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COLUMN: @Play: Introducing Mayflight - Using Roguelike Design Lessons in a Non-Roguelike

2010-09-02 16:00
@ Play is a monthly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre. This time, John uses this column to introduce his first-ever game project, Mayflight, which uses Roguelike concepts in a platform game. It s been a while since the last @Play column! Sorry for the long delay. I was working very hard on a personal game project. I bring it up because, as luck would have it, that project is the subject of this column.... The months I was MIA I spent working on a personal game development project, called Mayflight. (It s available for download from here. I ve put most of a demo playthrough up on YouTube in this playlist.) And in its construction, I ended up using a good number of roguelike design concepts to make a game that no one would mistake for a roguelike. I m still recovering from the development process so I need to get back into the swing of things concerning roguelikes (Dungeon Crawl had another major release while I was gone!), but considering that Mayflight uses random area generation and more than a few roguelike design principles, it might be useful and interesting to go over some aspects of the game s design, especially since the game, itself, is not a roguelike, not even in the style of Spelunky, which prizes object interactions.Glimpses of infinity Some years ago I had an idea for a randomly-generated platformer game. The concept was what we might call non-traditional: there were no enemies, there was no explicit goal, and there was no real purpose to the game. What was there was a few ideas as to how to create random terrain algorithmically, and the hope that this would be interesting enough by itself. Really, I think it isn t. (I actually think that it can be, but we aren t there yet. I may say more on this later.) Some time back I registered a copy of YoYoGames beginners game development kit Game Maker 8. After poking around with it, I found that it was actually much more powerful than I had expected. One can jettison the annoying drag an drop scripting system and use C-like code almost exclusively. It also maintains the DirectX commands for you, and generally lets you get on with the work of constructing your vision instead of wrestling so much with APIs. I will not say that it is perfect. If you prove the edges of the system you sometimes unexpected problem cases, such as if you try to generate random numbers within a very large range. It also has real problems concerning keeping code to yourself; as it stands, anyone can take any published Game Maker game and fairly easily get the scripts and resources out of it. However, real games have been made with it before, most notably to my mind two games we ve mentioned here in the past, Spelunky and Desktop Dungeons. Around the time I installed Game Maker on a new system, a news post opened up on its greeting screen about a game development contest YoYoGames was sponsoring, Competition06. I gathered from the text that...
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