(This is a repost of a reddit post I made yesterday - hope that's ok :O)
Hi everyone, I have been learning Unity for 3 or 4 months now and feel pretty well at home by now. I have a background as a C# programmer. I signed up for my first 7DRL to make my first roguelike - my first game ever, actually. I've spent the past weeks getting some of the basic roguelike stuff working - tiles, movement, collision, inventory, but: I need some help for some game design ideas.
I started out with a neat little, somewhat original idea, I think, and I didn't want to "spoil" it, but I think I have to, in order to get some help with what direction to go in. Basically I've always been fascinated with Conway's Game of Life, and it has some things in common with roguelikes (moving on a grid, "turn"-based etc.) so I thought, "Wouldn't it be great if I could walk around inside Conway's game of life and interact with it?" and so that's my idea. So the "life" moves one generation after the player takes one turn. I think it is an interesting concept, but where is the interesting gameplay? I thought about having the player fight a glider for example -- the glider could be coming to attack the player, or trying to get away, or trying to reach some object before the player. How can the player react? Maybe by casting a spell that spawns a living "life" cell somewhere (I have this mechanic implemented right now), and messes up the glider? Maybe the life takes two turns whenever the player takes one - but a spell could change it, so the life becomes slower. Or maybe another spell that changes the rule of the "life"? (Conway's game of life has the following rule: B3/S23, which means an empty cell comes to life if it has 3 neighbors, and live cells survive if they have 2 or 3 neighbors. All other cells die or stay dead.) Another brainstorming idea is that the player can spawn her own gliders/spaceships to fight against evil gliders/spaceships - so we now have two "lifes" battling(!).
But how would it work in practice? And a big question is how can I make it randomly generated? I mean, the glider and the object it tries to reach have to be set up kind of precisely to make it a tough but solvable challenge to the player. Any reactions, tips, ideas or questions would be very much appreciated. Thank you very much.
And to everyone participating, good luck on the 7DRL challenge week!
