Further on Towers

Of course, this won’t be a true Roguelike. Since MT was a strategy game primarily, the map layouts are integral. This is actually really helpful for beginning development because if I design the map creator now to grab pre-made maps, once the game is working, it won’t be so bad to implement the same methods to instead make the random maps needed for more rogue-like roguelikes I might make.

Another thing to consider in MysticRogue(tm) is doors. In the game, they had no thickness. One tile is in one room, the next is the first in the next room. I either need to create walls that can fit between tiles (also non-roguelike), or change the dynamics of the game by allowing one-tile thick doorways. Further, there was no interaction between rooms. I could flip a switch that affected another room, but I couldn’t drag an item through a door. On that note, standing in the doorway (on the tile where the door was) with the monster on the other side was a surefire way to keep it from hurting you. You couldn’t shoot through the door either, so you would have to move eventually, but it was the perfect place to use a heal spell, because you had no urgent need to move most of the time.

Ultimately, I plan to make this more roguelike anyways, since there should be 8 (not 4) directional movement, and the ability for monsters to chase you between rooms. Ultimately, it would be sort of fun to generate the tower as a series of random rooms, that only have to meet basic standards for inclusion. Then I could have more than 15 monsters per tower, more than one in a room at any given time, and turn this less into a recreation of Mystic Towers in roguelike form, and more like a tribute to it. This would give me a lot more leeway to rearrange the towers, add monsters, add or change spells, remove levitate, and more. I could use the rules of the towers as guidelines (ie: There still must be at least one teleport pad per floor, generator must be on floor 3, at least one bomb must exist to destroy it), and possibly still make a fun game. Of course, writing a map generator adds at least weeks if not months to the development time, so we will see. I may start with Rimm Tower as a recreation to be sure I can handle it, then abstract and change it from there.