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[no1hitjam]

TERMINAL RAIN

Search for meaning in an cyberpunk city sprawl.
Avoid the crushing influence of mega-corporations,
With only the neon light to guide you…

blog - twitter

SUMMARY

Terminal Rain is an open-world cyberpunk rogue-like where you hack your way to fame and fortune before your inevitable demise. This blog post outlines my design goals for the game.

Visually, this game takes strong inspiration from the terminal graphics of traditional roguelikes. I've been building my own 256 square tileset that includes upper and lowercase letters, punctuation, and a few of my own symbols. I'm building the lighting and effects myself with the goal of having a lot of lights everywhere in the environment reflecting off the rain-slick streets.

What do you want to see in a cyberpunk game? What do you want to do? Where do you want to explore? I'm eager to hear what you think!


NOTES

• I started this game in 2015 and took a long break because I just wasn't a strong enough programmer to manage it. I've come back to it and have been making a lot of rapid progress lately. The bad news is that my old screenshots are gone from this thread, at some point I'll be making an effort to rehost them.
• Thanks Thaumaturge for helping me come up with the title!

[Mya]

Hello!

Looks nice so far - looking forward to seeing more

What kind of gameplay mechanics are you going for?

[s0]

always nice to see people do cool looking stuff with good old ASCII

[TonyManfredonia]

I agree with the above; this looks great!  I can't help but be curious about what the game itself is going to be like, though.  Mechanics, characters, etc.

[no1hitjam]

Thanks guys!

Mechanics are a bit up in the air right now. My top priority is to make the player feel like they are truly inhabiting a cyberpunk world and be able do all the things they'd want to do. From surviving, to playing with future tech, to sabotaging futuristic mega-corporations, to robbing mega-banks.

[no1hitjam]

Added neon signs, more colors for lights, widened the tiles by 1px, and did some more behind the scenes stuff:



Oh and I'm blogging about this game here as well.

[no1hitjam]

Added some basic player interaction, ie: looting a dumpster for a burger.

[marcgfx]

I like your style, very unique! the lighting is nicely recreated. took me a while to figure out, that the player is the @ symbol. If you plan on cheating, I would think the player character would be a deserving choice.

[s0]

took me a while to figure out, that the player is the @ symbol. If you plan on cheating, I would think the player character would be a deserving choice.

it's a classic roguelike thing

anyway game's still looking nice!

[bbtombo]

this looks dope, will follow!

[quan]

not usually interested in ascii stuff because i like colours but this has REALLY NICE colours and the weather and lighting look super good and i love how the letters on the building blink and i want to see more of this

[Bombini]

Looks charming!

[no1hitjam]

Just updated intro post, and my avatar and username. From now on I'll be creating this game under the psuedonym 'Capsule.' Google says there aren't any other prominent indies using this name but let me know if I'm wrong.

A few weeks ago I decided I was done with my visual demo and evaluated what I wanted to do next. I decided to stop working in JavaScript and rebuild in C++ using SFML to render. I also started building my devblog site and other general promo stuff. I know I can make some cool looking cyberpunk visuals (thank to your feedback guys) so with this C++ build I'm prioritizing the stealth combat gameplay. Tomorrow night I'll post a gif here with what I've made.

BTW I switched to C++ basically to take advantage of SFML's sprite tinting (which is way faster than PIXI's), threading (nonexistent in JS), and a nicer debug environment. I needed to rebuild anyway because my demo was super hacked together and there are a couple of core design decisions I wanted to change. From what I've heard, rebuilding after the prototype is fairly common.

Anyways, thank you guys for the support.

marcgfx: Like Silbereisen said, it's fairly common among roguelikes. That being said it is important for the player to know where they are so I'm probably just going to make the '@' icon brighter than everything else to make it easier to spot. Also in the new build, the player is always in the center of the screen so that should help too. Thanks for the comment.

[no1hitjam]

Working on my stealth prototype. Here's some basic guard detection.

[GrumpyGiant]

unicode lighting

lolwut

[no1hitjam]

WELL about 2 years later I've decided to start at this one again! I really got dragged down by my own inexperience last time but I've grown quite a bit as a programmer and I've come up with a solid mechanic to base gameplay around (secret for now ) so without further ado here's a gif of the new build!



I'm building this in C# now and I've been able to move a lot faster by having a better structure for the world. The big things I want out of this are lots of lights, lots of buildings and lots of people. Right now the lights are looking good so it's time to figure out how to generate lots of buildings (WITH interiors).

[Pineapple]

that is one awesome looking update. the exterior especially is gorgeous

[Christian]

That exterior is excellent

And more sci-fi ASCII roguelikes is always a great thing, as is more cyberpunk

[Pixel Noise]

Nice revival - the new shot looks very cool! The colors are really compelling - I definitely want to see more 

[TonyManfredonia]

Welcome back!!! Glad to see you back in action.

Inexperience will lead to more and more experience