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bitsy

a little engine for little games, worlds, and stories · By adam le doux

Is a rogue like possible?

A topic by Phi_Dragon created Jan 21, 2023 Views: 323 Replies: 5
Viewing posts 1 to 5

Can you randomly generate rooms in bitsy to make it like a mini rogue like.

the answer will vary depending on how much like rogue you want your roguelike to be and how comfortable you are with hacking the engine >:)

the short answer is "no, not really" since bitsy doesn't have any built-in ability to change the tiles or sprites in a room

a longer answer is "sort of": it's possible to use variables in bitsy dialog to control what room a player goes to when they step through an exit; combine that with a shuffle block and you can randomize the rooms players go to - I've experimented with this as a way to create a random world layout and it's definitely possible, but I never finished the game in question partly because of how labor intensive the process was, so keep that in mind

a last option is you can hack the game engine either using community-made hacks (https://seleb.github.io/bitsy-hacks/) or by making your own modifications to the game's javascript after exporting - at that point you can basically do whatever you want, but obviously this is the most technically complex option

it's worth also mentioning that there are plenty of bitsy games that are roguelike or dungeon-crawler adjacent, even if they don't use procedural generation - it might be looking around for those for inspiration!

(for an example, you can check this game out: https://pixelartm.itch.io/midnight-dungeon)

I have sort of kinda made a rogue-lite in Bitsy: https://boticelly.itch.io/where-are-you-kitty
Although it's only roguelike-features are dungeon, randomly selected rooms, and "perma-death", when you run out of resources.

whoa that looks cool! adding it to my list to check out later :D

"a longer answer is "sort of": it's possible to use variables in bitsy dialog to control what room a player goes to when they step through an exit; combine that with a shuffle block and you can randomize the rooms players go to - I've experimented with this as a way to create a random world layout and it's definitely possible, but I never finished the game in question partly because of how labor intensive the process was, so keep that in mind"

This much was what I needed.

Thanks Adam.