The last element of the 7DRL engine’s “must haves” — a win condition for the player. With that out of the way, let’s talk about localization, combat, and making the game look a little less like crap.
Tipa
7DRL: Building an Engine — and it ends.
Working through my checklist of “must have” features for the game.
7DRL: Building an Engine — It Begins
Yesterday I mentioned a few things that were required to be part of any roguelike game engine. Today, I add two of them — an introduction, and a way for the player to be defeated.
7DRL: Building an Engine — Setting the Scope
This weekend, I added weapons, monsters only move when you move, and I added flags to tell if items were identified, cursed, wielded or worn. Each flag multiplies the complexity of the code by at least three times, but it is flags like these that are central to the Roguelike experience. How many flags I choose to implement has a direct correlation to how the game plays… and whether I can finish it at all.
7DRL: Building an Engine — YAML
If someone were to quiz me on how a game engine is different from a game, I’d think about it a bit, and then probably explain that a game is run by the game engine, but no part of the game is actually in the game engine. I’m enforcing that by moving the game (as opposed to the game engine) into YAML, which stands for YAML ain’t markup language. The game is data. The game engine runs that data.