Pitman Krumb

Pitman Krumb

Roguelike with boardgame style

• Seven-Day-Roguelike-Challenge 2011

• March 2011

• C#/Unity

Additional credits

Jana Reinhardt (art direction, 3d graphics, textures, additional game design)

Kevin MacLeod (music)

Video

Trailer

Links

PLAY

Download (Win)

Download (Mac)

Post mortem

In March 2011, the seventh Seven Day Roguelike Challenge took place. The 7DRLC is a contest without prices where the participants create a game within a week only; of course, the game has to be a roguelike.

If you don’t know what a roguelike is, don’t worry - I didn’t know much about it before I entered the Challenge, either. You probably can read a definition on Wikipedia, but as I was told the main elements are:

  • randomness, regarding world generation and gameplay
  • permadeath, which means no savegames and quickload
  • turnbased gameplay, so you have time to think

As usual, Jana Reinhardt and I teamed up and together we made “Pitman Krumb”. The premise is simple: you play the dwarven protagonist Krumb on a not-so-epic quest for mighty artifacts, collecting a lot of items and fighting against vile monsters. Jana did the graphics (character models, environment textures, decorations, GUI elements) while I used Unity3D for the interactive part. Again, Kevin MacLeod provided us with the music we needed.

Most roguelikes have procedurally generated dungeons and rooms as levels. I was sure I wouldn’t compete in this field and tried something different instead: Now in “Pitman Krumb” the player has a couple of so-called “cards”, which is our name for several pre-designed world sections with x*x tiles to walk on (with x in the range of 4 to 8 ). The player can distribute these cards on his journey and create his own dungeon this way. Everytime a new card is placed, new monsters and items also are created. Thus, “Pitman Krumb” should remind the player of a board game, which is complemented by the lack of animations and the style of the items (flat tokens on the ground).

The game generally is a role playing game, so the player can use different weapons, armours, potions and other magic stuff. After slaying enough monsters he can train several skills which make Krumb faster, stronger or more intelligent. At the end of each level a ladder appears which leads the brave Pitman to the next challenge …

All Seven Day Roguelike Challengers are winners as soon as they submit a finished game in the given timeframe. But as it is tradition, a Commitee consisting of several members of the roguelike development community evaluate all entries and give points on categories like “Completeness”, “Fun” and “Roguelikeness”. Out of 98 participants (46 of them completed their games) we made the seventh place (2.44 points average, with 1 being the worst and 3 the best). This is not too bad for our first roguelike!

While Jana posted daily updates of our progress on our blog on ratking.de, I used the more or less official website 7drl.org and wrote small articles every day. Here is a list of them, as there isn’t anything like this on the site unfortunately:

Screenshot 1 Screenshot 2 Screenshot 3