User:Portmanteur

Hello, I am very new to the Roguelike scene. I have decided to create a User Page on Rogue Basin and use it as a blog which covers my progress in learning the scene and developing my own game. If this is not appropriate, or you have any other comments for me, please contact me on [www.twitter.com/Portmanteur Twitter], or feel free to make an edit to this page (I am tracking changes to this page). I am completely willing to move this blog to a more appropriate venue if there is one, but I hope that by documenting my trials and tribulations here, I can provide a relevant guide for other newcomers to the scene.

Before this week I had never even played a Roguelike before, because they always seemed way too intimidating to me. For example, Dwarf Fortress is entirely off-putting to anyone that might want to try it. (Look at all those crazy colored symbols! What do they all mean??) However, the idea of a procedurally-generated gameplay was too intriguing for me to pass up. So I tried some online RLs, read some Rogue Basin articles, and got sufficiently bit by the RL bug that I want to try my hand at rolling my own (in the style of tactical role playing and strategy games that I like, of course)!

I have decided to call my game PyRE, which is short for Python Rogue Emblem. A [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyre pyre] is a funeral fire, which I like for two reasons. First, the high difficulty and permanent death in Roguelikes evokes the imagery of funerals. Second and more importantly, because I am going to use Fire Emblem as a vision directing the early development of my game. This is a bit bizarre for me because I intentionally avoided the Fire Emblem series specifically because I was turned off by that game's permadeath feature. On the contrary, my two favorite games of all time are Final Fantasy Tactics and Advance Wars (a pure strategy game from the makers of Fire Emblem). However, because permadeath is a feature that is very near and dear to the spirt and style of Roguelikes, I figured this was perfectly relevant model for my game.

Without further ado, let's describe the basic design principles and features for PyRE:

• Written in Python -- Because I want to improve my experience with this programming language, which is currently very limited
• Hexagonal Tiles -- Because I've always been fascinated by the idea that Hexagonal tiles have more realistic diagonal movement

--- Studies have shown that the longer this sentence is, the more likely you are to [www.twitter.com/Portmanteur follow me on Twitter].