Day #1 Update #3 (End of Day 1 Update)

Total Development Time So Far: 5 hours

OK, its now the end of day 1, and I’m still working on saving/loading, and haven’t yet started the character stats/inventory.

However, I’m not concerned about this, as I’ve never done a Roguelike with successful save/load functionality before and this is all a learning process. I’m finding that I’m having to do a lot of refactoring of game-framework code to fit into a saving/loading paradigm. Which is all good.

I’m also not using the direct Serialization features of C#, instead relying upon manually saving/loading each class, as I want to have more control over the contents of the save files, and I don’t want to having to start handling XML. But I’m happy to do this.

So, reflections upon Day 1? I ended up by necessity browsing a lot of the MSDN library, and its an incredibly helpful resource for any .NET developer. But I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s coding, and getting a character up and running.

The roadmap for the rest of the week therefore currently looks like this:

• Day 2: Finish Saving/Loading: Character Stats/Skills/Advancement
• Day 3: Items & Inventory
• Day 4: NPCs
• Day 5: Magic
• Day 6: Game Design/Game Goals
• Day 7: Polishing and Release

Current Music: Hideyuki Fukasawa – Chaos Legion OST

Day #1 Update #2

Total Development Time So Far: 3.5 hours

Due to other demands on my time, the total amount of development today will be 5 hours, before the 6pm deadline for the start of Day 2.

But I thought I’d share something (that I find anyway) amusing: compression of save files using the System.IO.Compression.GZipStream class and using the methods here:

In Delphi, this would have been a complete nightmare to code, whereas in C#, it was very straightforward.

Current Music: None

Day #1 Update #1

Total Development Time So Far: 2 hours

Right, spent 2 hours coding this evening. Progress made:

1. Added handling of keypad keys (as well as standard Vi keys)
2. Added diagonal movement (using the Nethack YUBN/keypad keys)
3. Added writing out of level to disk (see below)
4. Added message handling

The problem is that the level save files (300×200 cells) are 3 MB in size, because I forgot to cast the values of each cell properly, hence the files are meaninglessly (is that a word?) and needlessly inflated:

Next on the agenda is to fix this, and light out the rest of the game information (viewport, message log, current position turn count etc) before working on the character stuff, and the loading in of the game information.

Current Music: Jarboe – Mahakali

Started!

OK, I’ve now officially started, at 6pm UK time on Sunday.

So what’s up for Day 1?

I want to have completed by the end of day one (6pm tomorrow):

• basic character stats/inventory
• saving/loading

Technology

I am using C# (Visual Studio 2010) and Libtcod.NET

To begin with

So far, before I begin officially I have:

• An Intro Screen/Main Menu
• A @ walking around a map
• Independent lightsources

Screenshots below:

Hello world!

This is the devblog for the Stygia RL entry in this year’s 7DRL competition.