SudoHack

During this holiday season I started to work on a “new” project. I actually started it quite a few times, but never really worked more than a few hours on it before I lost interest. But this time I don’t just want to try a few things and code a small game, I want to know if I can finish one. Making a game from start to finish. With a menu and all (I never made menu). Also I often fantasized about about taking a year off after I got my Bachlor’s degree (if it comes to that) and be an indie dev - this is how I want to find out if I could actually do it.

SudoHack is going to be a a multiplayer roguelike, inspired by the numerous recent roguelikes, like The Binding of Isaac, Rogue Legacy, FTL: Faster than Light, which I played a lot of. It is set in cyber space and you (and your mates) control little programs that try to infiltrate a system (which explains the name, if you ever used Linux, where the sudo command executes another command as the superuser). The key element is (and of course I’m not sure if it will actually end up that way) getting from room (which are prebuilt, but randomly chosen) to room without losing too many “bits”, which you will pick up as loot from your defeated enemies and also lose by taking damage. They are essentially a ticking timer and HP combined. The goal is to finish the room in time, get to another room and go from there, defeating bosses along the way and hopefully infiltrating the system completely at the end. So far I have a lot of boilerplate code, a mini collision library and shooting with bouncy bullets!

 Also, as you can see, local multiplayer is already implemented (the green guy is controlled using my controller and the red one using my keyboard and mouse). It is planned to also integrate networked multiplayer, but since I have never done this before (in contrast to everything else I have planned for this game) I’m a little afraid of how it will turn out. I’m confident that I can at least hack together something, that probably works only on LAN, but I hope that I can do just a little bit more. Also this time I’m using LÖVE again, which is, as usual, a pleasure. Next up are enemies, which I already designed a few of and really can’t wait to integrate into the game.

One thing I already worked on way too much for a prototype is random weapons, which will be dropped as loot in the game. Every player starting the game will already have a randomly generated weapon (about 14 parameters). And for this feature in particular I started working on a shot sound synthesizer. Most of it’s features can be seen in the description text in the video below. Obviously it also contains a few sounds I generated just pressing the space key a few times.
 
Both SudoHack and the ShotSynth in their current versions are available on GitHub:
https://github.com/pfirsich/ShotSynth
https://github.com/pfirsich/SudoHack

If anyone in the world ever reads this (highly improbable) and doesn’t know how to get this game to run on his computer using the GitHub repository I linked here, but really wants to try, comment this blog post and I’ll upload a binary :)