Roguelike Dev Tutorial 2023

This is my entry for r/roguelikedev's annual tutorial event. It is a overdone classic medieval fantasy roguelike set in a world of my own design.

How to Install

Windows

1. git clone https://github.com/Rakaneth/tcod-tut-2023
2. .\bootstrap.bat
3. .\.venv\Scripts\activate
4. python main.py

Linux

1. git clone https://github.com/Rakaneth/tcod-tut-2023
2. ./bootstrap.sh
3. ./.venv/bin/activate
4. python main.py

How to Play

Your mission is to retrieve the Proof of Bravery from the depths of the caves and return to town.

Controls

• W - move up
• A - move left
• S - move down
• D - move right
• i - show inventory
  • W - move up
  • S - move down
  • Enter - use, equip, or unequip item
  • ESC - exit inventory
  • space - drop item
• space - wait one turn
• ESC - save menu
• Left Click - select monster as target

Progress

• Part 0 - Setting Up
• Part 1 - Drawing the '@' symbol and moving it around
• Part 2 - The generic Entity, the render functions, and the map
• Part 3 - Generating a dungeon
• Part 4 - Field of view
• Part 5 - Placing enemies and kicking them (harmlessly)
• Part 6 - Doing (and taking) some damage
• Part 7 - Creating the interface
• Part 8 - Items and Inventory
• Part 9 - Ranged Scrolls and Targeting
• Part 10 - Saving and loading
• Part 11 - Delving into the Dungeon
• Part 12 - Increasing Difficulty
• Part 13 - Gearing up

Libraries used

tcod, tcod-ecs, pyyaml

DevLog

2023 8-22 FINAL

Combat Improvements

• One last balance pass to lessen the tedium of bumping (and to give Farin and Falwyn a chance)

Dungeon Improvements

• There is now a final room called The End, in which the Proof of Bravery can be found. Wear it, and return to town to secure victory!

2023-8-12

Combat Improvements

• The player can now gain levels. This could be extended to other creatures as well, but is limited to the player for the moment.

2023-8-6

Dungeon Improvements

• Added a new level, the Crypt, as well as a few monsters.

Combat Improvements

• Adjusted enemy movement to avoid conga lines.
• The Stunned effect now functions, preventing the creature suffering it from gaining energy.

2023-8-2

Dungeon Improvements

• Some weapons, armor, and one potion are guaranteed to spawn on the first level of the dungeon.

UI Improvements

• The player can now drop items from the inventory screen (which now shows instructions on how to do so!)

2023-8-1

Screenshots

Equipment is in. Weapons can execute on-hit effects. I have the bones of a playable game. I just need a win condition and one last balance pass. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Dungeon Improvements

• The player can now go deeper into the dungeon.
• The player starts in 'town' - currently an empty level. I am considering putting some basic starting equipment in here.

2023-7-31

I am ahead still, but since I'm anticipating having a lot less time soon, I'm going to continue to forge ahead and even possibly finish ahead of schedule. Because I'm driving to finish early, I will no longer be updating by week, since I'll be moving from task to task in a different order.

Equipment - and most of the necessary combat adjustments - are in. The player can pick up, equip, and remove equipment, seeing the adjustments to stats in real time. Equipment uses inventory slots (of which the player has 8).

Combat Improvements

• Weapons, armor, and trinkets added
• Weapons have their own damage values, which are used if the player is armed
• Some weapons have on-hit effects. (Not yet implemented)
• Armor has a reduction value that reduces most damage by that value; damage-over-time effects are not affected.
• Armor has a durability value that is reduced whenever damage is received in that armor. At 0, the armor is destroyed. (Not yet implemented)
• Armor has an encumbrance value that slows down movement. (Not yet implemented)
• The player can have one weapon, one armor, and one trinket equipped.

UI Improvements

• Equipment shows up in the inventory screen.
• UI updates stat values correctly when switching equipment.

TODO

• Investigate lockup occuring sometimes during world generation
• Implement encumbrance
• Implement durability
• Implement weapon on-hit effects
• Link dungeons

Stretch

• Separate screen/dialog for full character sheet
• More ergonomic keyboard/mouse shortcuts

Screenshots

2023-7-29

Combat Improvements

• Items of various kinds spawn in the world.
  • Healing potions apply a regeneration effect that scales with the potency of the potion.
  • Poison potions apply a poison effect that deals damage that scales with the potency of the potion.
  • Lightning scrolls apply a large amount of damage to a single, visible target.

UI Improvements

• i brings up the inventory menu, and ENTER/RETURN select an item to use. ESC closes the item menu (and most other menus).
• There is a MenuWithValues class that allows the selected string to stand for some underlying value.
• Clicking on a monster will set it as target. If the monster dies or steps out of view, it is deselected.

Development Improvements

• Upgraded tcod-ecs from 3.4 to 4.2.1, thanks to HexDecimal's help.

Week 4

Most Recent Screenshot:

2023-07-26

UI Improvements

• Pressing ESC during normal play will prompt the player with a dialog to save. Choosing Yes will save the game and return to the title screen.
• An Exit Game option has been added to the title screen, allowing the game to exit without having to close the window

THE GREAT REFACTOR 2023-07-25

In creating a reusable template by harvesting the most useful plumbing from this project so far, I decided on a large refactor of the architecture that should make things a bit smoother.

• Removed the components that were wrappers over single fields; I can use named components for these.

• Worked some more on the title screen

  • Removed the ugly timestamps from the titles
  • Filtered out saves with older versions

• Factored out saving and loading into separate functions that can be called by anything with a reference to the engine

• Screens take a reference to the engine instead of a world; this allows for easier saving/loading because:

  • Only the engine's world needs to be replaced
  • Screens can call the save/load functions at need

• Removed action.py (possibly to return) since screens are using the engine directly

• Removed Screen.on_key in favor of a system similar to the EventDispatch. Each screen has the following methods, each of which correspond to a key press:

  • on_up: up, W, numpad 8
  • on_down: down, S, numpad 2
  • on_left: left, A, numpad 4
  • on_right: right, D, numpad 6
  • on_confirm: return, numpad enter
  • on_cancel: ESC
  • on_wait: space

  Now, there is only one big match...case statement in the base Screen class that calls the correct method. Screens override the ones they need; the others do nothing by default.

• The map updates its own FOV field.

• Many, many circular import issues were fixed.

Post-refactor

More UI Improvements

• Death screen is added. There is now a proper loss condition.
• The player can mouse over a tile to see everything in that tile. An HP bar will be shown if a creature is in the tile.

More Combat improvements

• A broad first pass has been made over combat. The player, currently, should easily dispatch most tier 1 creatures.
• Three new stats were added:
  • ST - strength and stamina
    • Increases HP
    • Increases DMG
  • AG - agility and dexterity
    • Increases ATP
    • Increases DFP
  • WL - willpower and charisma
    • Increases/improves scroll use (not yet implemented)

2023-7-23

So here I am, up late again, brimming with inspiration.

Game Message Improvements

The game messages got a lot of improvements:

• Messages about a specific entity use that entity's render color.
• Messages are now dumped along with save files in a separate logs/ folder. Considering the size, I will likely use an appending strategy and have the World dump the messages at a certain benchmark to keep save file size down.

Combat Improvements

There is now a rudimentary on-hit system in place, as well as an effect system. Some attacks or enemies have a chance to cause effects when they hit. The effects are defined in effects.py and have a uniform, flexible format. The hope is that some equipment will produce these on-hit effects.

Monster stats are being rebalanced, though I am trying to hold off on a balance pass until I get items in - which I am not far from at this point.

UI Improvements

• The UI now shows active effects, as well as a map name.
• Messages no longer occasionally spill out of the messages box.
• The UI classes were refactored to encapsulate some shared functionality. This enabled the creation of two new UI elements (currently unused):
  • TextBox - a simple box showing text
  • Dialog - a box showing text and additional options

Development Improvements

• There is now a gamelog that displays game events, out-of-world, as they happen. There is a DEBUG switch in constants.py that controls the logging, as I suspect that this will get quite large over a session.
• Screen names have been pulled into a static class ScreenNames to prevent accidental misspelling and get IDE help.

So...I'm a whole week ahead now. Bump-attacking is in place, and entities that are slain have their appearances changed, become immobile, and stop blocking. There is currently no death check for the player in place. The player's stats are drawn on the right side of the screen, and things that are hostile to each other deal damage when bumping. I created combat.py to group all of the combat-based functions together.

2023-7-22

Working on a title screen. Currently, it just shows a list of saved games. With a lot of hacking, save games can be selected from the menu. (Oh, yeah. I implemented a Menu class to handle those.) It even has version checks! Currently, an exception is thrown if the game versions do not match.

Maps are now generated based on some map data that describes the layout, items, general difficulty (there I go skipping ahead again), and available monsters types.

I think saving and loading is complete now. The world stores the game save name, which is determined by the starting hero and a timestamp. A saves directory is created if one does not exist when the game loads. This is where the game saves are stored. This folder can be deleted wholesale to remove the saved games. I honestly think saving and loading should be done sooner in the project and tested throughout. I am glad to have a version I am happy with.

Also, there are four distinct heroes, with different strengths and weaknesses. All the plumbing done earlier is paying off here; with a few changes to assets/data/characterdata.yml and titlescreen.py, I can easily add new heroes to the game. Monsters and maps are easier to add.

Now, back to pondering my combat system - and items.

Screenshots from Week 4

Week 3

Implemented field of view and basic collision detection. I adapted the tutorial's method of updating field of view to suit my use of scrolling maps. I've implemented some convenience methods on the GameState class to make finding entities easier. To get some visual feedback, I've gone ahead and implemented a bit of UI, with a message box appearing at the bottom of the screen. Enemies can now properly be kicked!

I also implemented a drunk_walk map generator that needs to be tweaked to consistently generate better maps. I did this from memory, so I might need to just find a good drunk-walk example and find out where I went wrong.

Week 3 is, in theory, complete.

2023-7-21

I skipped...way ahead. It turns out that the main motivation behind me wanting to clean up the gamestate was so that I could do some preliminary saving and loading, and it turns out that my efforts have paid off. Now the world pickles just fine, and I can load the game from a previous save. I tried to do this with the GameState class and it wasn't pickling properly.

2023-7-20

I may have been mistaken about that.

A lot of cleanup and refactoring happened. There is now a speed system in place. Control is not passed back to the player until they have enough energy to act. Entities act in order of descending speed and gain energy equal to their speed, acting when they have 100. Each game action has an associated cost:

• Moving costs 50
• Bump-attacking costs 50
• More to come

Among the things that got refactored was the GameState class. It worked initally until I got some help from @HexDecimal regarding proper use of the World to store arbitrary data. In a night of feverish inspiration (and an unhealthy dose of insomnia), I have removed that class and cleaned up all the functions that relied on the helpers there.

Now week 3 is complete. I will likely start week 4 early while I have inspiration.

Week 2

More plumbing. With a little bit of refactoring, there is now a module that stores components and a module that will create entities with all the required components. I have decided on using a YAML file (for which I am using the PyYAML library) to store the game data; I find it much easier to quickly edit and read a YAML file than a Python dictionary. I've also decided on a smaller screen size with a large 32x32 font.

Created several modules for drawing and the map. I originally wanted to have a lighter map class that would convert raw tile data - ints, at first - to the proper graphics data when the map was drawn, but I had trouble getting NumPy to play nicely with broadcasting tuple data, so I opted for the method used in the most recent tcod tutorial - with a modification that allows for large, scrolling maps. There is a Camera object that keeps track of a viewport, and the draw_map function in ui.py uses it to draw everything around the player.

Using tcod-ecs's relations feature, I was able to filter out entities not on the map being drawn. This is a huge step in being able to keep 100% of the game state - including maps - in a single World, which will make part 10 much easier.

I have decided to create my own class which holds the World as well as a dictionary of game maps. The World has a mapid relation that is used to filter out entities on the same map.

There is also a separate factory function to create a player character.

Finally, the player can no longer go through walls. This completes Week 2.

Week 1

I've done a bit of plumbing, setting up an Engine class to hold the game state and run the game, as well, as a system of Screens that are responsible for handling their own inputs. This will come in handy down the road when I implement things like equipment and shop menus. I've also added bootstrap.sh and bootstrap.bat to quickly get the virtual environment and dependencies installed. Running the game from a fresh start should be as simple as:

1. git clone https://github.com/Rakaneth/tcod-tut-2023
2. sh bootstrap.sh (Linux) or .\bootstrap.bat (Windows)
3. . ./env/bin/activate (Linux) or .\env\Scripts\activate (Windows)
4. python main.py

In addition, a minimal Python debug config file for VSCode is included. With Microsoft's Python extension installed, select the Python interpreter in the ./env folder and then the game can be debugged with F5.

Got started early using the brand-spanking-new tcod-ecs, which I find less annoying to use than esper. There is a bit of a learning curve, but I was able to use it to make a generic entity that could move around and produce the famous @.

With that, Week 1 is done. I will try to avoid skipping ahead, but that means I might make a second project alongside this to continue playing with tcod-ecs.