- Tower of Azari -
IntroductionFor those who followed along with
my previous programming adventures may recall a rogue-like I started in C++ back in late 2009, largely as a learning exercise. However, as I started college time ran short, various tasks showing up one after another, and the project was abandoned. Back in March of 2011 I began work on creating a very similar game under the same title in C# using LibTCod. Work has been sporadic, to say the absolute least, but I return to the project when time allows.
OverviewThe core and driving principle through development thus far has been ease and power of modification. The previous, C++ version of Tower of Azari permitted the player to edit the items and creatures in a manner similar to Dwarf Fortress' RAW files. In addition to bringing back a more powerful data-file format this time around, a great deal of the game is driven by scripts. This includes things like attacking, death-checks, etc; all removed from the hard-coded binary and moved out into scripts. Additionally, almost all of the stats a mob (creature), tile or item has are determined by the data-files; not fond of the traditional rogue-like stats? You can remove them entirely, and build a custom combat system from the ground up. Want a more complex (or simple) turn system? Build it. Initially these scripts were written in Lua, but that proved far too slow for things like tile-bumping or mass processing, so they've been shifted to C#. As such they can be compiled into a custom assembly at run-time, compile-errors are output to a log, and it all runs just as fast as the rest of the game.
At this point, the "game" is still more of a tech-demo. There are no map transitions, nor is there any sort of magic or special abilities. But the map is generated by a script (albeit a boring one atm), and there's no AI to speak of (though support for the scripting of such
has been implemented), but item, mob and tile type data is loaded nicely from files, and you can move around and kill the example mob, pick up, drop, equip and examine items/equipment, and customize a great deal of the functionality through scripts. There's still a lot more to do before I would consider it a game, but progress is being made. Without further ado...
Downloads and ScreenshotsWebsiteVersion 0.3If you have any problems running it, or any other trouble, comments, criticism (constructive!) or other input please let me know.