Inquiry Post #3 – Starting a 2D Roguelike in Unity

In my game development journey of learning Unity, I decided to tackle a 2D roguelike game. I am following this Unity tutorial. They have an example of a completed game, here is a small snippet of me playing it to show you how this final product should look like.

The goal is to survive in some form of apocalypse by gathering food, defeating enemies and making it to the exit. I say “some form of apocalypse” because the game they made has three settings: snow, urban, and sand. This example is me playing the urban setting, which is what I happen to be coding for at the moment.

In roguelikes the game is never the same each time you play it. Whether it be the map changes or the amount of enemies or items. So far my progress has been to code the board outline and the food appearing. By using a random number generator system. This way, it is never the same each time.

Below are two examples of my board being randomly generated and my player character walking around in it.

As you can see, the boards are vastly different. From the borders to where the food spawns. My character is always meant to spawn in the bottom left but in the second video I began moving before the recording started. My mistake.

I still need to add things such as enemies, obstacles, and an exit but that is all in the next few steps.

One thing I really enjoyed about this current tutorial are the challenges they give you where they do not show you the solution. An example of this was coding in the food. An easy challenge was instead of five food items appearing each level, they challenged us to make it a random amount each time.

I enjoyed it because it is active learning. You aren’t just copying everything down. While the challenges may not be required, I still am doing each one as it’s fun to find a solution. I’ll make sure to update this once more. Hopefully when the game is completed.