Wednesday 12 October 2011

Brogue 1.5 released

I seldom mention other roguelikes being released, but I think this one is a little special. We recently discussed Brogue on Roguelike Radio and the first line of the Brogue 1.5 change log caught my eye.

Dungeons now include interactive “quest rooms,” which include lock-
and-key puzzles, collapsing/flooding terrain, hidden items, elaborate
traps, challenges, boss monsters and more. 
I asked Pender the obvious question 'How random are these? Will you get the same lock and key puzzle in the same room every time?'. His response has got me genuinely excited:
Pretty random, and definitely not. The level geography is generated
randomly, and then the quest room function takes over, picks a quest
room type (of which there are currently 17, defined by the data in a
master blueprints table) and scans the level to find discrete areas
that meet certain requirements of that quest room -- e.g. a dead-end
area of certain size range that is dominated by a single chokepoint
cell. Then it adapts that area to serve as that kind of quest room.  
He goes on to describe a nifty flood trap (that you may want to avoid reading to not spoil yourself) which is completely dynamically generated and triggered when you get a key from the centre of the room. And the puzzles can have dependencies on each other:
So the key that you take from the room, assuming you escape, will be
used to unlock a door elsewhere on the level. These locked rooms can
be nested within each other, as can the rooms that guard the keys, and
it is always possible to unlock them all in a single game
For the full explanation, change log and download links, see the Google groups thread.

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