Gauging interest in a Dominions Roguelike...

[Nagot Gick Fel]

Vicious Love said:
Oh, and if you do end up using ASCII, instead of sprites, the Vampire Queen should be a navy blue, uppercase N.

Talk about undeserved honors.

[Ed Kolis]

OK, thanks for the advice, folks... now my little @-sign can run around the empty dungeon! Well, not exactly run as I haven't implemented the run commands yet; he can only move one square per keypress.

Now is there any trick to moving the cursor about on a console window? I tried to highlight the player with the cursor, but no matter what I did the cursor always stayed one square after the Last character printed! Is there a trick to this or is it just another Microsoft bug ? (I'm using .NET SDK 2.0 Beta so I should expect more bugs than is typical for a Microsoft product, if such a thing is possible )

Hmm, what to do next? Add monsters? Items? Terrain?

BTW, if anyone wants to see what I have so far, and is willing to download the .NET runtime 2.0 beta (or already has!), I've posted my work on my website: http://home.fuse.net/koliset/Programming/DomBand.rar . You'll need the .NET Framework 2.0 Beta runtime which you can find on Microsoft's website; sorry about the huge runtime which will soon be obsolete when the real 2.0 is released

[Kristoffer O]

Next?

Probably some simple terrain that blocks the way. Trees or walls.

Then one simple immobile monster to kill. An Oracle perhaps. Or a Thing of Many Eyes.

Then remove the ability to hurt the enemy unless you have a weapon. Then add a spear to pick up and equip so you can wound the beast.

Good Luck!

[magnate]

I was interested in the comment about not using Angband code. You could easily use a lot of the code to do stuff like draw the screen and move the character without spoiling the game for yourself. It's all in which files you look in. Try the z-*.c files for a start. (Actually start with main-ibm.c and go from there!)

For those of you who don't like Angband's somewhat arbitrary character level progression system, try Sangband. It has a skill system which is much more believable and engrossing.

My 2p on which bits of Dom2 to focus on putting into a roguelike: I'm with Vicious Love on this, it's the flavour that's important. So the 17 races are not only the character races but the monsters as well - you can add some code to prevent the player's own race turning up as monsters. The cheap units are the low-level monsters, and the more expensive ones start later on. So you start off killing scouts & LI, and work up to taking on iceclads and principes.

Setting it above ground has its advantages but is much harder to do. I'd start with a dungeon and add a wilderness once it's working.

There is already a spreadsheet which lists all the Dom2 spells, btw.

CC

[Tuidjy]

Do I have to do everything here?

The time period - immediately before the Ascension wars.
The hero - a disgruntled man who has an axe to grind with the Supreme Deity.
The setting - the hollowed mountain, capped by a tower, in which the One resides.
The enemies - the guards, worshippers, and piligrims from all seventeen races.
The vaults - trophies room from His ascension.
The special levels - single race levels, path themes, well known players.
The end boss - one of the pretenders of the original Dominion
The easter eggs - too many possibilities to mention

Steal, I mean borrow the code from ADOM, and Bob's your uncle.

[rylen]

Tuidjy said:
Do I have to do everything here?

The time period - immediately before the Ascension wars.
The hero - a disgruntled man who has an axe to grind with the Supreme Deity.
The setting - the hollowed mountain, capped by a tower, in which the One resides.
The enemies - the guards, worshippers, and piligrims from all seventeen races.
The vaults - trophies room from His ascension.
The special levels - single race levels, path themes, well known players.
The end boss - one of the pretenders of the original Dominion
The easter eggs - too many possibilities to mention

Steal, I mean borrow the code from ADOM, and Bob's your uncle.

Sounds really good. This was my v2 proposal.

Another fun way to make it more Dominions themed would be to have magic site dungeons. For instance, you might find the bile marsh dungeon where you fight bog beasts, horned serpents and hydras. Or the cloud pillers packed with air elementals and storm demons. Or an overgrown graveyard with carrion animations.

Mostly what I meant by sites w/ guards on a world map. Great for down the line. Early on, I suggest just make the single theme levels.

Rylen