Introductory post Kyra10:05 0 comments

Greetings!

As you might have noticed, we are Alpha Chicken Games. I can imagine, dear readers, what you must be thinking: ‘Where in heaven’s name does that name come from?’ Well, I shall tell you. The “Alpha” part comes from the fact that we are part of the Alpha mentor group. That’s quite easy. However, the “Chicken” part comes from something slightly more difficult: the first letters of our team members’ first names together form “KIPJ”, and if you just add an “e” to it, you have the Dutch word for the diminutive form of “chicken”. I hope that wasn’t too hard to follow.

Now, another thing you might be wondering is why we only have four members; after all, the groups are supposed to have five to seven members. The reason for that is basically just Fate having it out for us. Alpha used to have eleven students in it. Five of those students formed a group, leaving the other six to form the other group. However, one of those six decided to quit the study. The other one, well, he pretty much disappeared off the face of the planet. A slight inconvenience, but I reckon we’ll be all right in the end.

Ah, but I’ve gone on for far too long about those small things; I bet the reason you are here, dear readers, is because you want to know about the game we’re making! Well, we are making a modern remake of the old game called Rogue. Many of you may have heard of this game. After all it has inspired an entire genre, called roguelikes. Maybe you never really thought about the etymology of that name, but it basically means that a game is similar to (or, in other words, like) Rogue.

For those not familiar with the game, I shall provide a short description. It was a dungeon-crawler with randomly-generated dungeons and permanent death, or permadeath. The latter basically means that, once you die, you lose all progress you have made and have to start over again. The above screenshot shows an example of a randomly-generated floor. As you can see, the graphics – if you can even call them that – are very outdated. All things are represented by ASCII characters; it is completely text-based. This is, of course, one of the things we mean to improve.

Another thing we mean to improve is the level generator. Again, look to the screenshot above. You see that the dungeon is built in a three-by-three grid. All floors of the dungeon are made like this, with some small exceptions: sometimes, one of those spaces in the grid does not have a room, but instead just a hallway, either leading to another room or a dead end. As of right now, we are not entirely sure about how we are going to generate the dungeons. We might keep it quite similar to the way it was, except for the fact that floors will be larger. We might also make it so that every room is the same size, and that the rooms are connected without the use of hallways. The latter might lower the risk of performance issues. Dear readers, I shall bring you an update as soon as we have made a decision on this subject.