Here is a very small and short game I made in a few hours. I was working on an idea for another project and I remembered JR01’s game called One where it was literally just a singular object for the entire game. After fidgeting around with the idea, I created Label, a game made literally of just Labels. It’s all code from a single object, but there are other objects in the game since It was actually a testing game I had for years.
It’s W, A, S, D, to move around, and it’s a turn based puzzle game where you have to collect the key and escape without being hit by the enemy. The game is very simple in terms of designs, but I would like to see an entire dungeon crawler with this design. Hopefully I can update it later on.
I think the enemy movement is buggy (or at least I was earlier). And I still need to update the sounds and such, but it works for the most part. After playing it a few times already, I haven’t noticed anything gamebreaking. I hope to plan to add random generation and possible making an entire dungeon crawler from using only Labels, storing loot and items through texts, while presenting the simplistic world using labels.
This is probably the First Flowlab Game to actually function without the use of any active sprites (I don’t think the default sprite on the single object should count since it’s never viewed), but when I get Indie again, I’ll make an entirely new game with this single object so it can truly be just a single object in the entire game.
Also, don’t bother going through the code. I know it’s not organized or simple by using lists, I just used every other method.
I was pretty bored, so I got some more work done on this project that I totally didn’t forget about. I know the code is a mess at the moment, the new update kept throwing my behaviors around, so I just gave up on organizing.
For this new update, I temporarily removed the ending to work on some room generations. So far, you can only bounce between two rooms at the moment, but I plan to add random generation alongside some sort of combat feature to defeat enemies. Since it’s turn based, I’ll probably make it, so you have to position yourself just right to attack. It might be you can either attack or move. So, you’ll have to be careful when in a room with more than one enemy.
I may also have some sort of loot system at some point, but I’m not for sure yet.
I didn’t realize how instantly you can create an entire game, just by copying the code from one object.
There are no messages between objects are anything that needs linked. Everything is already set up. I feel this would be broken for a flowjam if the theme was Simplistic or something, all you would need to do is just copy a single object and you got a full game.
I honestly love this, I can’t believe I missed this back in July. It’s been a busy year.（；´д｀）ゞ
But this really reminds me of those ascii dungeon crawler games, like in todorrobot’s blog
I hope you keep working on this!
I recently came across an old Intelivision II from my grandparents building and it had the old Advances Dungeons and Dragons game on it.
Plus some other influences from other games such as 3 goblets and I generally love very simplistic dungeon crawlers. Plus it adds to the challenge of only using labels.
I definitely have a lot of ideas in store for this game and hopefully plan to make it more intriguing to the player than just walking around in different rooms.
I may change the style of how the player interacts with enemies and such. Not sure if I should keep the turn based combat, but it is very slow. I tried speeding it up, but it confuses the enemy a lot of times so I may just have the enemy slowly chase the player, while the player can move more freely about the dungeon, plus add repeating inputs so you don’t have to press W everytime to move up 1, you can just hold and you’ll keep going.
I’m still unsure of how combat will even work, if there’ll be a separate button for attack or make it similar to chess where you have to land on the enemy without them landing on you first, making the turn based combat very much a puzzle.
Hopefully it turns out good. There’s a lot of stuff I can’t easily accomplish because everything’s made of labels, but I’m sure it’s not impossible.
I did some more work on the game tonight. I sped up the speed of the player and added repeating Keys so you can continually walk in a direction without pressing a key for every move.
The enemy is very delayed and I’m not exactly sure why, so he doesn’t even move until you do, which makes the turn-based combat very difficult. Which I’ll fix later.
So far, I started working on a digital grid. I wasn’t sure how I would keep track of rooms that had multiple exits, so I created a very scuffed grid that should work.
As a room goes up the Y axis, it adds or subtracts 100 from the room number while rooms across the X axis only go up and down by 1. So, the first room is room 1. The room above it would be 101. This helps in creating a grid at least 99 by 99 before the room numbers are going to start repeating. I don’t think the game’s map would be that large considering that each room has 24 labels and 10,000 rooms with 24 labels each wouldn’t be very good on the performance. I know there’s a much simpler way to go about this, but this seems to work for now.
I also added the transition between going left and right between rooms. Originally it was only moving up and down, but now the movement is universal. Once I get the system going, it’ll be a lot easier to add rooms.
I don’t know of a way to keep track of existing rooms, so I don’t want the random generation to have doorways into rooms where doorways weren’t at. So, I may just do a bunch of manual editing for each room.
Someone liked this topic, and I was reminded of it. The game’s currently on pause and I haven’t done much else on it, other than have a total of 3 different rooms that can be traveled. I still haven’t found a good design for combat or finalized anything, so the game is still in progress.