No Rogues Allowed

Development notes for my work on a minimalist rogue-like side project.

Yep, I started over again. Almost one month ago, I wrote that I had re-built how everything worked because it was becoming very repetitive. I deleted nearly 95% of the item generation code and replaced it. That re-write meant that I combined all of my item generators… at that time […]

re-Starting Over – Roguelike Design part 10

2020/06/24 in No Rogues Allowed tagged bad code / formula / game / game design / math / normal distribution / php / prototype / rogue / rogue-lite / roguelike / rpg / statistics / web design

When I was a child, I started programming on an Atari 400. This was essentially an Atari 2600, but with a keyboard and some additional inputs for accessories. Mine had a tape drive which gave me working storage. It used standard cassette tapes which were abundant at the time. I […]

re-Learning Math – Roguelike Design part 9

2020/06/14 in No Rogues Allowed tagged bad code / formula / game / game design / math / normal distribution / php / prototype / rogue / rogue-lite / roguelike / rpg / statistics / web design

Yes the title of this article is a bit dramatic… you call it click-bait if you want. The reality however, is that I deleted nearly 95% of the item generation code and replaced it. That’s what I’ve been doing this past week. In the last article, I made some bold […]

Starting Over – Roguelike Design part 8

2020/06/05 in No Rogues Allowed tagged bad code / game / game design / php / prototype / rogue / rogue-lite / roguelike / rpg / web design

In the last post, I talked about there being some special cases for armor, shield, and trinket generation. I think this only applies to armor and shields, but for this post, I’ve only finished the shield routine. So we’ll talk about that. Oh, and pretty icons. Armor Attributes When I […]

Armor and Icons – Roguelike Design part 7

2020/05/30 in No Rogues Allowed tagged bad code / game / game design / php / prototype / rogue / rogue-lite / roguelike / rpg / web design

According to my post history, I started writing on this project 12 days ago. I had a working prototype a full week before that. I started taking notes on this idea at least 10 days prior to that. All-in, I’ve devoted a month to this project and all I have […]

Requesting Attributes – Roguelike Design part 6

2020/05/26 in No Rogues Allowed tagged bad code / game / game design / php / prototype / rogue / rogue-lite / roguelike / rpg / web design

Last post, I teased a bit about the Tier input on the form shown here. Between that post and now I added the Variance option… so let’s talk about these two things! Weapons Don’t Have Power While tweaking the randomness generator for adding attributes works for generating weapons with relatively […]

Choosing Tiers – Roguelike Design part 5

2020/05/24 in No Rogues Allowed tagged bad code / game / game design / php / prototype / rogue / rogue-lite / roguelike / rpg / web design / website

Previously, on Whoo Boy I Have No Idea What I’m Doing, we built a function to generate some random weapons. We use a combination of PHP rand() and mySQL ORDER BY RAND() to get random attributes from our tables, and add it all up into something that can be used […]

Creating Better Items – Roguelike Design part 4

2020/05/23 in No Rogues Allowed tagged bad code / game / game design / php / prototype / rogue / rogue-lite / roguelike / rpg / web design / website

In the previous article, I shared some code showing how I’m storing and retrieving things from the database. I want to clear up some things before we move on. In future articles we’ll look at the steps I took to be able to generate weapons of various “level” even though […]

My Code Quality – Roguelike Design part 3

2020/05/20 in No Rogues Allowed tagged bad code / game / game design / php / prototype / rogue / rogue-lite / roguelike / rpg / web design / website

After playing with the name generator I discussed in the previous post, I decided to tackle powers and abilities next. While having a cool name generator is neat on it’s own, I really wanted to be able to use this tool in future game design projects. In order to do […]

Item Powers – Roguelike Design part 2

2020/05/16 in No Rogues Allowed tagged game / game design / php / prototype / rogue / rogue-lite / roguelike / rpg / web design / website

In yesterday’s post, I introduced a simple random weapon generator that I designed and published at https://noroguesallowed.com. In that post, I talked about why I designed it… now I’m going to talk about how. There’s a few things I want you to know first: First: I’m a PHP developer. All […]

Random Item Names – Roguelike Design part 1

2020/05/15 in No Rogues Allowed tagged game / game design / php / prototype / rogue / rogue-lite / roguelike / rpg / web design / website

Sometimes, an idea gets stuck in my head. It could be nearly anything from an art piece, to woodworking design, a game mechanic, or a story that I want to write. When it’s something that’s really gripped me, the idea can consume my thoughts. I find myself thinking about it […]

No Rogues Allowed – Designing a Roguelike

2020/05/14 in No Rogues Allowed tagged game / game design / php / prototype / rogue / rogue-lite / roguelike / rpg / web design / website