Four Island

Hey guys! Look, I'm actually posting. I will (hopefully!) be posting a little bit more frequently now, due to situations and stuff awkward laugh. Anyway, I'd like to announce here that a little less than 24 hours ago, I started working on a 7 day roguelike! "What the heck is that?", you may ask. Well, basically, a Roguelike is a game such as NetHack (you've probably heard of that one) loosely based on the game Rogue, a game that usually doesn't have the best graphics (ASCII art is traditional!), a game that focuses on intricacy and replayability due to the fact that every game is different thanks to your local random number generator. A seven day roguelike is a roguelike that was written in exactly seven days. It's a sort of challenge, like NaNoWriMo for writers.

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Anyway, yesterday, I was sitting around, glum and bored, thinking about what exciting things I could do with my life now that my sentence of four years in high school has basically expired. I haven't really been doing that much programming lately, so I somehow came up with the idea of making a seven day roguelike! It's the perfect idea, because it'll keep me busy while also fitting into my short attention span. Look, a cat!

Anyway, after coming up with the idea of making a roguelike, I spent a couple of hours trying to think of ideas for a roguelike. Yeah, nothing was happening. My most interesting idea was this one in which a small penguin with 1HP followed you around and he could fish in rivers and get you food and if he died then you would be sad idk it kind of sucked. However, another idea struck me. Approximately two years ago, I mentioned in a poll of the week a game called "Frigid Earth," and interestingly enough, no one asked me what it was, though two people did vote for it for some reason which I cannot fathom. Frigid Earth is an idea for a roguelike that I actually came up with on December 31st, 2009, while avoiding my family members who were all trying to coerce money out of each other for some reason. I went and found my original concept draft that I wrote up two years ago, which I will reproduce for you now:

You start out in a barren, snow-covered area that seems to go on for miles, although the rushing wind blowing snow into your face does obscure your vision somewhat. Staying too long in the snow can kill you, so hurry. The sun is still out (which is why you aren't yet dead) but it is getting darker every minute. You have to hurry before the sun goes down otherwise you will die in the cold. Eventually, you come upon an abandoned tower, but the door is locked. There is a dilapitated village southeast of the tower which contains the key. You let yourself into the tower and you may (and should!) lock the door behind you to prevent the cold from following you. The tower is old and has no heating, but it provides shelter from the wind which warms you up a bit. The tower is mostly empty but for some random stuff lying around and a few mice. The clothing you find can warm you up, but make sure you choose carefully what you wear, you can wear at most 5 items and what goes on last must be taken off first. Eventually, you find a key, but upon picking it up, you hear a soft click. Suddenly, the windows in the room shatter and the cold starts coming in. Tiles adjacent to the windows will begin to freeze and once each tile is cold enough, the tiles adjacent to those tiles will begin to freeze as well. As with the outdoors, the snowy floor will decrease your warmth and may kill you, so you have to run from the advancing cold to the next floor. You may lock the door behind you to prevent the cold from following you. There are ten floors (including the ground floor) in this tower that increase in size and difficulty. Some contain holes in the floor, some contain traps. Some of the higher levels may even increase in number of rooms. The monsters will become more difficult and though you can gain experience by battling them, it is not easy to train due to the time limit. Once you reach the roof, an ending sequence is played and you win.

The main screen will have two parts. First, a 15x10 tile (32x32 tiles) game viewpoint. Second, room for three lines of messages (30 chars each) underneath that are the same width as the game viewpoint.

The outside world you start in will be barren and snowy. Broken remains of a path will direct you east and then south to a dilapitated village which contains a few broken huts generated roguelike. One will contain a key and another will contain a note mentioning a hidden tower. If you venture far enough north, a tower will suddenly appear before you (likewise, you move away, the tower will vanish). The door is locked, but can be unlocked via the key in the village.

Levels in the tower start out in an openish 20x20 room. The main staircase to the next floor will always be located in this room, but each staircase is protected by a locked door whoose key is located somewhere on the floor. There should be a few doors leading off of this main room that lead to roguelike generated small rooms and hallways which branch off even more. The floors will get more contrived and branch off a whole lot more as you get higher in the tower. Rooms can contain in-depth monsters and items. Eventually, you will find one of the rooms branch into a hallway with windows, a carpet and a key at the end. This is the key to the next floor. Upon picking up the key, a soft click will be heard and then all of the windows in the room will shatter, letting the frigid cold in. The cold will move exceedingly quickly, it will spread to all adjacent tiles every turn, so you must run.

The 7th floor will contain a room on the outside perimeter (in the corner) that is missing two walls and is covered in snow. Your first instinct may be to close the door and try to remove any cold that may have gotten through, but for players that have found ways to withstand cold, this room is particularily of interest. In the middle of the room is a pedestal with the Ring of Searching (which cannot be found anywhere else in the game) on it. When you wear this ring, any secret doors that exist will become visible when you walk by them. This is the only way to be able to use secret doors. Each floor contains a secret room containing a piece of a scroll. All 10 pieces form a story on how the Earth became so cold (it was a monster whose name will be decided later). When you reach the roof of the tower, normally, a floating rope will be present and you can climb it to enter a helicopter with rescuers in it and you will have been deemed to have "finished" (but not "won") the game. If, however, you have collected all 10 pieces of the scroll, the monster that froze the Earth will be present on the roof. If you defeat him, the world will unfreeze and you will win the game.

If you made it through that, congratulations. Basically, my idea is that you are the last remaining person on a planet that has become, for some unknown reason, too cold to sustain life anymore. You seek refuge in an old tower that you happen upon, where you find clothing and monsters. You fight your way to the top of the tower, where a helicopter will be waiting to take you away. Sound interesting? I think it does. :P For some reason, I'm enamored with the effects of cold weather.

Anyway, as I said, I have spent that last 24 hours working on this game, and I think it's actually going pretty well so far. Of course, the first day was just the core of the game: UI, movable player, random dungeon generator, field of view calculator.... Some of that stuff was actually quite complicated and I'm pretty proud of it, teh lolz. I've got some screenshots in case anyone's interested so far (click to see bigger):

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I'm actually quite excited about this little project. It's written in Java, so when it (hopefully!) gets finished, you'll all be able to play it regardless of operating system, and guess what! I fixed the issue where this game would take up all of your CPU time and cause your computer's fan to growl at you! You're welcome!

If you'd (for some god forsaken reason) like to check out the progress of my code, I'm actually using GitHub for this project, which is quite strange for me because I've never really used Git that much before. I'm used to Mercurial. Anyway, check out my Frigid Earth GitHub project. I'll keep you guys posted on the progress of my game over the next six days. I hope you guys are interested in playing my finished product! I know I sure am. :)