#raycaster

its been a couple months now since I started working on a silly little roguelike project and i guess im gonna talk about it?? i kinda want to make little devlogs and i guess now is a good time for that since im not too far in?

my goal for this project is a raycaster roguelike since i haven't...actually seen that done much. there's 3d roguelikes but normally if they're 3d they're pretty much assured not to be turn-based. my current system allows you to turn and look smoothly in all directions, and you move on a grid (all 8 directions) depending on where you're looking.

ive been mostly inspired by caves of qud for this, so im looking to do a hybrid of the open world/dungeon exploring like caves of qud has.

the thing that im most excited about for this has been a spell system that's been brewing in my head. im thinking that everything is turn-based, but then the spell casting is done in real time, as you draw certain symbols in order to cast spells. spells are made up of multiple symbols, and if you don't draw these fast enough, then a turn passes, leaving you vulnerable to any enemies as you continue casting spells.

currently ive got:

free-looking and movement on a grid (which is my raycaster)

sprites

......

uhh...

basic...random generation? i guess?

.....nothing really else

........oh i just looked at when i started this project and it was IN JULY!!!!!

holyy

i am....a very slow programmer. i see timelapses of people coding and they go really fast and that is not me. i am very slow. i have very long coding sessions (like 3 to 5 hours) and i get maybe 1 or 2 tasks done?

i guess i cant completely blame this long amount of time on me being slow. i think i didn't actually start dedicated work on this project until a couple weeks after i made my first couple of files. i was following a tutorial on youtube (3dsage's raycasting tutorial) and it took me a while to finish that.

but! this was where things went wrong. i did not realize that this tutorial was solely focused around 8 by 8 tile grids. i spent....quite a while getting things to work with larger grids. there's a couple of magic numbers in there that aren't quite explained either, and they work perfectly fine if you have everything the same as the tutorial. however, they don't work well if anything is different, so as i changed my rendering size i had to spend time figuring out where those numbers came from, and i spent hours trying to figure it out. I asked a couple nice people on discord for help, and they did help a lot! its just that some things they didn't know how to solve either, and so i had to figure that out myself.

and then...everything was perfect. everything was perfect with a 10 by 10 tile grid. so i added my random generation, increased the size of the map....and everything failed again.

i spent so long figuring out what was going wrong. i spent hours pouring over my code, trying to figure out what i was doing wrong. sought help again, and somebody else had a github repo similar to what i was doing, so i copied their code over and...it still didn't work.

it took me so long to realize that the raycasting algorithm i was using just wasn't suited for larger maps.

after that, i found a wonderful website that had a tutorial on making a DDA raycaster (this one) and EVERYTHING WORKED!!!!!!! (after days or weeks of following the tutorial and...you know, getting stuff to work)

so now 4 months later i am at a point where stuff looks nice, but its just a walking simulator right now. i don't think im going to be working on the rendering for a while after this.

where im planning on going next is a system for enemies and fighting them, and then hopefully items and an inventory. i am very scared for items and an inventory. but it'll be fine!

anyways here's some screenshots:

(ignore the fact that it is the backrooms i did that as a joke for my friends. to get the textures for these i just downscaled some things to 32 by 32 textures) (the wall texture is a really cool texture that i got here)

(ah, there we go. bad art and painful contrasts. this is a little more my style) (the art will get better everything is just basically example textures right now)

anyways that's everything!! sorry that this was just me rambling, i've never made a devlog before. devlog? devpost? idk.

Here is the prototype dungeon crawler I mentioned before

It's made in lua, in a framework meant for simple business forms. It really chugs.

I spent way too much time making and playing it so here it is. You can play it.

What I want is to keep digging in this slow ugly prototype that chugs despite being literally 320x240. And doesn't have a sane entity design, which leads to some wonderful implications of component design, like lowering your health below zero doesn't guarantee that component actually setting off it's internal components - in case they expect an "attack" event and you just did a fallout 1 and healed yourself to death.

Abusing my works' low-code platform to make a raycaster dungeon crawler.

Sampling textures through the drawImage overload with all the parameters actually makes this realtime, except there isn't enough speed for floor texturing.

It's running in fengari that's stapled to react, so performance is limited.

Sprites exist, but there is no culling for them beyond the shadowmap, so they can be seen through walls in some situations.