. It's sort of working for the window but I don't really like the white sidebar. The white makes it very noticable and look like, I don't know, paper texture almost, which would fit a tycoon game of some sorts where there was stuff to do with documents and the whole office theme. The dark sidebar on the other hand lets you focus on the game/map more easily.

I might add an option to invert the colors of windows that pop up but leave the menubar and the sidebar black. It's quite a bit of work, because there's more than just inverting the palette.

This game is sweeet. Such an unique experience. I added a couple of dialogs to the shared doc.

Keep up the good work!

[Devlog 4]

A quick update to show that I'm not dead or overrun by an angry mob of flesh eating kittens. Though I haven't been much active these past few days, there are still a few things that have been done.

Devlog 4

* Stuff can now be built (options include only a small camp at this point that needs no resources)
* In the main menu, you can now change character stats manually after rolling (oh wow ...)
* SOUND! I have implemented sound management, lots of UI sounds and quite a few ambient sounds. The world feel much more alive now. You'll be able to hear these once I get a new video done (later this evening I guess). To match the visuals, I create all sounds using a noise generator and simple sine/square bleeps and bloops. I'm using the awesome sfxr program. I'm undecided whether there should be background music, which of course could be turned off but it masks a lot of the sounds.

Here are some screenshots. Have a look at them, enjoy them, fall in love with them, make babies with them.

I was planning on going for some price around that but not for iOS

...run anywhere except iOS

I know, I know, it was just an example for the acceptable price range for me

It depends on how much content there is and how it stands out from numerous other rougelikes, many of which are free. So I really can't say at this point. If this was on the App Store, I would buy it for 0.99$, not for much more I guess.

Elfin Rouge
Rouge The Nifty
Rouge The Reduced

or

Miniman

Nevermind. Coming up with names is difficult and I can't really help

Thanks for the comments everybody, it means a lot. Beers on me!

IT'S BEEN 3 DAYS, EIGEN ARE YOU DEAD, WE DEMAND UPDATES

Sir, yes, sir. Lots of updates. Updates for everybody. But not yet. Soon. Meanwhile, I DEMAND you go and work on your own game.

This keeps sounding better and better. Like the old school attribute rolling for character generation. Takes me back to playing Demons Winter.

Sadly, I haven't played it. It's not a kind of game I would've been able to get my hands on around here back then. That is, in early-mid 90's in an ex-soviet country having just regained its independence (basically no Internet and not a lot of games going around), when I got my first computer. So, the early and even a lot of later RPG games kind of went past me.

The only thing more I would wish for, after looking at these screens, are more varied tiles. The old games couldn't afford them, but I think you can. And I don't mean just three different grass tiles, but small unique details you can come across while exploring.

And what I meant would not just be graphical rewards for finding something, but also perhaps have a small gameplay impact. Something similar to all the little neat stuff you can find in the Heroes of Might & Magic games, which gives you a small bonus, perhaps?

Yes, I'll be adding some terrain variations and definitely some unique things here and there, which I'll add once I figure out exactly what they should be. I'm still deep in technical aspects of things, haven't gotten to much gameplay yet

pixel+generated+rpg+characters+attributes=good

Yum-yum.

Still not working for me. I tried it on my home computer as well, still does not show anything but a black screen (Win XP, latest Firefox).

In Safari, the javascript console shows this:

Code:

15 Spaceship.js:316 INVALID_STATE_ERR: DOM Exception 11: An attempt was made to use an object that is not, or is no longer, usable.
312 WebSocketService.js:371 INVALID_STATE_ERR: DOM Exception 11: An attempt was made to use an object that is not, or is no longer, usable.
WebSocketService.js:385 INVALID_STATE_ERR: DOM Exception 11: An attempt was made to use an object that is not, or is no longer, usable.
>>1041<< WebSocketService.js:371 INVALID_STATE_ERR: DOM Exception 11: An attempt was made to use an object that is not, or is no longer, usable.

The last number goes up like crazy, something produces like a 100 errors per second. Hopefully this helps.

Man, I want a banana now.

Sweet! I like it, but as JasonPickering said, the tile outlines are too strong which makes it quite difficult to look at. Other than that you're good to go.

So, I expect to play it this time next month. Get cracking!

[Devlog 3]

Devlog 3

Characters now have attributes (strength, stamina, agility and intellect) and stats (health, energy, hunger and thirst)

Energy is depleted with each move you make. You can only restore energy by resting which you can (or will be able to) do in a camp or in the ship. Hunger goes up with each turn you complete (a day passes). While on the move, you can eat berries and such, but you need to make camp to make proper food which you have to hunt/fish .. you can't eat raw meat you know. Character gets thirsty only when not carrying or having run out of water. If you have water, drinking is done automatically. You can get water from springs and closed bodies of water.

You can make different kinds of camps. One would basically be a fire and some tenting and another which is more permanent, if you need to stay in one place for longer, a cabin. You don't need to camp every night. The more stamina points, the longer the energy lasts. I know it's not realistic to go on exploring for 10 days without resting but nevermind that.

If you run out of energy or get really hungry or thirsty (fatigue, starvation and dehydration) you start losing health. I haven't decided how to restore health ... maybe some herbal potions or other medicines. Run out of health and you're dead. Real sad. Anyway ...

Character/party creation upon starting a new game + attribute rolling + name generation

Changing attribute values manually is yet to be done.



Tried out different parameters for map generation




Still haven't gotten to inventory yet. I should, really. Hopefully tomorrow will be a productive day.

[is]

Water is empty, not your fault Eigen 

Here I was, blaming myself
No, but really, what I meant was that water has texture and waves, it refracts light, reflects the sky and the clouds and so on. It's in motion. Here's a nice pixel-art water though I don't have the colors to work with.

johnki, thanks. Yeah, it's progressing nicely. I currently have a slower period at work so instead of just sitting around, I work on this.

You still need somekind of a tile system to define bounds of land owned by the players and to place and move stuff around, no? Or do you use vertexes for that as well?

Anyway, it's frickin' awesome! The whole concept of the game and the visuals, really good. Looking forward to be able to play it

I was just thinking the other day that maybe the prevalence of adventure / RPG games is due to most people not having any spaces left to explore except those we invent - this is a quite literal take on that thought

Thanks. Exploration and curiosity to see what's out there is in our blood, it's our driving force I believe. As a kid, I used to love wondering around the woods around my grandparents place. Sometimes I had the dog with me. Not that I'd be the first one there but still, I was there alone and felt like I was discovering stuff. Unlike deep forests in America (just kidding), there was no fear of running into a serial killer or something so I just wondered around for hours. Luckily I didn't run into a bear or anything.

A sepia tone / less desaturated look could work better than the straight greyscale - have you played with that yet?

The grayscale stuff is just a by-product of the graphics. You see, I do all the art in 4 gray colors and then apply the palette in code, that way I can try out different color schemes more easily. In the video, I just disabled the sprite coloring for a while. I thought it looked interesting, not that I'd want the whole game to look like that.

Anyway, I've been doing some stuff and implemented a simple main menu. I'll be tackling intentory next.

Here are some pixels (quite a lot of them actually). It's already pretty fun just to go around and discover land until you come across a forest you can't cut down (yet). Nor do you have to worry about food and water.


Clicky-click. In the second image, I wonder what's beneath that one hidden area on the island. Oooooh, maybe an entrance to a super secret treasure cave? Nah, most likely some flowers. Of death.

I like the terrain. It's easy to add details to it and make more varied stuff. But not the water. All I can think of at the moment are the waves, which do not look like waves at all and occasional rocks. Other than that, it's really empty.

When you feel like giving up, take some superglue and glue the game onto yourself not to drop it.

Actually, don't. But take a break or work on something else for a while and then come back to it.

It's a really fun game!

Hmm, all I saw was a black background and the text field in the bottom. When clicking I hear some sound.

Safari 5.1.5 on OS X Lion

HTML5 games normally work.