Game looks mostly the same but the AI is beyond my expectations. At this point, the marines will try to stay away from you, just inside their firing range. This makes the Marine Commander (green m shown here) especially difficult since he can shoot farther than me. You will need to equip rockets, which have farther range, to take him out. Or manage to corner him.

I am really enjoying the power-management mechanic, even in these simple one-level play-throughs I find myself ducking behind corners and trying to recharge my shields. At this point nothing is very balanced but I'll try to have a playable version up somewhere tomorrow morning.

(BTW in this shot I am about to die if that marine takes more than 1 rocket)

A lot of progress under the hood, but the level (just one so far, no stairs-code) looks the same. Player can pick up rockets and use them against enemies.

Biggest item of the day was AI. I changed the bad guys from monkeys to marines and via the Incredible Power of Dijkstra Maps, they will try to keep you in range of their weapons without getting too close. Other enemies can path-find intelligently now instead of the terrible x/y-diff method.

Of course, they don't actually SHOOT anything yet, but it's a start! Trying to decide if I have time to draw actual projectiles.. the engine I am working with isn't really designed for it but it would certainly make the game more fun.

I started late Saturday afternoon, got to this point by Sunday. I feel pretty good so far! (The basic engine I already had but I ripped out a lot of the guts)


What is RoboCaptain? The short version:
A tactical shooting-based roguelike with a powerful systems-management sub-game ala the old LucasArts X-Wing/TIE Fighter games.


I like my roguelikes to look like roguelikes so expect mostly-traditional look & feel; nothing crazy except for the power mechanic.


As for why there are monkies... they are leftover from the pirate game I was making they are escaped from the (evil) human science labs!!


Official rec.games.roguelike.dev post here.

I'm doing the 7-Day Roguelike Challenge again, started yesterday and will have a finished roguelike game by the end of Saturday the 17th.

There is also a Google+ page which has been quite fun.

Andrew Doull over on ASCII Dreams has a great post with all sorts of useful other links.

I recently hosted a game of Neptune's Pride, a persistent "slow time" online strategy game where you win primarily by backstabbing making friends. The majority of the players game from the comments section of a lovely blog I read called Electron Dance. From there things got... interesting.

A month after the dust has settled, at least two of the players are posting their diaries.. I can't wait to read about what an ass I was in the third person! LiberalEurope (ug.. the hated Yellow Empire... so much hatred) is posting here, and Shaun (CitiesInDust) is posting here.

Go on, read about how terrible I was. I'll wait...

I realize this seems silly considering the number of people that read either blog is somewhere in the single digit range, but I think I will switch back to blogger after a short-lived tumblr experience.

I'll see what I can do about moving over the Grogue and 'and what army' devblog posts. Until then... expect some GRogue updates soon and tons and tons of 2012 7DRL reviews later in March.

In case anyone is still reading here, and not on tumblr, I started an '11-day Roguelike', based on pirates. In javascript. An official r.g.r.d post as well!

Also, hi!