Adoxographist - One who uses eloquence to talk about unimportant things.

The Coffee Show did an appearance at the Mainstreet Show in Livingston. The full video is available only to those who donate to KGLT's FunDrive during the Coffee Show, Wednesday 3-6 p.m. MDT.

A short clip of me being cheesy follows:


This show was a lot of fun in different ways.  It was the first time I've been on stage in many, many years.  I had forgotten how much of a rush it is to perform in front of a live audience.  The feeling of being judged instantly, and positively in this case, has some deep chemical connection that stimulates the social happiness centers of my brain.

The show was also fun in how some old material got remixed, partially on the fly and partially preplanned.  There were some fun new bits to Apollo 12-Year Olds, but The Dollar and Change Pyramid turned out a bit different than expected. 

During the rehearsal (if you can call a five minute "remember this old bit?" period a rehearsal), a few changes were decided upon.  Amongst these were that I would play the host, mostly because that was the only part I could actually remember, even though it hadn't been my part previously.  It was also decided that Randy would realize that he could be the winner if Keith didn't manage to guess the right things, which was a new character point.

Things didn't go quite as planned, which is normal for a live show.  Especially one where one of the people (me) has not done live performances or the particular bits in quite some time.  This gave all of us the opportunity to think on our feet and improvise without ruining the bit, something that contributes greatly to the satisfaction of doing a live show.

In the end things worked out quite well, and in a few cases even better than planned.  If you want to see what happened, I guess you'll just have to give generously to KGLT at the right time!

Hope you weren't looking for a long in-depth review 'cause this one's going to be short.

It won't compile on my windows XP machine after about thirty minutes of messing with different versions of Python and curses modules.  So I have no idea what the game is like.

On that note, if you want your game played, make it as easy as possible for people to do so.  Releasing source code and forcing people to compile does not comprise a finished game in any sense.

I'm so tired of dealing with just trying to get this game up that I'm not even going to post the screen shot where python chokes on the first print line.

My mother always said, "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all."  Fortunately for the length of this review, I don't listen to my mother very often.

Fortress of The Goblin King is listed in the success column for the 7 Day Rogue-Like Challenge, but it is in that column only as a matter of it meeting the minimal requirements.  It does load up, you can move around, you can even kill things (something my entry didn't have), but that's the limit of FoTGK.

Some of my issues with FoTGK come from it being programmed in Java, which is what I did mine in.  The issues are not that it's the same language, but rather that I know from experience how easy it is to not have those issues.  The first thing is the minor annoyance of the relatively small play window opening in the upper left corner.  It's not really that big of a deal but .setLocationRelativeTo(null) would have centered it on the screen, which is where I like most of my interactions to occur.

The second thing that jumps out as an issue is the opening text hard wraps at the window boundary, splitting words wherever they happen to hit the edge.  It looks like the programmer didn't care enough to either implement edge checking and string splitting in natural places, or for such a small implementation, simply manually ensure that the strings printed weren't too long.  Having these two things be the first two things that occur in the game gives a very strong impression that the game is going to be an unmotivated attempt.

This lackluster opening is followed by the lackluster gaming experience, but more on that later.  Before you ever kill your first goblin, you are very likely to notice that the game moves very slowly, with visible tears in the graphics update process.  I haven't been into the source, which is available, to check, but I suspect that rather than creating one graphics object and then painting it, each tile is being painted every time you move.

Later on while playing the game, I discovered that if you resize the window you get stats!  It's like a bonus easter egg feature.  Or maybe an easily corrected bug, I'm not sure.  You also get to see what you have equipped, which is always nice.  Before expanding the window you have no idea what you've got equipped, and when you equip new stuff you get no message that you've successfuly done so.

Having gotten thoroughly frustrated with the game at this point, I clicked the exit button on the upper right corner.  And nothing happened.  You have to use 'ESC' to exit.  Free tip to fledgling Java programmers: you can define the action your program will take when that exit button on the window is used!  For the love of God, fledgling Java programmers please read this page!

This impression is followed through with the actual gameplay.  You start out in a basic rogue-like dungeon with potentially some goblins around you.  Shortly you will enter battle and your torch will probably go out, leaving you unable to see far.  I'm not sure if the torch going out is just a bug or if the goblins you fight put them out.  It doesn't really matter as every goblin has another torch you can pick up and use, rendering the whole idea of needing a torching into something very uninteresting as there is no challenge in obtaining them.  Maybe the gameplay gets better later on, but I couldn't stand the slowness and repetitveness long enough to find out.

The combat and layout seem decent enough.  But in no way special.  Combined with the other issues in this game, I'd recommend not taking the time to try this game out.  It doesn't have anything to bring a veteran rogue-like player anything interesting or new and it has enough problems to be unenjoyable.

If this is the first Java program that Florian has ever made, then many of its issues are understandable.  I hope that he takes what he has learned making this game and strives to get better.  Fortress of The Goblin King has a nugget of enjoyable game that could be brought out with some work, but as it stands the game just isn't worth the time it takes to play.


Horrible text wrapping, but hey at least there's some goblins to go kill.  Now if only I knew how much health I had.



Oh! There's my health and what I have equiped! Now if only the gameplay itself was in any way interesting...

DDRogue is one of many success in the 2009 7DRL Challenge.  And while success for this challenge means having a working, playable, and mostly critical bug-free game, Flend has gone beyond the basics and provided us with an amazing game.

DDrogue looks like a standard rogue-like, with a somewhat subdued palette giving the impression of darkness and dankness that isn't present in many others.  The controls are also fairly standard and present no obstacle in getting right into the game.

The first thing the game does, after some housekeeping such as taking down your name, is open up with a fairly cliched story of being lost with amnesia.  My first impression was to think, "Oh no, mystery hero saves the world again," but this is a case where the cliche improves the story of the game.

As you make your way through the levels fighting various critters and monsters, you find bits of your equipment that have been scattered during some mystery event from before the game's start.  Every time you find a piece of equipment you improve.  Either you remember some fancy combat move you'd forgotten or perhaps something just makes you more confident and your skill level goes up.  In either case a bit of story accompanies the find, rewarding you with both excellent loot and another hint into the background events that lead up to this adventure.

It turns out that the cliche of amnesia drives this story and game in a way that is satisfying and excellent for the design goals of the game.  Amnesiatic heros are often too clueless for too long and it seems more like a way to drag out gameplay length than for any solid reason.  DDRogue doesn't suffer from that problem at all.  The amnesia give the player a reason why the hero isn't super powerful in the beginning, but finding things increases not only your skills but your tactical options in a way that is very satisfying.  The story bits happen often enough that it's clear the amnesia is a way to provide a good reason to get better very quickly, which is quite an excellent idea for what is meant to be a relatively short game.

I highly reccomend taking DDRogue for a spin, if you have Windows and .NET3.5 as it requires both.  You can get it here.

It's official, RGRD (rec.games.roguelike.development) has a reddit channel here.

Check it out today.

(sorry, no screen shot)

The premise of this 7DRL is that you have pissed of your god so badly that your only hope it to start worshiping a completely random god.

When you first start the game it says that the only thing your have to do for the random god is bring a stone of chaos to his alter, but as befits his random nature the god will demand something different (and random) of you each level.  You may be asked to kill only a certain number of enemies, or all of them, or none of them.  You may be asked to drink all of the potions on the level.  You may be asked to run for your life from a super powerful enemy.

The game has the feel of a well made rogue-like.  The controls are mostly what would be expected and the difficulty of enemies being represented simply by the character used to display them makes combat encounters easy to jump into.

The graphical layout is old school RL style, but it doesn't need to be fancy for this game to accomplish its goal.  In fact the simple style really gives the feeling that you're playing one of the first RLs that you always suspected were more about randomness than skill.

I enjoyed this game thoroughly, partly because the randomness makes it interesting and partly because it's short enough you aren't upset when you die a random death.  You can get the game through here.

I finished my 7DRL with a few hours to spare.  It can be found here.

Important things to know:
It's built in Java using Netbeans IDE.
It makes use of libjsci, a library to control input and output to a window approximating terminal emulation.  libjsci is built by Slashie with some additions and assistance from myself.

It makes for an interesting tech demo of fairly realistic stone layering and modification, using real-world principles for laying down sedimentary layers and then applying some physical metamorphoses, igneous intrusion and extrusion, and then heat metamorphoses.

The gameplay itself is rather easy in the beginning and it takes so long for the gameplay to become interesting and challenging that it's hardly worth the time it took to get there.  Still it's interesting to see how such a game has come together, and I look forward to creating the sequel which will have many more hazards, including hostile critters.

This marks the first complete rogue-like game I've made.  My previous effort, Quarker, stalled out amongst a reworking of the combat algorithms.  I found that having a definite time-line in place helped me focus on turning out a playable game rather than failing to turn out a perfect game.

This also marks the first programming challenge that I have taken part in, and that was enjoyable in its own right.  Even though I was making the game by myself, there was a sense of community in doing so.  Knowing that other people all around the world are doing similar work with the same time frame was surprisingly motivational for me.

Overall I think that the 7DRL challenge was good, as it gave myself and others that little bit of extra motivation to produce something which was doable, but still entertaining, in a short period of time.  Many of the 7DRL entries look more like tech demos than full games, but that's by comparing them with modern big budget, lots of time input games.  If Pac-Man is a good game standard, than most of the 7DRLs stand on their own as a complete game.

For more info on the challenge, and links to all the games, check out this thread.

This screenshot is from a beta version, but you can see some of the stone layout complexity in it.

The Seven Day Rogue-Like Challenge (7DRL for short) has come around again.

One of the first entries completed, because he started a week early, is Kaw's Emperor Engine.  It's a steam-punk style game in which the protagonist's old mentor apparently created some unspeakably evil mechanical abominations, shortly after which he disappeared. This naturally leaves the hero as the only hope for all humanity.

The unique mechanic in this game, besides the hero, is that you not only grab parts from defeated enemies to make new items out of, you actually have to study the smashed remains of clockwork automotons to learn how to make the items.  There are some serious balance issues in the version I played, 1.04.  I never got the right combination of parts to make anything.  This is the point where you'd expect me to start ranting and raving about how bad the game was, but that's not what's going to happen.

Despite the balance problems, the games unique look and flavor make it quite enjoyable.  You have to accept that you're going to die when you meet the brass spiders, but that's okay.  There's a thrill to seeing what random thing you've learned from your most recently defeated enemy that taps into the basic loot-pleasure center of the gamer's brain.  Once the balance issues are fixed, I have a feeling that this will become an instant classic in the rogue-like genre.

Along with the description of the setting, there's a great deal of uniqueness provided by the display itself.  The colors chosen are nice and give a steampunk feel without being either obnoxious or silly.  The information display is clean and it's easy to follow what's going on and what your character's status is while playing.  A little more work could be done with the menu system, picking up things is a pain when you can only grab one item at a time and you almost always want everything that's in a pile.

Overal I would say that Emperor Engine is well worth spending some time with.  Watch for the future of it as well, as I'm sure it'll evolve into something even greater than it is today.  Any game where you can double die has to be worth trying out!

I've been wanting to mod games for a while now, but didn't really know where to start.  Well now I've started, with a crazy game called Dwarf Fortress.

So far I've made it easier to find fuel sources by adding in burnable peat.  It's also easier to get iron since I've added in bog iron which appears in soil layers.  I've also modified a few of the gems, and made it possible to create Jet from Liginite.

Nothing too terribly exciting, but it's a start and it's given me some ideas for other games.

Other game idea 1: "Excitable Digger" - a game where you run around and try to dig up gems.  You have to watch your energy and you can cash in gems for food, but your score is based only on what gems you have at the end of the game.

Other game idea 2: "Mineral Assayer" - an educational game where you have to identify mineral types, based on descriptions of them

There's nothing that makes you feel good in quite the same way as suddenly noticing that you've gotten better at something.  For me, today, it was paying drums on Rock Band on my Xbox 360.

For nearly half a year I've been stuck playing medium level on anything harder than three dots, and hard level for most of the songs under that, but today I discovered that I've gotten good enough to play songs all the way into the four dot category on expert level!  Something just seemed to click inside me and suddenly I could do faster beats with my foot and do them when they were off of the main beat, something I'd been having trouble with for a long while.