7DRL 2012 nears 50 entries with 3 days left!

With 3 days and some change left in 7DRL's 8th Annual challenge to make a Roguelike game in 7 days, competition entries are nearing 50!

I suspect we'll see some more Roguelikes pop up by or before the compo ends on the 18th. There are already what look to be some unique and interesting entries in the competition as well as a fair number of first timers to the competition.

To recap, there are no official prizes or places for 7DRL. If an entrant completes their game with the 7 days, then they have "won". There is only e-pride and e-fame at stake here but either way the outcome is fun and brings with it a ton of new Roguelike games and open source code sharing which is great for both players and developers.

Stay tuned to 7DRL news when on Sunday we find out, which games make the cut and who gets crowned as the next...IRON CHEF!
(Sorry, the wife was watching the Food Network last night.)

MarioRL: But our princess is in another castle!

I'm working on MarioRL right now as my entry in the annual 7DRL contest.  7DRL is a programming competition that takes place annually.  The goal is to make a finished, playable Roguelike (aka dungeon crawler) game in 7 days.

There aren't any actual prizes or places.  If you finish your game in the allotted 7 days, you're a winner basically.

There are a lot of great roguelikes based on other games such as DoomRL, CastlevaniaRL, ZeldaRL and so on.  I realize a Mario themed anything isn't incredibly original but it hit me this weekend that no one has ever made a roguelike based on Super Mario Bros, a game ripe for rogueliking.  I mean, you travel through various dungeons, fighting monsters trying to rescue a princess.  A little cliche sure but perfect!

I'm using GM:HTML5 which I just purchased last week so I'm not sure how great of an idea that was but I'm rapidly learning the GML scripting language.  GM:HTML5 does have drag and drop game creation but for something like a roguelike game you definitely have to use the scripting language.

It's similar to Java or C++ in a way and while I'm no expert in either, I'm picking it up fairly quickly.

With any luck, I'll have a playable game by the contest's deadline and once that's over, I'll take my tune polishing and fine-tuning it.

And of course, here are some screenshots:

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7DRL Approaches! 10 - 18 March 2012

The annual 7DRL competition is nearly upon us.  For the uninitiated, 7DRL is an annual competition to make a finished, playable roguelike game in 7 days.

This year's 7DRL will run from Saturday, March 10th to Sunday, March 18th.

There are no places, medals or prizes save for bragging rights and interwebs fame.  The goal of the contest is simply to make a finished game within the time frame.  If you achieve that then you can consider yourself a winner.

You can find out more about 7DRL and it's history here and at their official site.

The folks at 7DRL have posted some contest ideas here and there's also a discussion here if you'd like to join in.

Feast your eyes on the new DoomRL!

For those newcomers to the Roguelike genre who are still put off by text mode games there is now officially not a single damn reason not to download and play DoomRL...right BLEEPing now!

DoomRL has long been heralded as a Top 10 Roguelike but the lastest release finally brings a long lusted after graphical interface to DoomRL.

This new release is best described as a Doom inspired wet dream bathed in the blood of demon corpses.  In addition to graphic tiles it now also features an updated user interface and mouse support.

It's available for Windows, Linux and Mac so stop reading this article right now and go check it out at the official DoomRL website before they run out of bandwidth!

Planet Roguelike MIA

The Elderlore website has been down for sometime now and along with it, Planet Roguelike a massive roguelike news aggregator.

In the absence of Planet Roguelike, I'm trying to rebuild an uber Roguelike RSS Feed featuring articles about RL News & Development.

Just click on Planet Roguelike at the top of the page to check it out.  If you have roguelike feeds to suggest you can leave a comment on the page.

You can also check out RogueTemple forum user Britzl's Roguelike Feed Aggregator on Yahoo Pipes which keeps tabs on a number of popular Roguelikes.

Everyday I'm Dungeonin'

It turns out it wasn't entirely feasible to keep a daily log of all my Nethack adventures since I don't live with my mother...

So I figure instead of just blogging about my droll Nethack adventures why not blog about about my love of Rogue/Roguelike games in general?

So yeah...that's what I'll do.

Also, thanks to BilliamBabble for the great dungeon wall-wallpaper.