The main goal of the RogueBox Adventures Dev-Blog is to be a documentation of the progress the game makes and to offer interested players a source of information how the future of the game will look.
I will try to post new articles about the state of the work as often as possible and hope you will enjoy reading them.
Please visit RogueBox Adventure’s web site to learn more about the game.
-The mighty Glider-
The weeks after the last release of RogueBox Adventures past really fast to me.
But for all that I’ve made a lot progress in the development of the game.
The game world grows
The first time since the release of v1.00 I’ve managed to add a big amount of new content to RBA.
A brand new biom with own vegetation and monsters has become part of the game.
It’s a desert located southward from the main map. You can reach it by finding a guidepost somewhere at the southern edge.
The desert contains:
– Two new plants(palms and cacti) which are both act like trees
– A new kind of rocks(desert rocks) which acts like the already known rock on the main map
– 3 new hostile monsters
– A new kind of animal(lizard)
– A random generated river
– And a settlement whit a new kind of peaceful NPCs called Neko (a catlike race)
You can build everything inside the desert biom but no stairs. This is because I am planning a dungeon to explore in the underground here for a later update and I don’t want the player to be able to dig inside.
Further improvements
A lot of bugs from snapshot 3 have been fixed this time. The most important is that the monsters will be a bit more weak now. After changing the way they are generated they got a bit to overpowered I guess.
The compatibility to GCW-Zero also is on a good way now. But there still have to be changed some things.
A new feature that really will affect the gameplay is the possibility to collect young plants (this means saplings, young cacti, palm saplings and scrub seeds) and plant them at another place.
This will allow you to farm berries more easy or to build a tree farm behind save walls etc.
A last improvement that will be interesting people who like to play RBA on a *nix-like system (like BSD, GNU/Linux or Apple OSX).
I’ve added a option flag (‘-m’) you can use to let the game create a launcher-file for you automatically. This maybe will make things a bit more easy to you.
Just type “[Path to RBA]*/main.py -m” inside your shell once and move the launcher wherever you want.
*You have to replace “[Path to RBA]” with the correct path were RBA lies on your computer.
A new way of distribution
After a discussion on !freegaming@quitter.se I have decided to distribute the standalone of RBA on itch.io from now. I think that maybe would attract more new people (who maybe don’t care about FOSS until now).
On the releases page of github you only will find the source releases, please go to itch if you like to download the MS Windows standalone.
Whats Next
I wouldn’t expect to much new features with the next release it will mainly contain bugfixes and some minor improvements.
But this isn’t because I don’t like to work on RBA next month.
The main reason for this is that there have be some other things for the game then expand the codebase.
For example the homepage(https://themightyglider.github.io) has to be totally redone in order to look more professional to a person who seeks informations about the game.
Furthermore I have to improve the itch.io page and the articles on roguebasin.com and lgdb.org.
At last but not at least I want to start writing a users manual which will allow new players to come into the game much more easy.
-The Mighty Glider_
Get the new snapshot here.
Much technical changes.
Since the last release of RBA I have rewritten big parts of the inner mechanics of the game.
One positive effect of this that no more data files are needed to store monsters,tiles or items. Instead all this objects are loaded out of python-modules directly.
This makes developing much faster and more easy.
More interesting for players might be the new title screen an the fact that the game now supports more then one saved game.
Also the complete UI has been improved to offer a better view on the games map.
Finally I started to build a low resolution mode to be able to port the game on devices like the GCW Zero. The main view works already well only the menus still need a bit more work.
If you like to test the low resolution mode by your self you have to set ‚low_res‘ to ‚True‘ inside ./LIB/version.py .
Gameplay related changes
In the gameplay didn’t change so much this time but a few improvements are worth to talk about.
First dryades spawn as peaceful monsters now and turn to angry dryades if you chop down a tree near by. (Villager NPCs aren’t affected)
Secondly, shopkeepers are implemented as real NPCs now that walk around in their shops.
Furthermore I’ve improved the eat function. If you eat rotten food now you have a chance to become blind and/or poisoned.
At last but not at least I have added the possibility to swim in deep water if you aren’t wearing any Armor.
Become social
I decided that it would be a good idea to use social media in order to keep the development process transparent.
But for a free software project like this one the big well known (and not free) services are not suitable, so I just created a group on the GNU social network you can join me on:
https://gnusocial.de/group/rbadev
If you want to know more about the GNU social network please visit: https://gnu.io/social/
What’s next?
Since the first release of RBA almost every change made was a technical one.
So I decided to make new content for the next release. Much new content! 😉
-The Mighty Glider-
The second snapshot of RogueBox Adventures is out now.
About the pain of distributing Python games for Linux
Python is a great programming language with a lot advantages and only a few disadvantages standing against them. But this few really can be painful …
For me as spare time game developer the main reason to use Python is that it allows me a fast development process and easy prototyping because I don’t have to care about so much basic things.
The language is designed to be a Swiss army knife for programmers. By default it contains functions for the most common tasks inside a program.
The only thing that is missing are functionalities that are needed to create games, like drawing a graphical surface or playing audio.
Pygame is one way to add this features to the language.
So far everything sounds nice but the problematic point is that Python is a so called scripting- or interpreter language. That means that you need to have the Python interpreter (with all extensions) installed on your system to run a program that is distributed as plain text file or so called python bytecode file.
Now the Linux specific problem. Python it self is part of all Linux Distros (at least of the big ones like Ubuntu or Fedora) but you still have to install the pygame extension. And this is a problem because every distro uses its own Package management system. Debian and Ubuntu use apt, Fedora yum, Arch Linux pac-man and so on…
This means even the way how to install the pygame package on a System is different.
Everything would be much easier if pygame would be a standard component of all big distros.
I know it shouldn’t be a problem for a ordinary Linux-user to install pygame on his or her computer. As less as it should be a problem to make a launcher or to run a python script on the terminal.
But it would be nice to distribute RBA with a binary file that can simply be executed by a double click like I made it for Windows by using Pygame2exe.
This would be specially nice for people who are new to Linux and don’t know were to start.
Maybe some day there will come some solution to solve this problem. Until then you have to use the source code version if you are on a other platform than Windows.
I am really sorry about this.
Ranged combat (at least for the player), Level-System and optical feedback
Now lets come to positive things.
I’ve managed to implement ranged combat to the game. To do hat I’ve added a new slot to the inventory to hold magic items in your left hand and weapons and tools in the right one. If you hold a magic weapon in your left hand you can press F to switch to the fire mode. Your GUI will turn blue then and you can fire a magic bolt in any direction by pressing W,A,S or D.
Another improvement is that RBA got a simple level system now.
If you reach a new level you can choose a attribute to rise. You can choose Strange (physical attacks), Skill(defence against physical attacks), Power(magical attacks), Will(defence against magic attacks) or Health(more LP).
Monsters are also spawned with a level that corresponds with the depth they are spawning at.
The monsters choose how to use their skill points by them self. (A orc will focus on strange and skill while a dryade will choose more skills like power and will)
This leads to the fact that every monster in the game now has its individual attributes.
Furthermore humanoid monsters are now created with a individual equipment.(Not every type of monster can use all sorts of equipment)
all in all I hope that these changes will lead to a much better balancing inside the games battle system.
The last thing that is new to this version is a kind of eye candy.
If you hit(or miss) a monster or you are hit(or not) you get a optical feedback on the map now.
If the attack failed a white ‚Miss‘ appears over the monsters head (or in the case that you are the one who was missed over your one). A hit is shown with a green ‚Hit‘ and a critical by a red one.
This doesn’t only look sweet but helps you to keep the overview in combat situations.
Beside to this I’ve also fixed a few bugs like a random game crash when attacking monsters and a few minor things.
Furthermore the wands are correctly called ‚wand‘ now and not any longer ‚ward‘. The graphic glitch when holding one is fixed as well.
All in all the game should run a bit better now.
What’s next?
In the next snapshot I will extend the tiles class with a few new properties that will be used of the new AI(witch will come in a later release). I also have plans to change the tiles class in a way that it becomes easy to make different looking instances of of them. For example this could give me to make different kinds of trees that act the same way like the one that are already inside the game (grow and can be choped down with a axe) or in longer term this would allow me to make seasonal changes of the overworld.
I also thinking about making a new map type that uses this new features of the tiles class.
Furthermore I think it is time to create a real main menu and a save file management system that allows you to play more then one saved game per copy f the game without copy+paste save files.
I hope you will enjoy this version of RogueBox Adventures.
Keep your eyes open for the next one and don’t be shy to give me feedback. May it be ideas,wishes or criticism.
-The Mighty Glider-
Today I’ve released the first snapshot of RBA to show off the progress I have made on the way to v2.00 .
You can find the snapshot here.
This release mainly contains technical improvements.
But first things first.
Goodbye Android, Hello Linux
I’ve decided to drop the Android support and focus my work on the PC instead.
This has different reasons.
The main reason is that I am not lucky with PGS4A(Pygame Subset for Android).
It causes new problems with the rendering with every change I make on the game engine.
I have to change code that works fine on PC to work on mobile devices as well. This slows down the development process in a unnecessary way.
Maybe I will add Android support later if I find a better solution to convert python code for mobile devices. But for now sorry to all Android users.
Good news for Linux users I’ve build a Linux Standalone for 64 bit systems. Simply download the zip-archive, unpack it and run launch.sh .
You don’t need an installation of python or pygame on your mashine.
Cleaning the Code
With this release I have finished the first point of my todo list. I’ve cleaned up the code base.
The main aspect that has changed with this is the process of loading image files. Monsters and tiles have been merged into big tilemap files. The class definition has wandered from main.py into a separate module(./LIB/gra_files.py) as well.
I was able to replace over 1000 lines of code with less then 200 without loosing any functionality.
But the main benefit for further development will be that it becomes much easier to add new monsters ore tiles to the game.
Field of Vision and optional mouse support
The most eye catching changes in this version is a improvement of the field of vision and a option to hide the mouse pad. To say it with easy words you can’t see trough walls and the mouse pad has to be turned on inside the game options menu.
What’s coming next?
The next step is a improvement of the battle system. This will bring up the following changes:
– a improved level system for monsters and the player
– ranged (magical) combat for monsters and the player
– a visual feedback for hits
– a better AI for monsters that will allow them more interesting behaviours like casting spells or use healing potions
Maybe not all changes that are listed here will be already come with the next release.
RogueBox Adventures dev-blog 