Shambletown

Shambletown
Alpha Project
Developer	Norman B. Lancaster
Theme	Zombies, Post-Apocalyptic Future
Influences	Fallout, Diablo, Wasteland
Released	Jan 4, 2011
Updated	Jan 12, 2011
Licensing	GPLv3
P. Language	JavaScript
Platforms	Browser
Interface	Keyboard, True-Color ASCII
Game Length	N/A
Official site of Shambletown

Description

Shambletown is my take on the modern Roguelike, mixing elements of more modern games with some of the classic Roguelike characteristics. A major goal is to keep the interface very simple with as few key bindings as possible.

Many compromises have to be made to allow Shambletown to live inside of a browser window. One major factor is the size of the save files. This is kept to a minimum by using a repeatable random number generator which allows the game to only store a small seed value instead of the layout of every map. The algorithms used for map generation, visibility calculation and path finding have to be computationally conservative due to the interpreted nature of the language.

There are advantages to Roguelike life inside the browser however. CSS attributes allow for 24-bit color resolution of foreground and background colors. The browser environment is event-driven from the ground up, and everything is very well sand-boxed. I also hope to create an online save and bones file service after the 1.0 release.

Status

Shambletown has been abandoned in favor of a smaller project. See the official site to play the last tech demo.

Screenshots

Title Screen from Version 0.02. The title screen is procedurally generated.