A key consideration when designing a game engine is how rules of the game will be encoded. The engine needs a way of enforcing statements such as “Doors can only be passed through if they are open”, and “If a burning character walks into a pool of water, it stops burning”. The expressiveness of a game engine’s rule-encoding is important, as it dictates the limitations of mechanics that can be implemented in games. Nobody wants to discover late in development that their engine can’t be used to efficiently implement a certain feature.

A roguelike I made in Februrary 2016.

Play in browser

You are a faithful servant of the Pyro God. You returned to the former home of your ancestors in search of his ancient cathedral, only to find the city a frozen ruin.

This is my first attempt at writing one game a month. It’s a turn-based dungeon crawler in the style of traditional roguelikes. All the characters in the game are bugs. Each bug has an ability and combat stats. You can “channel” a bug and gain access to its ability and stats.

Play in browser

Most games employ some form of visible area detection to simulate the fact that opaque objects obscure one’s view of whatever is behind them. Recursive Shadowcast is one of a handful of algorithms that compute visible area in worlds represented by 2D grids. This makes it suitable for use in roguelikes. This post will explain the recursive shadowcast algorithm.