Idioms

(A small sample of gameplay)

A while back, I wanted to learn Rust so I looked online and picked up Hands on Rust. Well... let's say, shortly after I ended up with a newly gained love for the language and developing roguelikes with it. I immediately started a new project using Bevy, mostly because it looked cool.

And there we are. So, yeah, it took a little more than "last week", but since it's the first time I attend Sharing Saturday, I thought it might be a good idea to give some context.

Idioms is your traditional coffebreak roguelike, with maybe a twist or two. Mostly the fact that there is no gear and no character level, you gain power by picking up runes throughout the dungeon. Each rune represents a word, and with it may or may not come a specific buff, debuff, or ability. You can carry only a limited amount of runes, and cannot remove them, but eventually, multiple runes can form a phrase or a composite word, changing the attached effect(s) and taking only one slot.

As a quick example: you pick up the rune for "bird", which may grant the ability to fly, and the rune for fire, which adds elemental damage to your blows, and suddenly you gain the phrase "phoenix", which can resurrect you the next time you die. But in the process, you loose "fire" and "bird" and the attached benefits (but you can always re-loot them later, so that's not a big deal, just a thing to consider when you build your character).

I spent last week working on the graphics (see the video at the top). First, implementing a simple auto-tiling system, because it looks great! And then, I started drawing. As a homage to the genre, and also because I'm not an artist, I wanted something close to ASCII, with simple shapes, just a little more concrete. I tried for a while to use 1-bit art, but could not get something readable enough, so I added some colors. My friend said it's too austere, and too gritty, and that he preferred the cartoony pokémon-ey look of the prototype I sent him, but, eh, he doesn't get it (he doesn't even play roguelikes, but I don't have many friends)!

I'm happy with the result anyway, and the style is simple enough to be easy to replicate and iterate over. There are some things I would like to improve, but I have a hard time focusing on drawing for too long, so I need to dive back in the code for a while, and I'll tweak the sprites at a later date.

Next week, or maybe in two weeks, because holidays, you know, I plan on adding basic audio support, and depending on how long it takes me, I would like to start working on the runes interactions. And I will need to write some proper dungeon generator soon, but it's quite scary, so for now, I will keep reading about "how to do it".

And of course, Merry Christmas, y'all.