Hello!
We had a similar conversation here: https://itch.io/t/2839532/how-does-one-roguelike-a-bitsy.
I think that Bitsy is quite suitable for making simple dungeon-crawling games. It all depends on your particular design vision and the scope of your ambitions, of course. Like, it's pretty easy to make room-to-room movement and even some sort of randomization, but I don't see how you can make combat or inventory management without some extensive hacking.
As I see it, it depends on whether you would like to make it real-time or not. If we're talking about Adventure's level of simplicity, you can go the easy way and just check when the player approaches the monster if they have a weapon or not. You can even add some probability to determining whether the strike will hit or miss, and make a simple hit points system. However, it might get a bit more complicated and messy, as you will be dealing with a lot of branching lists within branching lists.
I would say that if you want to use any autonomous movement to the NPC, you will have to use hacks.
I've made basic RPG-type fighting in Bitsy using only super super basic coding knowledge I got from learning the BASIC programming language for about 2 days. All you really have to program is:
- Set player health, player level / strength, enemy health , enemy level / strength as global variables.
- Upon contact with enemy, set random number (you may have to write extra code to set up a faked random number as real random numbers may not be supported - I can't remember what I did). Add your strength or level number to this random number. Subtract that from enemy health.
- If health is less than 0, game over. If enemy health is less than 0, enemy disappears (and you gain 10 exp or whatever). If you reach xx exp, add a point to strength or whatever.
My code did not use any special graphics for when you attack, or have the enemy chase and attack you first, or anything like that. As I said, I figured out how to do it in 2 days of learning BASIC and didn't know any other coding languages, so it is definitely not an advanced thing. You really only need to know if / then statements, variables, global variables, and basic math.
