ROGUE-FP will be out on the 30th. I didn't use github to back up the code so I can't be exactly sure of when I actually started work on this but it grew out a 7drl I made in 2020 so its around 3 years worth of work and I'm glad I did it. While I did put a lot of effort into ROGUE-FP and I hope you enjoy it, it is meant to be a trail run for later games I want to make. I figured if I was to make a real, proper, modern(in terms of feature set anyway) 3d first person roguelike I better go back to the basics and figure out what made the old ones work and also what won’t work in first person.
The dungeon generation is simple and to some of you folks the monsters and items will be very familiar, but I felt I needed to go over these seasoned roguelike elements and see exactly how they might translate into a 3d environment. At an earlier point in development I figured that the game should go all in on being first person and the player should never be able see the map at all except for when you find a scroll of mapping. But I found that you really can't separate the idea of a dungeon crawler from having some sort of map available. Even with a maximum number of 9 rooms per floor in ROGUE-FP it is still easy to find yourself running around in circles and losing your sense of direction. This is obviously in part due to the fact that all of the rooms have the same wall textures but I think the problem would still remain to some extent even if each room had different textures.
Monsters and items being visible though walls when you find potions to detect them is a relic from that time of development.
Future Updates
Anyway, moving forward I would like to continue to support ROGUE-FP for a while before I completely dive into another project. First on the list is some more music tracks and of course a few more items and monsters with the option of turning them off if you don't want to play with them and just like the core item and monster set.
After that
But after that I will begin on my next big roguelike. I plan on exploring mechanics that would would fit the roguelike genre but aren't entirely possible in 2d, at least not easily. Things like potions that change your size, enemies that drop down from above, the ability to lob spells at your enemies, and so on. I would also like to resurrect some mechanics from old pen and paper RPGs that seem to be somewhat lost to time. Things like xp for gold, dungeon maps not being meta, the hiring of men at arms, and the possibility of resurrecting player characters that died in the dungeon, among others.
I would also like to take a look into procedural trap generation since as I'm not bound by having objects be the size of individual tiles it should be possible to combine bait and business to create hundreds of different ways of killing player characters. I’ve felt that if I could get the game to generate a trap that could set a gold coin to start rolling away across a room so that the player would follow it into the path of an oncoming boulder then I’ve met my goal in that department.
I plan on having real time lighting and physics as well. The sort of old school way of simulating a lit torch in ROGUE-FP in dark rooms became a source of bugs for a while that always needed to be dealt with. When it was combined with wands of light, potions of blindness, and potions of hallucination it could become a bit of a headache. So I figure it just makes sense for the engine to handle that sort of thing. It will most likely look better as well.
Multiplayer is a possibility although if it slows down development too much it may need to be cut. Mod support is also a possibility but for some reason me and the Godot engine and modding don’t seem to be getting along but maybe it will work better for me with the new Godot 4 that's just come out.
So, I hope you enjoy ROGUE-FP and get a good score on the leaderboard. If you have any questions or even feature suggestions feel free to email me at [email protected].