For the 2010 7 Day Rogue-Like Challenge, I wanted to do something a little controversial. Rogue-like games are typically from a top-down view, which makes a lot of sense when you want to represent the action in a 2D dungeon.
In a change from the normal view, Earl Spork is a side scrolling platformer. While there was, as hoped, some controversy over whether or not it really qualified as a rogue-like game, I think that it was very successful. It was turn based, grid world, and contained random terrain. On the other hand, there was no inventory system, which means no identification sub-game which is often cited as a primary feature of rogue-likes.
Earl Spork is available here as a .jar file. You need Java to run this file. Like last year’s entry, this was also built using libjsci.
Example of the gameplay.
I beat the game and it was very fun. It now one of the very few (or the first) roguelike I have beaten. I highly enjoyed the water physics, and wished there was more water.
The only thing I disliked was the fact that one could only move on the diagonals using the vi keys. I found that very non-intuitive, because the game help makes it sound like one could do everything with the num keys. So I, for the first part, was trying to do everything with the non-diagonals because I thought one couldn’t move diagonally. There for I kept falling down the pits because I couldn’t jump far enough.
Thanks for playing! The water physics is actually where I spent half of the 20 hours total programming this game, so I’m glad you like them.
You can use the diagonals on the numpad, but they only work if you have numlock on. Sorry for the confusion on that point.