C++❤️2023 in RoguelikeDev] Sigil of Kings (aka Age of Transcendence)

[2023 in RoguelikeDev] Sigil of Kings (aka Age of Transcendence)

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[Example dungeon and overworld](https://preview.redd.it/pw9slj2z18da1.jpg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=489080bf11080009ed4568ef0ae195005c688d71)

Previous years: [2022](https://www.reddit.com/r/roguelikedev/comments/s66jij/2022_in_roguelikedev_age_of_transcendence/) | [2021](https://www.reddit.com/r/roguelikedev/comments/kz8vqj/2021_in_roguelikedev_age_of_transcendence/) | [2020](https://www.reddit.com/r/roguelikedev/comments/ekbtj8/2020_in_roguelikedev_age_of_transcendence/)

**Overview**

Sigil of Kings is a roguelike/cRPG in development, with the following main planned features:

* **Dynamic, self-sufficient world.** There is main plot (world-in-peril of sorts) and it slowly advances, not waiting for you or your actions. The game can play by itself, without you, still resulting in an interesting storyline, most likely eventually resulting in the end of the world. So you are but an actor, but with the potential to significantly change the course of the story.
* **Procedural dungeons/cities/overworld/history.** Every game and adventure location will be unique: Procedurally generated overworld, dungeons and cities, different starting history (which cities/factions are in power, who owns what land, who likes whom, etc).
* **Faction dynamics.** There will be several factions and races, that control territory, cities and mines to extract precious resources. Territory control will be a thing, and the player will be able to influence this. The player can join several factions and advance in ranks within them, affecting NPC relationships (Paladins guild can't be happy if you have fame/standing with the Thieves guild).
* **Exploration heavy.** The core of the game expects the player to discover adventure locations (dungeons, lost cities, caves, etc) and clear dungeons to locate clues and relics towards "solving" the main quest, in one of several ways.
* **No food clock, but doomsday clock.** There won't be any food clock, but you can either live your whole hero life and die and not achieve anything, or you can also be inefficient in terms of progress and eventually lose out to the main quest.
* **Semi perma-death.** If you die, you might be revived by NPCs, if you're in good standing with particular groups and if you've possibly paid some sort of insurance. A starting character will permanently die, because nobody cares about you and you don't have the money/means to make them care enough to resurrect you. By building up your character and making yourself important in the world, things will change. Of course, relying on others to resurrect you will be extremely foolish.

Inspiration for this game comes from ADOM, Space Rangers 2, Majesty 2, Heroes of Might & Magic series, Might & Magic series (not ubisoft's abominations), even Age of Empires for a few bits, and of course the gargantuan elephant in the room: Dungeons & Dragons.

I make this game in my spare time, the scope is grand (for the time I can allocate), I am not in a hurry (not the fastest either), and I don't plan to change projects.

**2022 Retrospective**

Looking back, a lot of work not *directly* related to the game. E.g. a month-long attempt to make a tutorial (aka: make a constrained mini roguelike) which didn't get finalised as a tutorial, but got finalised as a product (look up last project). Here's the code\]([https://github.com/byte-arcane/roguelike-tutorial-cpp](https://github.com/byte-arcane/roguelike-tutorial-cpp)).

What took a long time though was to prepare a Steam page, and a trailer, for the game, including a new name. I spent lots of months in that, but part of that work was for example refactoring code and adding abilities, so it was not exactly a waste of time. [Here's the Steam page](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2195820/Sigil_of_Kings/) and please watch the trailer if you haven't, I've put a lot of work into it :D. So, I published the page, took a breath of relief, went of holidays that that was the end of the year.

**2023 Outlook**

So many exciting things to do! So:

* **GUI for the game**. The new Unity Gui looks mature enough now, there are plenty of icons around, so no more excuses! I have a number of screens/overlays in mind, and the main challenge is to refactor the code while learning good practices for the new system. I think Unity recently released a free ebook with some guidelines and such, need to check that out.
* **Art tools**. I'm currently working on a toolset to assist the creation of retro-looking game art from photos, AI or whatever. And before you ask, it's a bit more complex than some basic nearest-neighbour downscale. I'll make it available soon-ish (when I stop adding "essential" features) for all, on itch.io, and I'll make a post about it here when it's released.
* **Dungeon content**. At the moment I have lots of complicated dungeon generation and object placement logic based on RNG, but at the same time the game support fixed prefabs. What I'm not currently supporting, and it's direly needed, is parameterisable prefabs. This is a deep delve on the dungeon generation process, but I don't think it will need much more time.
* **Anything else** required so that I make a nice playable multi-level dungeon with a boss! A single sentence here, conveniently hiding monstrous amounts of work for adding content and bug fixing.

**Links**

[Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2195820/Sigil_of_Kings/) | [Website](https://byte-arcane.github.io/age-of-transcendence/) | [Videos](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNhHfTDNTo1CGEzfSY2tcbQ) | [itch.io](https://aotdev.itch.io/age-of-transcendence)


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r/roguelikedev - [2023 in RoguelikeDev] Sigil of Kings (aka Age of Transcendence)

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