Month: April 2023

Added a map viewer to RogueBusters. I added this so that I can see what I’m doing while I make the city blocks more interesting. I’m also investigating the use of the wave function collapse to create the city blocks.

The output tends to be a little more complex than I had hoped for. I haven’t given up yet. Here are some more examples:

Here’s an example from a map of Chicago from 1857:

There are only a few variations, so I’m not sure how to model that with WFC. For now, I’ll just work on creating the map from a few basic variations and see how that goes.

You can walk around the city and pick things up. Pressing “i” will show you your inventory.

Here’s another view showing more stuff:

Field of View is working, and I now have a simple scripting engine to place prefabs:

It just places them in random positions, but I’ll soon be able to specify positional hints to the generator so things end up in the right place. There is also a template engine for generating names and other types of text. Here are some examples:

Full name: Harriet Santana
Full name: Lyle Berger
Full name: Eloise Delarosa
Full name: Phillip Combs
Restaurant name: Hanson's Family Restaurant
Building name: Fields Plaza

I plan on using these templates to generate basic NPC dialog, but I would much rather have GPT-3 or GPT-4 do the talking. Maybe we’ll get there, I don’t know yet, but the template-driven dialog should work fine for now.

Other than walking around, there’s not much you can do in the game, so I want to work on inventories and items now. Then I’ll work on NPC interactions and combat.

Started a new project. I renamed gpthack to strafe. It’s a first-person roguelike engine now. I may use it again in a later project. I started another project I’m calling RogueBusters:

It’s set in the 1920s and based on a role-playing game my high-school friends and I used to play back in the day. It’s not much at the moment. The city folk just walk towards a random target and then stop. You can walk inside buildings, but I just got prefabs working, so there’s only one thing inside them:

I’m staying with Rust for now although I’m having a rough time with it. I don’t want to stop and actually learn new concepts like ownership and lifetimes. I can focus on the gameplay features I’ve always wanted since I don’t need to worry as much as I have in the past about graphics and physics.

Hopefully, I’ll see this one through, but I’m not making any promises. I would rather be disciplined than motivated, but I’ll take what I can get :).