Gu all.

I've not posted or kept up with the goings-on of 64Digits in a long time, and I'm probably not going to start again soon, but that's just some real talk.

I've working on a game for the first time in a long time. It's got some true beam flavor.



You can download the editable and play. Basically it's a run-and-gun inspired by Berzerk! where the further you go from the spawn point, the harder it gets. Arrows to move, Z to shoot, and R to restart the game.

Two weeks ago I announced a competition inspired by an old ZZT tradition, the Blitzkrieg ZZT. Today it happened, and I think it was a pretty big success!

Each entrant had two hours to design a game from nothing. The theme was despair. The twist is that all the entrants are also judges, each competitor has to judge each other competitor's game on a scale from 1 to 10.

Check out the forum post to download all 13 entries. Andy_W, Beneibe, Cow, FishyBoy, FrankieSmileShow, im9today, Jolli, Pietepiet, Rolf, Sir Xemic, stampede, Toast, and trolleybusses all managed to complete their games. The winner will be announced tomorrow, after all the entries have been judged.

Over at Poppenkast we're holding another competition, and this time it's being hosted by me, and not jw! Read more about that in the thread.

I've also decided to switch to Tumblr for blogging. It suits the way I blog perfectly: short, frequent posts that aren't necessarily related. Here's mine.

welp that's that

I haven't blogged in a long time :( it's also the first one I ever tagged.

I'm working on another roguelike. This time I'm making it in C, built on top of The Doryen Library, and scripted in Lua. I don't have any specific plans for it yet, so I'm just adding things I think I'll need. I have a lot of boilerplate code, plus support for ini file reading, Lua scripting, and a few different types of level generators. At the moment gameplay consists entirely of walking around on empty maps (with some nice FOV at least).

It's called PsionRL because originally I wanted the game to focus on psionics, but now I'm not too sure. I guess I'm just going to let the game evolve as I go.

Screenshots

Inside a cave

The cave generator is pretty simple, it's based on cellular automata rules. You can change the way it looks just by changing the rules.

Inside a forest

The forest is even simpler. It's just a 10% chance that a tile is a tree.

I originally wrote these generators in Lua because of its sheer elegance -- you can define functions within functions, which made for some pretty looking algorithms. (Cave generator Lua source)

What I found was that once I started making scrollable maps, Lua took 60 seconds (or more) just to make a 60x25 map. Compare the C version, tested with maps 100x100 in size, is done instantaneously.

This is no small project, and it won't be done anytime soon. If you want to keep up with the project, you can check it out on its project page.