Is this still a roguelike?

[magellan]

So after discovering gruesome i dusted off my compilers and ... i think the thingy i am working on right now might even be getting somewhere, maybe even somewhere mildly entertaining. ;)

But I wonder if its still a roguelike or just a game with ascii graphics?

So what do you guys think:

Its sci fi, your character doesnt have stats, just your ship has. No XP, but you can buy upgrades (and maybe find some nifty ancient alien artifact tech)
goal is to get 1000.000 credits by mapping planets (randomly generated on a random starmap) and get ressources.
there will be spacepirates, and you will be able to destroy their base, getting some bonus points
there will be merchantships, wich you can rob, getting also some bonus points
there might be an abandoned space station, infested with monsters

... it won't be a classic roguelike, especially because of the absense of loot, but will it still be at least near the genre from what i have outlined so far?

[Epythic]

Here's some literature (http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=Roguelike) for you.

And, whats a "classic roguelike"? That would be rogue itself only, right?

[Grey]

I don't think it matters whether the game is roguelikes or not, as long as it's fun. Certainly it would have certain ties to Rogue with the ASCII representation. Anyay, would be good to hear how development goes - sounds like an interesting game idea.

[magellan]

thx for the feedback guys

humm... according to those definitions it would be pretty roguelike if it ever gets finished :)

but as grey pointed out: not important how roguelike it is, as long as its fun, good point grey!

[magellan]

well...if anybody is interested in a sneak peak: here you go
wouldnt even call it an alpha...
you cant win, you just can die, save and load and highscore not yet in there and tons of other stuff still missing, but the main parts are there

enjoy, feedback welcome.

[Ars]

Some kind of help file would be nice, especially stating keybindings would be crucial. Right now I couldn't figure out how to do much.

[Epythic]

well...if anybody is interested in a sneak peak: here you go
wouldnt even call it an alpha...
you cant win, you just can die, save and load and highscore not yet in there and tons of other stuff still missing, but the main parts are there

enjoy, feedback welcome.

Doesn't work for me:



$ wine prospector.exe
*
*
...
*
127 planets
P R O S P E C T O R


That's the (abbrev.) output. Whatever I type, nothing happens.

By the way, what programming language did you use?

[magellan]

Freebasic was the language of choice.
Humm... possible wine not liking standard FB console?
maybe compiling on linux would help, wich we will do once there is a little more stuff to compile.

(Working on highscore and savegames right now, and after that we can start with the neat stuff. Added a little gimmick: if you dont name your ship it gets called NCC - #Number going up by one each time you dont name your ship) :)

[Epythic]

Freebasic was the language of choice.
Humm... possible wine not liking standard FB console?
maybe compiling on linux would help, wich we will do once there is a little more stuff to compile.

(Working on highscore and savegames right now, and after that we can start with the neat stuff. Added a little gimmick: if you dont name your ship it gets called NCC - #Number going up by one each time you dont name your ship) :)

You could just give me the source code...

[magellan]

Guess i could :) Though looking at them would propably make you go blind, so you have been warned :D

[Epythic]

Guess i could :) Though looking at them would propably make you go blind, so you have been warned :D

Thanks a lot. Compiled fine, runs better than under wine. However, still looks a little (*cough*) buggy.
Anyway, I gave freebasic a look years ago, so this is kinda interesting to me.

[magellan]

a little? how kind of you sir! :)

[magellan]

Much less bugs, some new features. if anybody is interested, check it out here:

http://sites.google.com/site/prospectorctor/Home/prospector.zip?attredirects=0

New stuff: You can become a merchant by making the bulk of your money trading goods between stations. But pirates get more agressive if you transport much high value goods
8 special planets. (distributed among 30 systems so you should find one or two even in short games)
a handfull of nifty little alien artifacts
3 skilllevel 6 legendary officers.

I hope you find it mildly entertaining. Feedback welcome.

[Shadow_2014]

Took me a couple hours to get a system down in order to max everything out. Here's one particular flaw I noticed:

The fact that you have unlimited time upon a planet means unlimited cash. If you go to a tree-covered planet and stand on a plant, you can stick something on your enter key and receive butt-loads of Bio Data while you make a sandwich (true story). Since the ratio of Bio Data to Credits is 1:1, a single trip can buy all the personal equipment you need, assuming the Data integers max out or roll over at 9999, though I didn't bother getting it quite that high. A quick fix for this would be needing Oxygen to explore planets' surfaces. This would allow a set number of turns on any given planet.

Aside from that, once the numerous typos and grammatical errors are eventually fixed, I found the game quite fun to play. Kudos.

[magellan]

Hehe... interesting point. didnt think of that! thanks.
Found another solution to that problem: Skillchecks for finding noteworthy plants get harder the longer you are on a planet, and after some time are impossible. There is some logic in that too: The longer you study the vegetation the less likely you are to find something you haven't found yet.

But I like the oxygen idea, especially now that i have implemented an atmosphere variable a few days ago (so far only affects the number of flying creatures and results of scanning a planet). I am going to nib that idea :)

The version i have on my hardrive right now has seen some work on balance (still too easy though once you got all possible upgrades) and has some nifty new stuff in it: Merchants trading between the stations, and you can rob them, navigational hazards on the star map, Mountains block field of vision, prettier post mortem & highscore, better movement system, critical hits in space combat, you can asign a list to the random name generator and it choses one of them, or add your own naming scheme with a 4 digit number ... and about a gazillion minor, medium and major bugs squished :) ... but there are some more bugs to be squished before i can release it into the wild...

I will let you guys know. & thx for the feedback!

[magellan]

Still amateurish, still bugridden, but also quite a bunch of steps forward from what you last saw from it:

http://rlprospector.googlecode.com/files/prospector0.1.1.zip

enjoy!

[magellan]

For those who are interested:

Prospector is approaching a point where it would look remarkably similiar to a game. It is approaching that point with sublight speed, but approaching it nontheless:

http://code.google.com/p/rlprospector/

Feedback and criticism is of course most welcome!