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Gemini (Roguelike?) Game Update

Posted on Tuesday May 25, 2021

Hello gemini folk,

Last week I wrote something about an idea I had for a game that could be played over the Gemini protocol.

you can read post here if you care to

My primary goal with this is to exercise my Gemini protocol server, MoonGem, and tease out its flaws and limitations. I thought that a good way to do this would be via a simple game, particularly one with some kind of server-side statefulness. I enjoy roguelikes, and given their use of ASCII graphics I figured a good place to start would be building one of my own.

I will be hosting a WIP demo here, if you'd like to try it out

Over the weekend I put some work into this concept. See an example of the UI below:

name: Ara Fairsword       score: 0

   abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEF
                ┳
 0 ████████████████████████████████ 0
 1 ████████████████████████████████ 1
 2 ████████████████████████████████ 2
 3 ████████████████████████████████ 3
 4 ████████████████████████████████ 4
 5 ████████████████████████████████ 5
 6 ████████████████████████████████ 6
 7 ████████████████████████████████ 7
 8┣█████████████@██████████████████┫8
 9 ████████████████████████████████ 9
10 ████████████████████████████████ 10
11 ████████████████████████████████ 11
12 ████████████████████████████████ 12
13 ████████████████████████████████ 13
14 ████████████████████████████████ 14
15 ████████████████████████████████ 15
                ┻
   abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEF

[1] Move to...
[2] Move NORTH
[3] Move SOUTH
[4] Move EAST
[5] Move WEST

The following features are shown here:

A game board with an '@' symbol indicating the player's position
Alphanumeric markers along the edges of the board to indicate rows and columns, as well as indicators next to those axes that indicate the player's current X and Y coordinates
A randomly-generated player name (from one 'lua-namegen' library that I stripped down considerably)
Links for navigating around the board in the cardinal directions as well as by inputting arbitrary coordinates in column/row format (e.g. 'n14')

Game state is kept in-memory between requests by a small server application that runs in the background. It listens on a UDP port for requests from the Gemini server, serving a player view model as well as accepting 'move' commands. The server also handles serializing the player state to disk periodically (in JSON format right now, because it's convenient).

Currently the only functionality that's implemented is moving the player around in a static grid, shown above. My next steps are going to be to implement the following:

Tunneling mechanics
Some sort of 'bomb' ability for clearing large spaces of uncleared board
Items of some kind (perhaps the above bomb thing included) that are revealed as spaces are cleared
A scoring system; possibly based on finding specific items or performing some other tasks
A concept of 'sectors', or other boards that the player can visit and dig up. Since there is a persistent user-state model on the server, users can visit the same sector as one-another
Some kind of leaderboard

Questions

Movement

Since all interaction is performed via links, moving one tile at a time is somewhat slow and tedious.

I think the two solutions to this are either to disincentivize moving long distances in any one direction (how?), or to allow 'teleporting' to arbitrary tiles at will. In the latter case, how does this jive with the tunneling mechanic?

Sectors

How should they relate to one-another logically, if at all?

My first instinct was to have them identified by numeric X/Y offsets from some origin point. I see a couple of issues with this:

Allowing players to skip between arbitrarily distant 'regions' defeats the purpose of having an implied spatial layout, in my opinion. If you can go wherever you want, whether one sector is next to another has no valuable meaning. Coordinates are meaningless if they serve no further purpose than as simple addresses. In that case I might as well just use some kind of numerical index.
Limiting movement only to 'neighbor' sectors, however, will prevent players from getting very far (due to the clumsy movement mechanics mentioned above).

So the natural conclusion is to have some sort of an 'address' system for sectors. Populated sectors could be listed someplace accessible, and shared between players if they wish to cooperate in some way. Movement between sectors can be performed either by choosing a 'random' option to be sent to a randomly-generated address, or by manually keying one in.

Multiplayer

Given the set of mechanics mentioned so far, in what ways could players cooperate with one another? Listed below are a couple of ideas I've got so far:

Sharing addresses and coordinates of valuable items so that other players can find them (encouraging mutual aid)
Some system of cooperative 'construction' tasks (raids? some kind of item farm?), difficult or unfeasible to perform by oneself
Special items to be 'dropped' by a player who will then be rewarded if they're picked up by another (see first bullet)

Closing Thoughts

The more I think about it, the more I am really feeling excited about the prospect of a mutual-aid-themed Gemini Roguelike. I hope I can hold onto this motivation for a while.

This being my first 'dev blog' kind of post I've written, it turned out being quite a bit longer than I expected. Thank you for reading if you've made it this far.

- panda-roux -

next: "So, what now? (CW: see top of post)"

prev: "Lua Complaint"

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