Let's kick some ASCII

I'm a weekend Python novice crafting his first RPG as a labor of love after growing up always wanting to create my own video game.

[zolvaring]

I’m gonna give the dogs to the ex and kill myself

[zolvaring]

guess I'm pretty much addicted to downers and uppers now. : / don't do this.

[zolvaring]

I just wanted to cry.

By the time I got logged in. Just numb again.

[zolvaring]

i don't know where these feelings belong or

how to keep holding onto more and more i feel the floor beneath the weight of them cracking

[zolvaring]

Staring down

and I see something that calls to me almost as much as the world above it sadly

[zolvaring]

solo dev blog (i.e., how to produce major depression)

Been working on basically the game still since the last post, though it's been rewritten and reconceptualized over and over and over.

Granted I don't make releasing an actual thing my top goal, I'm still in this to learn or whatever, I'm weird like that, but I'd love for something to take shape.

This is now the depressed 5+ years solo dev blog. Let's go.

[zolvaring]

This blog still exists(?)! I’m going to try and be active here yet again, here is a link to this prototype on my github: https://github.com/zolvaring/curses_rpg_demo

This is a project I stopped working on a little over a year ago, but I’m planning on heavily referencing for another similar project I’m slowly trying to get started. It showcases a procedurally generated landscape (only one functional level, but there are scraps of other palettes available), enemies, items, and some other nifty features I’ll show off in some future posts.

It is built entirely using Curses and Python, and meant to be run from a terminal.

Please feel free to give me any feedback or thoughts, as mentioned I’m not really developing this project exactly anymore, but be referencing this on a future project, so I’m grateful for any improvements.

[zolvaring]

Here is a similar effect using a cave palette with an “underground” sense to it.

[zolvaring]

And here’s where I’m at now. I’ve done it mainly by modifying functions that generate rooms to ask a new function for the tile it should use when placing each tile. I can then use that new function to spit back either the same tile repeatedly, resulting in solid colors, or different tiles based on set probabilities. Works for now.

[zolvaring]

[zolvaring]

The best Python RPG tutorial on the planet.

By the way, I can’t even begin to blog about this game without at least giving a huge amount of thanks to Jotaf for creating this tutorial on Python development using libtcod library: http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php?title=Complete_Roguelike_Tutorial,_using_python%2Blibtcod

I’ve been working on this project for a while now but literally started with no knowledge of Python, and only simple websites as programming experience, and started using the code within that document. That source code, along with the tutorial explaining the logic behind it, has literally been teaching my Python in my spare time from experimentation and I cannot give it enough praise. 

I understand a lot of people are into pygame and I want to check that out perhaps later in development, but this tutorial really gets a lot of great use out of libtcod and is literally the best resource I have found for python rpg development from scratch. 

This is just a simple labor of love RPG, so I don’t know if anyone will read this, but I will always encourage anyone interested in creating anything similar to this project to do themselves a favor and check out this tutorial.

[zolvaring]

Currently trying to enable backgrounds to be “palettized” instead of just a solid color or black undiscovered background. 

I’m doing it in a way where, once it’s done, I should be able to apply it easily to all other room generation, but in this specific case I’m trying to create an outdoor effect containing a dirt area inside a heavy forest. 

I can polish it perfection later in development, but I am still improving it currently. Before I’m done with it today I want to:

- Quiet down the forest palette

- Apply a different but similar effect to the dirt area, so it is not a solid color

- Expand the dirt area a little in some way, to counter the negative space exposed by allowing forest tiles to not block sight (for outdoor effect)

- Add some objects to dirt area, particularly a path of some sort, and maybe more trees or more developed tree mechanics (currently you can chop trees  to turn them into raw wood, but they don’t grow back or anything)

Once this is done I’ll probably try to apply to the dungeon map generators since that is most of the game, but I really want to work on expanding weapon properties today, so, again, I’ll by making broad brush strokes, I guess you could say, as right now the graphics are so simple that anything would be an improvement.