I'm working on my own game! It's a roguelike, and I am trying to incorporate horror and story elements in it as well.
It mostly exists as a bunch of ideas and notes and a few tests for various parts of it.
The following are basically my notes of ideas for the game condensed into something slightly more coherent. They don't form a story yet.
Because of the fact they are still pretty incoherent I'm gonna just spoiler them:
[spoiler]
WORLD:
Small town and a massive tower on a circular plot of land floating in a void. Sky around is a light purple. The town has shops and NPCs that you can talk to and buy stuff from. Slowly as you play, the land will slowly fall away starting from the outermost tiles of the island, and these tiles will continue to fall away until they reach the tower, at which point the bottom of the tower upwards will also slowly fall away. The townspeople are far too scared to go into the tower (for a good reason, I'll talk about it later) and eventually all huddle up in the center of the town, until they fall anyways.
THE TOWER:
Cultist wizard dude lives at the top of the tower and has all sorts of weird stuff. He's pretty much an unknown dude both in-character wise and to me. Not that it matters much. Lots of weird stuff in the tower, its dark and murky and stuff. Lots of weird alchemical tools, herb gardens, whatever. This weird stuff is what'll make the progression of most skills happen - finding old bits of knowledge and tools in various dedicated rooms.
More note-type stuff, still pretty incoherent (soz):
For the most part, it will have a lot of standard roguelike elements, as well as horror elements. Mostly playing on fear of the unknown. Also things like blood trails that will be left behind you if you get hit by a sharp weapon that monsters can detect and follow. AI's that can let me have descriptions like "something moves in the shadows, just outside of view" what have you.
[/spoiler]
Technical info:
* I'm writing it in Rust. I like rust. Its a nice language. I'm using Rustbox for interfacing the terminal. Rustbox is a set of bindings to Termbox.
* There will be two types of things: Tiles, and Entities. Tiles are stuff that make up a map: Walls, floors, etc. Everything else is an entity with events and metadata. Items, monsters, etc. Every entity has every event implemented, but are not required to respond to them. If they don't respond, the event returns false. If they do respond, the event returns true.
* Frontend and backend will be totally seperated so if I want to switch from Rustbox to some graphics library in the future, it will be super easy.
* uhhhh
Heres screenshots of the various parts I have been working on:
(http://i.imgur.com/K6vBTvQ.png)
That is testing the very beginnings of the map generator and the entity system.
(http://i.imgur.com/oBj3kcW.png)
That is testing room basic room generation. Its much more impressive behind the scenes, since its actually working with my Tiles system.
...
Oh, turns out I don't have that much.. BUT THE ACTUAL PROJECT IS STILL IMPRESSIVE OKAY.
Anyways, once I get it to the point its maintainable I'll make a git repo. Right now I'm just working on basic features, scrapping it, and starting over until I get the architecture right.
Stay tunnnnnnnned~
edit: oh right I forgot, Epsilon is the codename until I can come up with something meaningful
Glad to see you're still working on stuff :D. I am curious about how the horror elements will be incorporated to a rogue-like. By horror I often think of scary pop-up style stuff, as in, eerie atmosphere and sounds and some monster might jump at you out of nowhere at any moment with scary music, but since rogue-like is just text I am very curious. Good luck!
Are Lovecrafts stories popup books? No! I'm gonna do this the old fashion way: Creating unease in the player through creative use of the environment. I'm taking a LOT of inspiration from another roguelike for this, called Infra Arcana.
I don't even know what a lovercraft is. :P But yeah I wasn't thinking of books when I read that your game was an horror game, since I always associate games with movies more than books. :P I also didn't read many horror books other than Goosebumps.
That said, the old fashion way would definitively spice the game up. :) I can't wait to see what you come up with.