Lanarts Goals

So I decided to write up a post about my hopes for when I finally release 'Lanarts 1.0'. I hope outlining where the game is going encourages people to contribute.

The design philosophy:
To create a fun, dangerous, procedurally generated, co-op RPG which allows for continual character advancement without repetitive elements. The game will be very light on plot, and feature critical decisions, such as choosing between different challenges. The game will be best played end-to-end with a team of around 4-6 friends. The game will be designed with a loss-condition in mind, but one that can be made more lenient to players' liking.
 
Guiding points:
Any tedious aspects should be as streamlined and automated as possible.

The character advancement should introduce more interesting and nuanced features rather than just stat-gain. Character races and other game bonuses should be versatile enough to provide benefit to a large number of play-styles.

The game should be as data-driven as possible, allowing for easy content creation. The game should lend easily to hosting modified game content. Modified game content will happily be considered for integration into the base game.

The V1.0 goals:

• Stable Lua API that allows for developing/customizing the game as much as possible. V1.0 will introduce a (loose) API freeze and best-effort backwards compatibility measures.
• Well-performing game-play with at least 4 players (more is ideal).
• A lobby server for easy match-making.
• A flexible stat system based on character traits and abilities. This includes items with interesting effects, and a variety of 'tech-tree' style advancement options.
• An overworld with towns, thematic dungeons, and a final boss.

What aren't my goals:

• I'm not sure if V1.0 will have original graphics. While nice, I do not consider this a version-number assignable goal (primarily because I do not have the talent to decide when it happens.
• I don't intend to make Lanarts a generic RPG engine. I will move towards this as much as possible, but only where it enables smooth growth of the game.

7Day Roguelike Challenge Complete!

OK time to release.
Download: http://7drl.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/bughack.zip

I'm a bit exhausted from working on it so I'll just paste the README.

Welcome to BUGHACK.

The idea for the game was to include roguelike mechanics based on how ants find food through scents.

You are a leader ant who must lead worker ants to delicious harvest. Every sector you must gather a certain amount of harvest. Keep your ants safe, or you'll take damage! You must call ants out of an ant hole and then lead them to to fruit.

Press C in-game to see controls.

THE GAME IS TOO SMALL:
To fullscreen, hit F in game.
Alternatively, replace the occurrence tiles12x12_gs_ro.png in bughack.py with tiles18x18_gs_ro.png

Dependencies:
Python 2.X (32 bit is needed on windows)
SDL (included in Windows, needed on Linux)

RUNNING:
python main.py
(Or on windows, right click main.py and run with python 2)

Created by:
 Programming by ludamad (Adam Domurad), art by REZ (Clay Bullard)

7DayRL Competition!

OK, this will look silly in case I don't complete, but I will be joining the 7day roguelike competition!

I will be teaming up with putterson (who does occasional work on lanarts with me) and REZ (who I previously did a Halloween competition with, resulting in Carny Death Peddlers). The hope is to have a tiles-mode with ASCII.

I'll say at this point to save myself from potential foolishness that any potential failing of the competition will be due to being too ambitious with too little free time, and not because of lack of interest!

Anyway, cautiously optimistic.

I'd discuss the game idea but they're going to change a buttload -- and we'll find out soon enough, ain't it ?

So plans are to use libtcod & Python. It won't be my first game in Python but it'll be my first graphical one. So far just learning libtcod and going through the tutorials, but I find it straight-forward. It's funny how well suited libtcod is for this competition.

Lanarts Update March 4th, 2013

New release, ready for download!

It is recommended you move with WASD, melee with H, fire spells with YUIOP, mouse controls for everything else. Mouse controls for spells are fairly suboptimal at the moment.

Additionally, 1 to 9 for inventory slots 1 through 9.
Right click is needed to drop items, however.

So it's been 2 months since I felt like compiling this thing on Windows ... damn. About time for another lanarts release !
I hope sincerely to go back to a biweekly release schedule.

Major changes:

• Enemies now do not regen health a bit after hit. This makes enemy packs a lot less annoying. [Credit for idea goes to serprex]
• Floating point strictness flags turned out to help a lot with the remaining syncing issues.
• Saving the game is much more streamlined -- now you simply need to exit (via shift+escape) and the game will automatically save. Reload the game and hit Continue (or enter), and your game is loaded. I feel comfortable having this the default now since I haven't run into any save-file bugs in a good amount of time.
• Victory screen added, you can win the game now !
• Scoreboard added, with stats for your previous characters, whether you won, etc. Navigate it with arrow keys/pageup&down if you have a lot of entries.

Minor changes:

• Made it easier to distinguish walls and floor in the brick&hive tileset
• A lot more code was brought to the lua side, including the menu implementation. The scripting is becoming quite mature, and the game much more engine-like. Documentation to come !
• Unit tests moved fully to use UnitTest++
• Network debug mode was fixed, logging was made more verbose. Diff'ing logs proved to be very effective rooting out syncing issues.
• Game pausing and the steps_per_draw setting work again.
• Minor balancing to spells
• Added key display overlay for spells, and FPS counter in corner
• Moved the wide-open and difficult floor 4 layout to floor 7
• More options for hosting games, and the server's options now override client options (whereas before they could be weirdly out of sync)

Special thanks to putterson for all the online & LAN testing.

Windows:
Download!

Linux:
I do not yet provide linux packages, please do kick me if they'd be useful for you.

git clone http://github.com/ludamad/lanarts --depth 1
./run.sh

If you are missing dependencies on Linux (probably the case) please run either fedora-deps.sh for Fedora, or debian-deps.sh for Debian or Ubuntu.

Feedback

Please direct any bugs and inqueries either as a github issue, a comment on this blog, a post on the #lanarts freenode channel, or an email to domuradical@gmail.com. Feedback very welcome !