TL;DR: Is it okay to let components have logic in an ECS to prevent system bloat?

Hello! I am currently creating a traditional roguelike engine in Python, using an ECS framework.

Currently I am trying to figure out how I want to handle game logic. I know the traditional approach is to have Systems handle logic. So for example there is a MovementSystem that listens for the MoveIntent component to be added to an Entity, then queries the World to check for collision, and finally updates that Entity's Position.

But I expect that myself and others using my engine will want to create many unique components for all sort of reasons. For example, if a user wants to have many different types of armor/damage prevention, they would need a DamageSystem (or multiple Systems, each handling a different stage of damage calculation), that would need to check every single equipped Entity for each of these individual components.

I am worried that this could have performance impacts, especially because the System needs to run and check all of the relevant entities, even if none of those entities end up having the component.

I understand that separating logic and data is an important part of an ECS, but wouldn't it make more sense to support individual components to listen for events and act themselves? So each variety of Armor component would listen to DamageIntents themselves instead of having a DamageSystem search for Armor components.

Thanks for taking the time to read this!

Tileset repository - Dwarf Fortress Wiki

Or where can i check if they are free to use?

As usual, post what you've done for the week! Anything goes... concepts, mechanics, changelogs, articles, videos, and of course gifs and screenshots if you have them! It's fun to read about what everyone is up to, and sharing here is a great way to review your own progress, possibly get some feedback, or just engage in some tangential chatting :D

Previous Sharing Saturdays

Mike Cook’s “Next Level: Making Games That Make Themselves” is a history of procedural generation in games, starting with Rogue and Elite and working all the way up to Caves of Qud and Dwarf Fortress. We just covered it in our book club podcast - the Game Developers’ Library. It’s a book which is well worth a read for anyone working on roguelikes and who wants to think about the implications of using different generation techniques and the balance between authorship and randomness. It’s not so much a technical how-to but a creative treatise on the power and diversity of these methods

EDIT: for typo, but also to say - thanks for all the upvotes and positive comments on this one! Reddit can be a minefield re: anything self promo and the edge-cases like this one often feel like they’re not worth the effort, so thanks for restoring my faith!

https://youtu.be/s14EfGPNHFk?is=Yu8EQeUgqHy83qDV

The general wisdom when building a game is not to invest too much until you’ve proven your core gameplay loop is fun.

But I’ve been thinking, how does validating that fun work for a traditional turn based roguelike ? What’s the minimum viable thing you should focus on?

Environment generation, actors , turn engine and combat ?

And/Or is the “game loop” for traditional roguelike already proven so you will always be able to tweak the mechanics in the future - ie you’ll never build a roguelike that isn’t at least minimally viable as long as you build it right ?

Or something else ?

Recently I finished up going through the entrants of 7DRL Challenge 2018, doing a video for each one of those games of old. This also includes incomplete entries that failed the challenge.

Mostly posting this here as there were some games I couldn't play; be it because they had no way of being played on Windows, or the executables didn't seem to work. If you are one of those developers who can't find your game in my playlist, that is likely why. Feel free to message me if you can figure out a fix to make your games playable.

As usual, post what you've done for the week! Anything goes... concepts, mechanics, changelogs, articles, videos, and of course gifs and screenshots if you have them! It's fun to read about what everyone is up to, and sharing here is a great way to review your own progress, possibly get some feedback, or just engage in some tangential chatting :D

Previous Sharing Saturdays

Hello, these last few months i was working on procedurally generated tactical rpg inspired by fire emblem, but ended up scrapping it.

However i already had a few assets done and i feel it would be a waste to just throwing them into the bin.

So i'm thinking about repurposing the existing assets into a more traditional roguelike style (basically removing the blue/red color coding from characters) the picture in the post also shows the dungeon tileset i was working on and the overworld/worldmap tileset, so it could be used for games with both dungeons and a worldmap like adom, tome, etc...

So, far i only know of a single existing tileset for angband that is somewhat similar in style (high res and handpainted) so i want to gather some feedback before i keep working on this on move on to something else.

I don't have any project i could use it for so i would probably make it free or cheap on itch or something, but it could be cool to finish it and see it used in someone else game.

So, does it look interesting or something you would want to use?

Keep it up folks! It's great seeing everyone participate.

This week is all about setting up a the FoV and spawning enemies

Part 4 - Field of View

Display the player's field-of-view (FoV) and explore the dungeon gradually (also known as fog-of-war).

Part 5 - Placing Enemies and kicking them (harmlessly)

This chapter will focus on placing the enemies throughout the dungeon, and setting them up to be attacked.

Of course, we also have FAQ Friday posts that relate to this week's material.

• #12: Field of Vision(revisited)
• #41: Time Systems(revisited)
• #56: Mob Distribution
• #70: Map Memory

Feel free to work out any problems, brainstorm ideas, share progress and and as usual enjoy tangential chatting. :)

As usual, post what you've done for the week! Anything goes... concepts, mechanics, changelogs, articles, videos, and of course gifs and screenshots if you have them! It's fun to read about what everyone is up to, and sharing here is a great way to review your own progress, possibly get some feedback, or just engage in some tangential chatting :D

Previous Sharing Saturdays

Congratulations for making it to the second week of the RoguelikeDev Does the Complete Roguelike Tutorial! This week is all about setting up the map and generating a dungeon.

Part 2 - The generic Entity, the render functions, and the map

Create the player entity, tiles, and game map.

Part 3 - Generating a dungeon

Creating a procedurally generated dungeon!

Of course, we also have FAQ Friday posts that relate to this week's material

• #3: The Game Loop (revisited)
• #4: World Architecture (revisited)
• #22: Map Generation (revisited)
• #23: Map Design (revisited)
• #53: Seeds
• #54: Map Prefabs
• #71: Movement
• #75: Procedural Generation

Feel free to work out any problems, brainstorm ideas, share progress, and as usual enjoy tangential chatting. :)

For my first roguelike project I'm working on proc-gen. As a data scientist, random walks are attractive to me. In time series analysis we use random walks with drift to characterize some phenomena like stock market fluctuations. I added "momentum" as a parameter to help give the walker drift, which creates corridors.

I'm using Golang because...

1. I've written Python for money for like 8 years now and it's boring me
2. Golang ships a binary so in theory my outputs can run anywhere.
3. It's pretty dang quick while still handling garbage collection for you.
4. For terminal based tools the ecosystem is incredibly mature. Many of the best modern terminal tools are written in go.

I put the code in GitHub if you would like to play with it yourself!

Might do a YouTube walk through if anyone is interested. Let me know.

https://github.com/PigsEyedea/drunkardwalk

I am not new to development or RPGs but am new to game dev and building roguelikes. I’m having fun with my prototype but I’m struggling with the order I’m building things. I’ve found myself going down rabbit holes of trying to balance things way too early , but it also sometimes seems that without some semblance of balance , I can’t lock in a core game loop that feels good. I am trying to start very traditional and turn based as well so I’m not exactly in uncharted territory.

For example, I’ve played around a lot with proc gen and my map style. My game is themed around exploration of a city at night where different blocks are different dungeon floors. For the basic map I’m using BSP with WFC to help add variety to the rooms.

But what happens is I have a nice large map with 20 or so rooms, but during my playtests, I sometimes will go to 3 or 4 rooms in a row with nothing in them and it feels frustrating. (Maybe this is just part of the genre lol)

So it’s like, I could make less rooms, or bigger rooms, but what if I like the amount of rooms and want more content in them? And if I don’t want more enemies or treasure than I’m dangerously close to introducing new content and balance to solve a problem and potentially cause a whack a mole of other balance problems.

I know this isn’t supposed to be easy, but I guess my main question is how have people solved exploration feeling boring until you get to a fight or a drop/chest?

As usual, post what you've done for the week! Anything goes... concepts, mechanics, changelogs, articles, videos, and of course gifs and screenshots if you have them! It's fun to read about what everyone is up to, and sharing here is a great way to review your own progress, possibly get some feedback, or just engage in some tangential chatting :D

Previous Sharing Saturdays

How do you actually catch balance regressions?

I've been going in circles on this and I'm curious how other people handle it.

The specific failure I keep hitting: I change a scaling formula or add a new weapon archetype, everything looks fine in isolation, and then three weeks later I find out that some mid-tier item outperforms things it shouldn't at a level band I never manually checked. The curve looked fine on a graph. The problem was the interaction with crit/attack speed/enemy resist, not the curve itself.

So my questions:

1. Do you actually simulate time-to-kill across level bands, or do you eyeball curves and playtest?

2. If you simulate: is it a spreadsheet, a throwaway script, an in-engine tool you built, or something off the shelf?

3. Has anyone here ever "paid" for a tool that helped with this? Asset store, SaaS, anything. Genuinely curious whether this is a "we all just build our own" situation.

Not selling anything, I'm trying to work out whether the tooling I keep wanting to build already exists or whether everyone just accepts the spreadsheet.

(Context: solo dev, RPG, currently on a Google Sheet with more tabs than I'd like to admit.)

I could benefit from some player feedback in the future on my project, I uploaded a project on itch.io years ago that didn't get many plays (understandably since it was more of beginner generic project).

Thank you /u/Tesselation9000 for signing up with Sunlorn

Download for Windows here: https://tesselation9000.itch.io/wander

Tesselation9000 says:

Sunlorn is a game about traveling the world and exploring deep dungeons, with strong influences from Nethack, Larn, Brogue and DCSS. The game is heavily focused on having a rich, interactive environment and leans hard on using procedural generation. Not only are levels randomly generated, but the world map, the number and types of locations you visit, and the game objectives themselves vary with every run. My vision is to build a game that gives you a different adventure each time you play. There is a dynamic lighting system, fire that spreads, rivers that flow, clouds of mist or poisonous gas that slowly diffuse, and a sky that cycles between night and day.

Sunlorn has a lightweight character build system. There are no experience levels, classes or skill trees. The primary way of advancing your character is just by increasing their six attributes (the usual D&D six-pack: strength, constitution, dexterity, intelligence, wisdom and charisma) by collecting magical statonia flowers scattered across the world.

Presently, you can build a character from one of four human nations. This choice does not affect your statistics, but influences things like your starting area, how other species perceive you and what gods are available to you. There are eight religions you can find in game that will grant special powers to their followers. There is also a large number of potions, scrolls, wands and other items.

I recommend starting with the tutorial before jumping into the full game. If anyone is able to make it past the first three levels of the starter dungeon, I'd really like to hear about it. After that point, the game hasn't been playtested enough to balance out. Actually, what would be REALLY cool is if anyone would like to volunteer to let me watch them play a run.

It's only available for Windows at this time, I'm afraid.

Leave your feedback here, or you can email me at sunlorn@gmx.ca

Thanks!

Other members interested in signing up for FF in future weeks can check the sidebar link for instructions.

TL;DR I want to make an ASCII roguelike from scratch, but I'm lost in the sauce with regards to language/engine/libraries etc.

Hey, folks. For the past few weeks I've been dabbling in roguelike development. I managed to cobble together two different prototypes — one in Godot and one in C# using MonoGame + SadConsole. I've learned that I much prefer coding from scratch and that's how I want to proceed. My prototyping quickly got out of hand and I'm now out of my depth. So, I need to start again, learn everything properly, and prove to myself that I can actually build something.

I've been lurking here for a bit and I did check the sidebar for tutorials, but I don't know what I don't know, ya know? There's a lot of options and a lot of different opinions, and I'm a little lost. I'd be happy to continue with MonoGame + SadConsole, but it seems the SadConsole tutorials have disappeared? Is there a newer alternative I haven't found?

My skill level: I'm familiar with HTML, I've been learning C#, and have maybe a vague understanding of Python. I can look at a block of code and probably figure out what it does, but I'm not yet confident putting all the pieces together and making them work.

Why not start with a simpler project? I learn better when I'm interested in the topic. I've tried to learn to code several times over the past 20 years and this is the furthest I've gotten so far. I want to make this game.

Any guidance would be appreciate. Thanks 🙏

Maze Hunter ASCII is a demake of the classic Master System game "Maze Hunter 3D" (1988). It features a procedurally generated maze full of hostile creatures. The player must navigate through the maze, avoiding or defeating the creatures, in order to find the exit and escape the labyrinth.

While the original game was not a roguelike, this version reimagines it as a minimalist roguelite experience. Each run generates a different maze layout, enemy placement, and exploration path, making every attempt unique. The game keeps the simple arcade spirit of the 1988 release while adding procedural replayability and the tension of starting a new run with each expedition into the labyrinth. No permadeath as the game has a saving system.

I've made a few other game prototypes, but this will be my first proper roguelike.

It's not much to look at yet. Right now it's just basic lighting and moving around. Oddly enough this is my first time doing grid-based and turn-based movement. The basics weren't too difficult, but I wanted to implement the common feature where you hold down a directional button and, after a short delay, the player moves automatically (but at a reasonably speed). That took some trial-and-error, but I think I've got it to a place that I'm comfortable with now.

Welcome to the first week of RoguelikeDev Does the Complete Roguelike Tutorial. This week is all about setting up a development environment and getting a character moving on the screen.

Part 0 - Setting Up

Get your development environment and editor setup and working.

Part 1 - Drawing the ‘@’ symbol and moving it around

The next step is drawing an @ and using the keyboard to move it.

Of course, we also have FAQ Friday posts that relate to this week's material

# 3: The Game Loop(revisited)

# 4: World Architecture (revisited)

# 22: Map Generation (revisited)

# 23: Map Design (revisited)

# 53: Seeds

# 54: Map Prefabs

# 71: Movement

​ Feel free to work out any problems, brainstorm ideas, share progress, and as usual enjoy tangential chatting. :)