Aug 17, 2023
It’s a little confusing to keep calling these posts studio notes, since I no longer have a studio space. I’m sitting in a room at our place back in Austin that’s still filled with unpacked boxes. Settling back in is a slow process, and the last month has been really busy with moving a relative out of this space as we move back in. We also got a new kitten, who we are slowly acclimating to our other cat through a pet gate, carefully negotiating their two territories and resources (is there a strategy game idea somewhere in cats claiming or sharing litter boxes, food dishes, toys and sunbeams?)
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Aug 11, 2023
Still don’t have a project tag for this roguelike experiment yet, but it seems like it might turn into an actual game. Now I’ve added doors, (some of which are locked and have paired, color coded keys,) inventory, enemies, and slightly janky click to pathfind to suppliment arrow key movement. I’m about to add sound with howler.js and audiosprite next.
A big thing that is missing is fog of war. I made kind of a mess getting my Grotto tiles working and it’s not as straightforward as it would be in a normal ascii rot.js game. I’ll give it some consideration once I get sound added.
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Jul 10, 2023
I added fire and death to the little rot.js roguelike game I am tinkering with. This is separate from Grotto but uses the same visual language. It’s a difficult proposition to try to integrate this with Grotto, as this is turn based and Grotto is a multiplayer database driven thing with no understanding of items or characters positions in a room. This feels like a new game so far and not an extension of grotto, although there could be some interactions between the two using Grotto’s API. What should it be? It could either be a totally new dungeon game or I could try doing some sort of zero player ant-hill arcology thing to go with Archon as I had originally imagined. Hmm.
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Jul 5, 2023
Two work notes-
I was able to use the Grotto API to make a bot player, hosted on Glitch, that has simple logic that has the player check the cleanliness level of the room it’s in once and hour, if it’s dirty it uses a scrub brush item, if it’s clean, it moves through an adjacent unlocked door.
I also had some moderate success using my tileset to build a small dungeon map using the roguelike javascript library rot.js. using a rat’s nest of conditional logic, it does sort-of-cellular-automata-style matching rules to draw walls and shadows around a floor map, in the style of Grotto rooms.
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