Graphics, Equipment, and Combat!


Hello!
Since last time I've added a few cool things to the game, all of which really make the project start to take shape. You can see all of it in the gif below, and then some explanation below that.

Title
I'm very pleased with the ASCII art title, the text is generated using this nice web tool by Patrick Gillespie (The font used is Fire Font-k by MJP, with a few manual tweaks). I was also pleasantly surprised that the terminal title bar displays emojis. In the end I've decided on the name "DIRECTORY DUNGEON", it's simple and self-descriptive enough, and it was the working title anyway.

Graphics
It's surprising how much of a difference some custom icons and emojis makes to the feel and novelty of something like this. It's also interesting seeing what you have to do to have a folder display a custom icon (create a hidden .ini file in the folder pointing to your icon). I've left files with their default text file icon and just opted for a preceding emoji, I didn't want to use custom file extensions and icons as that feels pretty invasive. Originally I planned to find some free little icons to use but I ended up having fun making them myself.

Equipment
The player now has an "Equipment" folder inside themselves which will hold all of their equipped items. Each piece of equipment can alter the player's stats, and there are a finite number of slots for equipment (Head, Body, Main hand, Off hand, and Necklace). In the gif you can see the player moving the rusty sword they found on the Skeleton into their equipment folder, then a log line tells you what's happened and the effects it gives. I think this will be the only kind of "progression" in the game, as it won't be long enough to justify any kind of leveling mechanics.

Combat
Probably the most important interaction in an RPG is murdering things, the second being stealing things. Combat here is resolved automatically between the player and all NPCs in a given room. When entering a room there's a few seconds grace period before the NPCs detect the player so that they have chance to escape. After that each round of combat is resolved after a few seconds interval (these timings are adjustable via a config file) until the player is dead, has run away, or all the NPCs are dead. NPCs are text files but turn into folders with loot when killed, as you can see in the gif.

Folder Renaming Problems
Sometimes, during testing, after the player eats the cabbage the equipment folder also disappears. This is because eating the cabbage changes the player's health, which changes their folder name (the % in the folder name is a remaining health %). This means that the folder you were just looking at ("Player - 75%") no longer exists (renamed to "Player - 100%"), so the file explorer doesn't have anything to show you. I'm not sure if this is a pain enough to scrap showing health in folder names, I'll see how it feels going forward.

Next
Now that most of the interactions are in place, it's time to make this a complete experience that can be played from start to finish.

Get Directory Dungeon - a File Explorer Dungeon Crawler

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