Noxico

Excerpt from my actual plan file.

This is the first prototype of what later became Noxico. It had rudimentary scripting, which is in mid-demonstration here. The yellow on blue smiley was white on gray with shades first. A few ticks later, he’d ask “what did you DO!?”

The whole entity generation thing was developed separately at first.

Items can be found on the floor and taken, though there’s a bug where looking at a dropped item or picking it up continues into looking at yourself for some strange reason. Also, the plan is to let the player take anything in a 3×3 grid around him, which would let me put stuff on shelves. Shown here is the part where you can read books, Elder Scrolls style. There is in fact a single “book” item, and the carried item’s tokens determine which one it is – specifically, the ID token.

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?

The title screen and character creator certainly look better this way. Those are 80×50 PNG files rendered on-the-fly to spaces and half-blocks, by the way.

This is just a possibility. Each tile on the screen can have any RGB value, instead of just the 16 basic CGA colors. Any thoughts?

Those are a hundred naga, all sharing a single Dijkstra map to the player, which is efficient, combined with a hack to let them route around each other, which is less so. For a hundred of ‘em, the frame rate drop is appreciably low and could be zero if the player didn’t move (because that forces a recalculation of his Dijkstra map) and I didn’t let the nagas route around each other.