- 27 Nov 2023
The holidays are always a great time to slack off and work on fun projects - while eating too much pie and wearing sweatpants for multiple days, of course. Over the past week or so I’ve made a few neat things and more importantly tied the Markov chain word generator into the Goblin Caves project.
The first little thing I made is a procedural mushroom generator.
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- 17 Nov 2023
The first screen the player sees in Goblin Caves is a black screen with a question and a prompt.
This “new player” screen was originally made as a “quick and dirty” sort of thing, with the intention of replacing it with something fancier - or at least more flashy. It’s really grown on me since I originally wrote it, and I don’t think I’m going to change it. What does still bother me though, is that if you just hit enter without putting down something a little message box pops up, asking you to “Please try again.”
That’s kinda lame, and directly above the code that does that error checking (was) a comment I wrote to myself: “It would be super cool if this was replaced with a call to a random name generator…”
Well I came across that comment while rewriting all the drawing and input handling code, and decided that was going to be my next project.
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- 7 Jan 2017
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on simplifying the code for my roguelike project - heavily inspired by one of my favorite books on my shelf, Game Programming Patterns.
I’ve seriously read this book cover to cover, multiple times - and every time find a new use for one of the ‘patterns’ in it. I just discovered that the author’s blog has a bunch of good reads on it as well. One of the biggest problems I’ve had with the roguelike project was a simple way to issue commands (which should have been a clue) from the player to the character, and from the computer AI to the enemies.
The first chapter in the book, and this blog post had the answer - the ‘Command’ pattern. I have no idea how I didn’t think of this sooner - basically, all the actions that an actor (player or enemy) can take are issued as ‘commands’.
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- 22 Dec 2016
So, every time I get the urge to write a blog post about whatever random bit of code I’m writing - I look at the blog and think: “Hm, this is kinda ugly.” Then, I have to rewrite it until I’m mostly satisfied with how it looks.
Recently, I’ve been working on writing a nice little interface for handling menus and other parts of the UI for my roguelike project. Unfortunately, like the layout of this blog, I can’t seem to find a satisfactory ‘look and feel’ - I think I’ve got a good start though.
While procrastinating working on that, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the map, and my ECS system. At the risk of prematurely optimizing code, it seems like an awful waste of space to make every tile an entity. Most of a tiles properties are simple boolean flags anyways, so why not make tiles just a bitflag and glyph to represent them?
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