Into Ruins

Reach depth 16 and retrieve the Wings of Yendor Controls (◀)(▶)(▼) : Turn (▲) : Step forward / Attack / Interact (X) : Open inventory (O)/Z/C : Wait 1 turn Into Ruins is a roguelike for the PICO-8 Fantasy Console. There are no stairs. Jump down holes in the ground to make your way to the bottom. You will encounter natural cave formations, crumbling dungeon rooms, and terrifying creatures on your way. There are no doors. Tread carefully or the creature in the next room might spot you. Light helps you explore more easily, but also reveals you to your foes. Fires can spread wildly through the environment, while glowing mushroom spores can mend your wounds. There are no classes or character levels. Expand your abilities by finding magical items on your descent, and bring them to their full potential with Orbs of Power. Each attempt is a new beginning — the different types of orbs, staves, cloaks and amulets will not be immediately recognizable to you. Some experimentation is required to identify them. Credits Into Ruins was created by Eric Billingsley. It was greatly inspired by Brogue by Brian Walker. Thanks to FReDs72, Heracleum, James Edward Smith, morgan, Oli414, Sim, SlainteES, SmellyFishstiks and Waporwave for beta testing and feedback. Technical Info I figured some of you might be interested in some of the technical aspects of the game. This was my first foray into PICO-8 and Lua, and I learned a lot along the way -- from discovering with shock that variables are global by default after a week and a half of strange bugs, to trying to cram as much as possible into strings, and _ENV abuse to reduce token count. How does it all fit? Initially I thought I could fit everything into 1 cart, but partway through I realized that even if I could fit all the features I had planned in while respecting the token limit, the compressed character limit would be a problem. The final version of the game is in 2 carts -- one for the title screen and text intro, and another for the main game. The title screen cart also puts a huge string containing most of the game's data (creature stat blocks, animation data, item stats, text descriptions) into the upper memory region, which is then read and parsed by the main cart. Because the title screen still displays the environment and character, there's a lot of similar code between the two carts, though a lot of things that were refactored to save tokens in the main cart are still in the title cart in their original form. Even with these measures, the main cart still needed to be stripped of comments, newlines, and whitespace using shrinko8 to fit within the compressed character limit. As far as tokens go, making almost everything in the game be the same type of object went a long way. Each object has a type (which is just its sprite number), and from that we can initialize its properties with a combination of default values and ones read from the huge string mentioned earlier. Having everything be intialized and accessed the same way means that each object has a lot of data it doesn't actually need, but we aren't strapped for Lua memory so that's okay! The upside is we can reuse code where appropriate, and make things interact more easily. To save tokens on accessing properties, I also made heavy use of the _ENV trick outlined by slainte here, and seleb's list of token optimizations was indispensible as well. Level generation The levels are generated using a couple different algorithms. Levels can contain natural caves, manmade dungeon rooms, or both. In either case, there is a variable called Entropy which ticks down as more of the level is generated. Caves Caves are made recursively using a type of random walk. From our current position, we try to generate another tile in a random neighbouring space. We then decide whether to recurse again from this position or backtrack -- this probability is based on the current entropy, so at the start we always continue, and by the end backtracking is more likely. Playing with the starting entropy and the amount it goes down by with each recursion allows us to achieve the right density and balance between narrow tunnels and wide open areas. When choosing which tile to put in a new space, we consider the tile we are generating from. Each tile type has a corresponding section of the map data which defines 16 possibilities for the next tile, so we choose one at random from these. In a way this is like a Markov Chain, where the state is just based on the tile we are coming from. Holes, grass and other environmental features are all generated this way. The tile definition can also include an entity to generate, like a mushroom, brazier, chair or barrel. With each recursion, there's a very small chance we switch to generating rooms. Rooms For rooms, we choose a random point on the map which will be contained in the room, and then random values for the room's width and height. The boundaries of the room are clamped to multiples of 2 or 4 to get them to lock together well and play nice with the rendering. We then create the floor and walls of the room, with one dimension being staggered to fit properly into the hex grid. Each room gets a random crumble value, which we use to decide if we should replace parts of the wall with different tiles (selected in the same way as in the cave generation). After generating each room, there's a chance we switch to cave generation. Otherwise, we keep generating rooms at random positions until the entropy reaches 0. The rooms can overlap each other, and each time we generate one, a random openplan variable sets whether it should have walls on all sides, or try to merge with any overlapping rooms. In this way, we can get all kinds of interesting dungeon shapes just by combining rectangles. Post-processing Once the initial generation is complete, we analyze the level to find parts that are inaccessible, and then find a nearby position the player can get to and connect them in a straight line, either by building bridges or tunneling through walls. Then we recurse randomly through the level and fill out the contents of the manmade rooms, in the same way we did with the caves earlier. There are a few more steps, like creating cave walls, ensuring there are exit holes, and running the code to connect areas again at various points. One interesting step is to replace cave walls which have walkable tiles both below and above them with a random tile, again sampled from the map data. This is actually the only way that stalagmites and mushrooms can be generated, and I think it makes their placement a bit more natural looking. Spawning With the environment generated, all that's left is to spawn creatures and items. Creature spawn groups are again defined in the map, with each line corresponding to a different depth. We attempt 6 times to spawn a group of creatures, either choosing a group from the current depth or sometimes randomly from a greater one for a nasty surprise. We pick a random position, and try to spawn a creature there, and then move on to a to a neighbouring tile for the next one in the group. If it turns out the spawn point is invalid, we don't try again, just move on. This means some levels, especially smaller ones, will tend to have fewer creatures but that's okay -- it just adds variety! Items are spawned in a similar way, with the depth just affecting how many we try to spawn (we attempt to spawn slightly more items on earlier depths than on later ones). For certain important orbs, we make extra spawn attempts if there haven't been enough of them generated yet over the course of the game based on the current depth. Wrap-up There's a lot of other things that I think could be interesting to write about, like the lighting, FOV algorithm, or various aspects of the AI, but for now I think this post is long enough. Let me know if there's anything you'd like to hear more about! Into Ruins is also available on itch.io, and the unminified code is up on Github. v1.07 changes (2024/05/05) Fixed victory animation not playing properly when attacking with rapier on final move Spear special attack now triggers when summoned blades, pushed objects, or teleporting enemies enter the guarded space Improved spore/fire interaction so that burned mushrooms or glowhorns now produce an expanding fireball when destroyed Fixed lit torch thrown at pink jelly only lighting one of the split jellies on fire Fixed lit torch thrown at an enemy flying over a pit not setting it on fire Fixed sleeping enemies pushed by a thrown orb of gravity not falling down pits or bumping into things properly Enemies pushed by a thrown orb of gravity now lose their turn v1.06 changes (2023/06/22) Web player touch controls (itch & newgrounds only): removed ability to input a diagonal on the d-pad by pressing in between two directions. Web player touch controls (itch & newgrounds only): removed ability to input simultaneous X and O by pressing in between both buttons. Fixed cursor being off by 1 pixel vertically when aiming Adjusted aiming prompt text alignment v1.05 Changes (2023/06/09) Added custom font Clearer text descriptions for Orbs of Gravity and Light Fixed searching enemies sometimes moving after spotting you Fixed orbs not activating when thrown at enemies flying over a hole Fixed Pink Jellies having the wrong icon when hit with an Orb of Data v1.04 Changes (2023/03/08) Increased chance that a given spawned item will be a "fun" orb (fire, ice, teleport) -- other items will spawn slightly less often as a result Improved several movement animations (player & some enemies) that had incorrect timing v1.03 Changes (2023/01/02) Increased chance of spawning a weapon or staff until at least one has been spawned Increased chance of spawning an uncursed wearable item until at least one has been spawned Flesh Horrors have a new unique ability... Frozen enemies no longer display "?" when switching to searching state Fixed player appearing not to die on game over screen when killed while being pushed down a pit with slofall active Fixed a visual glitch that would happen if you blinked to victory Fixed player not casting light until taking a step after descending while on fire Fixed creatures not casting light until next turn when they catch fire from being in light Fixed tiles not catching fire if a burning creature moves onto it and either dies or stops burning immediately after Fixed creatures with idle animations still animating while frozen v1.02 Changes (2022/11/08) Improved fire animation (was intended to flip horizontally every 3 frames, but I accidentally broke this before release) Changed text description for Orb of Light for improved clarity v1.01 Changes (2022/11/02) You can now pick up <important item> even if your inventory is full. Fix a rare bug where 2 Mirrorshards could teleport into the same space, with strange effects. Increase Mirrorshard HP from 6 to 8