Roguelikes tend to have a lot of UI. And, frequently, it's fiddly UI—there are lots of things to display, with deep and complex information. So UI layout is a pretty important part of building a roguelike. Nethack's inventory and status line UICogmind's part list UIThe advanced inventory UI in…
In my last post on Adrift's map generation, I noted that the binary space partitioning technique that Adrift uses produces arbitrarily-sized rectangles for rooms. Generating the contents of rooms that aren't a standard shape is a bit of a challenge. Games like NetHack and Cogmind get around this by having…
You wake up alone on a broken colony ship. You're starving hungry—how long were you asleep?—but the door won't open. You'll need your wits about you to take apart, diagnose and repair the ship's limping systems, stay alive, and figure out what the hell happened. I was looking…
I've been working on map generation in Adrift this week. I've been through a few different unsatisfying iterations of the map generation code and I'm finally feeling like I've encountered a rich algorithmic vein, so I wanted to write a little bit about what's been working. The world of Adrift…