05 / GAMEWORK IN PROGRESS
AlterVault
A top-down, turn-based pixel roguelike in Java and libGDX. Procedural provinces, towns and dungeons; Normal or Hardcore; runes, crafting, guild classes.
WHAT IT IS
AlterVault is the game I keep coming back to. Top-down, turn-based, pixel art, roguelike. You pick a guild class, walk out of a town that was generated a second ago, and go find out what's under it. Java with libGDX, because I wanted to own the whole engine, not rent one.
WHAT I BUILT
- Turn-based movement and combat on a tile grid.
- Procedural provinces: a walled home town, waystone camps further out, and dungeons in every one.
- watabou's town generator (TownGeneratorOS), ported to Java and fitted to the tile grid.
- Normal and Hardcore modes (Hardcore means it).
- Guild classes, runes and enchanting.
- Mining and crafting: dig through the walls, forge gear from what you haul out, and barter the rest.
- Story chapters alongside procedural quests.
- Pixel-art sprite sheets, the knight on this page included, plus an atlas exporter and validator so a broken cell never ships.
THE HARD PART
Procedural towns that feel hand-placed.
Random towns are easy. Towns that look like someone meant them are not. I ported watabou's town generator and spent most of the time fitting it to a tile grid: streets carved from every gate to the plaza, doors that open onto something walkable, a footprint smoothed so the wall reads as masonry and not gravel. Last step is a flood fill from the gate. Any door it can't reach gets a lane carved to it, and if that lane hits the city wall, congrats, the town just got a back gate.