Running Noxico on Arch Linux.

Easier to implement than I expected.

Today, I added slime people to the game’s bodyplans file, and adjusted the engine to support certain oddities about them. For example, their “skin”, if you can still use that word, is the same color as their hair, which is described as goopy along with the rest, and they leave quickly evaporating trails, which you can examine if you’re quick. This also revealed a thing where the trails would overlap the characters, because entities are drawn in order of definition, so the very new trails were drawn after the older characters that left them. Dressings are now drawn first, followed by BoardCharacters, which includes the player.

Roguelikes are turn-based, giving you all the time you want to determine your next move.

Megazeux is realtime.

So is Noxico right now, but I’d like to steer it more towards Roguelike. So here’s an idea:

If the player does nothing for n seconds, the game presses the Rest key (usually the period) for him. Depending on a setting, this could range from a very long delay (if any) to near-realtime.

Which brings me to another idea that’s related to the above: passive and active effects. If things are paused, that includes things like flames, attack animations, and various other, somewhat hypothetical effects. So my idea is to have passive effects run in realtime – flames have animated burning – while active effects work turn-based – flames don’t actually spread until the player acts (or has Rest forced on them).

What do you think?