[HN Gopher] How to make roguelike games in Rust
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How to make roguelike games in Rust
Author : agluszak
Score : 178 points
Date : 2020-01-11 15:13 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bfnightly.bracketproductions.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (bfnightly.bracketproductions.com)
| darksaints wrote:
| Are there any AAA studios using rust yet? I personally think it's
| not going to happen any time soon, but I'd be glad to be proven
| wrong.
|
| My theory that it won't happen without some form of inheritance-
| like structure. Games, like many forms of simulation, are
| inherently stateful and tends to fall hard on the OO-side of the
| Expression Problem spectrum. Traits tend to give you the best of
| both worlds, but in very important aspect it falls short: the
| traits themselves do not have data members. I saw a proposal
| where you could link object data members explicitly to data
| members that the trait required, which would probably fill that
| gap...but I don't think it has gone anywhere. Anybody know what
| I'm talking about so I can look up the progress?
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Embark is a new AAA studio made up of ex-EA DICE folks who are
| heavily using Rust.
| Pamar wrote:
| Ask HN: are there any roguelike games that can be played
| (collaboratively) by two players on remote connection?
|
| Mac OS would be a plus because both me and my friend use mostly
| Apple stuff at home.
| thoughtpalette wrote:
| Steam has a remote play feature now that allows another player
| to join a game, even if they don't own it. It's been semi-
| spotty.
|
| I highly recommend Children of Morta for a co-op roguelike.
| prutschman wrote:
| Mangband (multiplayer-angband) has a Mac OS port of both client
| and server: https://mangband.org/
| aaron-santos wrote:
| There is a wonderful multiplayer roguelike for the Commodore
| 64. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ASGn5J9PHbs
| otachack wrote:
| This is great, thanks for sharing it. I started a Rust project
| awhile ago to do something similar but based on a boardgame. It
| was fun but I didn't keep up with it. I'll try to get back at it
| using this as inspiration!
| somesortofsystm wrote:
| Yeah, I agree - this is a terrific read, and seems like a nice
| way to jump into Rust, a language I am eager to explore .. lots
| of strange new idioms, and from the perspective of a rogue-
| like, nicely done .. will give me a bit of Rust chops anyway!
| Thanks!
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| Was it to learn Rust or were you already familiar with the
| language?
| kris-s wrote:
| Are there commercially successful roguelikes that use ascii art
| only? Dwarf Fortress is the only one I know of and it's getting
| an official makeover for the Steam release.
| planetsmashr wrote:
| DCSS isn't commercially successful, but I think it has the
| potential to be if it went that direction. The tiles version is
| probably most popular though:
|
| https://crawl.develz.org/download.htm
| nyolfen wrote:
| cogmind has done pretty well even if a bit niche. not pure
| ascii but pretty close, like df. really excellent game, as
| well.
| kris-s wrote:
| Looks really cool!
| mrmonkeyman wrote:
| Not ascii technically but close: caves of qud.
| empath75 wrote:
| Replacing ascii with sprites is easy to do later.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Rogue?
| jere wrote:
| Both Cogmind and Caves of Qud have optional tiles that look
| like little more than ASCII.
|
| Door in the Woods is ASCII only and has sold ~5,000 copies in
| about a month. In fact this game has inspired me to try to work
| on a pure ASCII roguelike for my next commercial project.
| billfruit wrote:
| Caves of Qud comes to mind.
| [deleted]
| babuskov wrote:
| I don't know about roguelikes success (Cogmind comes to mind),
| but I can tell you that ASCII games can be successful if you
| have a good idea. For example, I spent about 2 months making
| Rogue Bit just over a year ago:
|
| https://roguebit.bigosaur.com/
|
| And it sold over 25000 copies so far.
| bmsleight_ wrote:
| The trailer did not really show me any game play. So I can
| not judge it and see if I want to buy.
| babuskov wrote:
| Showing gameplay would be pointless because 99% of the
| gameplay is in player's head, analyzing the code, maybe
| even writing some down on paper. If you just look at the
| screen, it doesn't make much sense.
|
| Here, try looking at this gameplay video:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4RskXHDLzo&t=183s
|
| It's hard to pick any point in that 75 minute video that
| would be a good trailer material. There's nothing visually
| spectacular except some static ASCII art and there's no
| surprise mechanics that would draw attention. The game
| itself isn't about ASCII art anyway, so having that in the
| trailer wouldn't make you learn much.
|
| But then again, it isn't a game for everyone. It's for
| people who are into hacking, computer internals,
| binary/hexadecimal numbers or assembly/machine language.
| Pyxl101 wrote:
| Every game that Zachtronics releases has a gameplay
| trailer, for comparison. Perhaps it would be useful to
| look at some of those for inspiration:
|
| http://www.zachtronics.com/tis-100/
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/504210/SHENZHEN_IO/?cu
| rat...
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/716490/EXAPUNKS/?curat
| or_...
|
| I think a gameplay trailer could be made from content
| from that video, by stringing together a series of short
| clips. Show the player moving around, manipulating
| things. Each clip a few seconds in length. Similar to the
| trailer for Exapunks, you could display text like "Solve
| puzzles" "Manipulate bits" "Hack your way to safety" (or
| whatever makes sense). Maybe end with a sequence where
| something drastic happens (the player does something and
| the whole screen changes), fade to black.
|
| I think it'd be useful to show the player what the
| gameplay is actually like. Sure, it's not for everyone,
| but you can still show what it is.
| thegeekpirate wrote:
| Just to add on to the "not a roguelike" list (it's an
| adventure game), Stone Story RPG
| (https://store.steampowered.com/app/603390/Stone_Story_RPG/).
| umvi wrote:
| That's not really ASCII art. I mean it is, but iirc it's
| custom shader code in Unity made to _look_ like retro style
| ASCII art. So it 's actually way more difficult to make
| than a grid of ASCII characters.
| flafla2 wrote:
| Although I get where you're coming from, I disagree with
| the assertion that this makes it "not really ASCII art".
| At the end of the day modern terminal emulators use a
| graphics API at one point to render characters on the
| screen. You wouldn't say that iTerm2 isn't a "real tty"
| because it has a metal backend (in this case, iTerm2 is
| also using a custom shader to render ASCII/unicode --
| more complex than this game of course). Where do we even
| draw the line? Is ASCII art only legit if it can render
| natively in a traditional terminal? How about only one
| without hardware acceleration? POSIX compliant? Further
| down the rabbit hole we could draw a line in the sand at
| tty's with no window manager.
|
| It would still be trivial for the developer to add an
| "textshot" feature to export a frame to .txt, so I'd
| still qualify it as fitting the ASCII art aesthetic.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Depends if its easier for you to do 3D. I remember when I
| found thr ThreeJS ascii shader I had a bit of fun with
| it...
| aganame wrote:
| DF is not commercial yet. Partial list of successful roguelikes
| with ascii:
|
| - rogue - (net)hack - moria, angband, etc
| feanaro wrote:
| Don't forget ADOM, though it now has graphical tiles too.
| boomlinde wrote:
| Several commercial versions of Rogue were sold in the 80s.
| andolanra wrote:
| I said this in a previous comment on a different story, so I'm
| going to copy-paste the content of that comment with some minor
| edits:
|
| The bfnightly tutorial is a very good tutorial, but I do want to
| warn that it's not always terribly idiomatic Rust: Herbert was
| using the writing of the tutorial as a way of practicing Rust, so
| there are places where the explanations aren't quite correct and
| other places where the code isn't what an experienced Rust
| programmer would write. An example that jumped out at me (this
| from Chapter 1.7) was the use of &s.to_string()
|
| which is an expression that could be shortened to just s.
| (Specifically, s has type &str, calling to_string() on it
| converts it to a String, and borrowing it allows it to be coerced
| back to a &str but now with unnecessary copying.) Elsewhere (this
| from Chapter 1.2) it has explanations like
|
| > Copy and Clone allow this [type] to be used as a "value" type
| (that is, it just passes around the value instead of pointers)
|
| which is also not a correct explanation, or at least is a
| misleading one: things can still be passed by value even without
| Copy and Clone and without any pointers at all. (Arguably, he
| meant, "You can share the value without using borrows," but
| that's not what the explanation said.)
|
| That said, all this is nitpicky (and I suspect that Herbert would
| be receptive to feedback along these lines--I just haven't had a
| chance yet to provide it!) because the tutorial's explanation of
| roguelike-writing is still very good, and in fact I've been
| following it as a rough guide for writing a tutorial on top of a
| different Rust library myself! But I do want to warn about using
| it as a model for learning Rust specifically.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > > "value" type
|
| They mean a nonlinear (or nonaffine) type, as opposed to a
| affine type - that can only be passed by reference if you don't
| want to get rid of it yet - which they would presumably call a
| "reference" (or "by-reference") type. It's a correct
| explanation, but ambiguous (not misleading, but perhaps
| confusing) terminology.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| I recently made one in Rust [1] with Tomas Sedovic's tutorial
| with libtcod and he suggested this one as a good next step!
|
| I'm also excited to see that this one looks wasm compatible.
|
| 1) https://youtu.be/UKpDNnfiId0
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