I’ve been working on a lot of tile-based games and thought I’d write up a series of tutorials on things I’ve learned. I’m going to try to keep these tutorials as concept-heavy as possible, but my implementation will always be in Python with Pygame. I’ll try to provide psudeocode whenever possible so that those of you who develop in other languages will have an easier time.

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Cypress Tree Manor is one of those games that makes you click the X button in frustration, cursing and swearing, only to double click on ‘run.py’ again seconds later (still muttering expletives).

For this reason alone, Nils Fagerburg should consider it a success.

The basic premise of the game is that there are zombies loose in an old manor house. Despite the popularity of the zombie meme, I’m getting a bit tired of all the zombie-based games these days. The real challenge in Cypress Tree Manor is getting past your fellow survivors. An individual zombie by itself poses little threat to an adventurer armed with a shovel or a chainsaw.

The real difficulty in Cypress Tree Manor is the win condition: search the many crates, bins and chests in the house and find the bunker key, then get to the bunker downstairs (which only has room for 1). Your computer opponents will murder each other (and you) on their way to find the key and get to safety.

This isn’t to say Cypress Tree Manor doesn’t have issues: on top of being fairly hard, it is controllable only with vim-keys. While this reviewer grew accustomed to the control scheme fairly quickly, it would be nice to see controls extended to the numpad. Additionally, it is possible for the game’s (admittedly bad by the author) random level generator to create unsolvable levels: see the screenshot included. However, in my 20+ games before writing this review, I only noticed this happening once, so I would guess it is pretty rare.

There’s also a strange AI glitch where some enemies will simply walk back and forth in place. This can be really irritating if you’re trying to kill them off. It’s a tribute to the design of this game that these bugs and limitations aren’t an immediate turnoff: but the gameplay and humor endeared themselves to me immediately.

Cypress Tree Manor has plenty of good stuff too: the zombies die leaving pools of ascii blood. The weapons include hammers, chainsaws, and shovels, and you can find chocolate chip cookies and sausages lying around. The title art and “you die” screens are hysterical (by the way, your brains were delicious).

If you’re looking for a complex dungeon crawler, this isn’t it. But if you’re looking for a way to kill 5-10 minutes while waiting for your coffee to brew, you should consider checking out Cypress Tree Manor. Don’t expect perfection; it was, afterall made in just 7 days. And don’t expect to win everytime either.

Cypress Tree Manor - Website

Whispers in the Void 0.666 - Linux (python, pygame and pgu required)
Whispers in the Void 0.666 - Windows (stand alone executable)

- Update: If you downloaded this shortly after release, there was a bug included that crashed the game when you switched to fists or knife. This has been fixed.

Oh wow, it’s almost time to release.

Okay, I’ve got a demo version for playtest purposes. There are some limitations in it, so just try to be gentle. If you find any bugs that I haven’t listed here, let me know!

Known limitations/bugs:

• You have to close the game when you die.
• The game crashes after you descend from dlvl12 (this is the last level)
• You can’t move in diagonals.

There were a few things I haven’t managed to get into the game, but I don’t know how much more of them I’ll be attempting. The majority of tomorrow will be spent smoothing out the experience - adding intro screens, cutscenes with plot text, and other things to make the overall experience better.

Please leave comments!

Whispers in the Void 0.666b - Linux (python, pygame and pgu required)
Whispers in the Void 0.666b - Windows (stand alone executable)

So close!

A bunch of new stuff today, cramming for a final night of testing on Friday. My 7 day deadline is Saturday at 8:00pm EST, and I won’t be releasing it until a few hours before that. Stuff that got done today:

• Three types of grenades!
• Adrenaline!
• Ability to infrequently sense when monsters are nearby
• Corpses

Tons of new stuff:

• More weapons
• Lots of new tiles
• All enemies are in
• Armor
• Combat is nearly complete
• You can progress to new dungeon levels
• Powerups

Time for another quick screeny. Some preliminary weapons stuff is in!

Making progress. Monster AI and pathfinding is in (mostly), status system works, time to start on combat!

Here’s the first screenshot. I’ve got walking around, random map generation, and line of sight in so far. Next step is to start randomly generating items and monsters; then begins the ai fun

It’s 8:00 PM EST, and I am beginning my attack run. My game is going to be based on the Cthulhu mythos and set in the far future. I’m thinking something like Deadspace meets the plot of ‘Doom’ with a hefty serving of ‘Event Horizon’ in there as well: an ancient (evil) artifact is used to power the faster-than-light transport drive of a ship. Upon activating the jump device, the ship jumps to a parallel dimension filled with unspeakable horrors, driving the crew mad, etc, etc.

Tools used will include Python, Pygame, and various sound/music tools. This will be graphical, although I will be keeping it strictly turn-based roguelike, and there won’t be much in the way of animation.

I’ve got some great ideas planned. Since the setting warrants it, I am going to focus almost entirely on long-range combat. Enemies will be attacked by right-clicking on them; hand to hand weapons will be a last resort. Rather than food keeping you advancing, ammo will be your incentive to keep moving down. I’m going to try to keep the stats as simple as possible: perhaps just health, armor, and sanity. I’ve got a lot of other ideas too, but i’m trying to start small and work my way up to something playable in 7 days.

I’ll be keeping a progress log on my blog at http://nihilsys.com as well as keeping this thread updated.