Creating a Roguelike in Python

I have decided to produce a Roguelike game to further my programming skills, and document the experience here.

Roguelikes appeal to me for their emphasis on gameplay over flashy graphics (to the point where many have no graphics at all) and for the extensive community of Roguelike developers and enthusiasts to draw upon. Also a Roguelike should make an ideal programming project, as it can be broken up in to several sub-projects such as:

• Random dungeon generation
• 'Line of sight' calculations
• Artificial Intelligence for monsters
• User Interface design
• Sound and Graphics
• A million things I haven't thought of yet!
  

Due to the nature of Roguelikes, the dungeon generation and gameplay aspects can be worked on before any consideration of adding graphics and sound effects.

This is by no means the first or only development blog for a Roguelike game. Dirk Kok's blog 'Writing Kode' is one such site that is an influence and inspiration for this one. Dirk uses C++ for his game, while my programming language of choice is Python, which I hope be a good choice. I expect my first tentative steps to emulate Dirk's, and then diverge from there.

As I am a hobbiest rather than a professional coder you shouldn't expect to see stellar examples of good Python coding. Rather I will be relating my trials and tribulations as they occur. I may also express my opinions on certain existing Roguelikes or ideas I would like to implement in my final game, however, I will try to keep that sort of thing to a minimum until I have some working code!

Coming soon: Creating a random dungeon

Did you know that "Robot... sleeping... tired?"

Freeform artrage doodling. No preliminary sketch. Fun huh?

Sprout (I.F.)

Just some freeform doodling with Artrage.

That thing on top is a sprout by the way.

Vector Texture Tutorial

I'd like to share the technique I used for the texture in this image.

Tools used: Illustrator CS2, Artrage 2 and a Wacom tablet.

First I exported my Adobe Illustrator artwork to a jpg file. Around 100 dpi is good. Then I "Imported Image" into a wonderful little program called Artrage 2. It looked a little sumpthin' like this:

For this tutorial I use the layers feature available only in the full version of Artrage 2. The full version costs a whopping $20. That's right. $20. Did I mention that that's payable with your Paypal funds people?

At the end of the tutorial I'll show you how to get exactly the same results with Free Artrage 2.

OK, so, layers. Take a look at this:

That right, just click there to create a new layer, and then click there to edit the paper settings for your new layer. Choose a 50% grey colour for the paper, give it a nice rough texture and set the opacity to 0%. In the next picture the opacity is set to 100%, but you get the idea.

Now for the fun bit. I have used the charcoal tool (great for bringing out the texture of the paper) to draw the highlights and the shadows using only pure white and pure black.

When I'm done I set the paper opacity to 100% and export as image. At this point it looks something like this:

Alright, now your done with artrage and it's back to Illustrator CS2. Place your newly created texture image, and make a copy of it. Select the copy and hit the Live Trace button. You will notice in the trace settings something called the threshold.

If you lower the threshold slightly below halfway, the 50% grey background of your image will read as white, leaving behind only your black shading. At this point I Expand the Live Trace and use the Magic Wand to select and then delete all of the unwanted white areas.

Now repeat with the other copy of the image. this time raise the threshold slightly above halfway, the 50% grey background of your image will read as black, leaving behind only your white highlights. At this point I Expand the Live Trace and use the Magic Wand to select and then delete all of the unwanted white areas. (lock your shadows up in another layer so that you don't accidentally delete them too!)

Well that's the basic technique. Many thanks to Russell Tate for the original Texture Article over at istockphoto.com. You may notice that his technique involves a scanner, a printer and a real live pencil and paper(!)

If you're not ready to commit to the $20 purchase of Artrage just yet, heres how to achieve these results with the free version.

There are no layers in the free version but you can still load your background as a "Tracing Image"

It looks like the above image while you work on it but it will Export To Image with the plain neutral grey background (which I showed you how to set earlier in this tutorial.)

Now go download Artrage and have some fun folks!

Illustration Friday: Episode One

Hello World,

This is my first submission to Illustration Friday.

Topic: "Red"

Leave me a nice comment if you like it!

I made this picture using Artrage 2.