[Game] Mogue [v1.2]

[covertiii]

Hello adventurer! Welcome to Mogue, a Brogue-like realtime dungeon crawler built in Luanti. You're on a quest to retrieve the Crystal of Yendor, rumored to be somewhere in depth 12 of the dungeons. Bring it back up to the surface, place it on the pedestal and your name will forever be remembered. Along the way, try to collect as much gold as possible to show off to future explorers of the dungeon. But beware! The dungeon and its inhabitants do not take kindly to intruders. There will be traps you must avoid and monsters to sneak around, to fight, or to run away from. If you die on your quest, you will lose any items you find, your stats will reset, and you'll need to start again at the top. The dungeon itself will change its shape, and you will need to explore it anew. But do not despair, as you explore the dungeon, there will be many chests containing items to help you on your way to retrieve the fabled crystal.



ContentDB Link: https://content.luanti.org/packages/covertiii/mogue/

Source Code: https://gitlab.com/billy.covert/mogue/-/tree/master


Original Post Below
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Mogue is a first person Roguelike experience built in Minetest (Minetest + Rogue = Mogue). It's inspired by Brogue (https://github.com/tmewett/BrogueCE) and Minetest. This game is very much WIP, but there's enough to start sharing with the community here.

You're an adventurer in search of treasures and glory. You start in the overworld and you need to find the entrance to the dungeons of doom to begin your adventure.



Once you enter the dungeon find treasure, weapons, scrolls, potions, food and other items to help you on your adventures and defeat the monsters.



Find the ladder down to the next level - each level gets harder.



Play through video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef9UeyYwNhg

Getting Started

Use the /carve command to generate a new dungeon. Walk along the perimeter of the ruins until you find the entrance. Sometime the entrance is in the ruins - it's always 2 blocks in from the parameter. Good luck. There's no amulet yet - so grab some gold blocks and kill some monsters. You'll leave a bones block on death with all your items. If you /carve, it'll erase your bones and you'll need to start again!

Details

I've always wanted to play a first person real time Roguelike game. There's a couple out there like Barony and Delver, and they're fun to play. I've also enjoyed playing Brogue - which is a traditional roguelike in the spirit of Rogue itself. Brogue has some unique level generation. I've always wanted to experience it in first person. There's a project out there called NotEye which takes Brogue itself and puts it in a first person view. I've always wondered what Brogue would look like as a Minetest game. A few months ago I decided to take on the project and port some of the level generation code over to Lua so I could experience this first hand.

I started off with Minipeli (https://github.com/paramat/minipeli) and I've been pulling assets, mods and code mostly from either MineClone2 and Minetest Game. I've also pulled in a few mods from ContentDB to add additional functionality.

What I've done so far:

• Ported over enough of the level generation code from Brogue to make the game playable (minus the machines)
• Generated Brogue items and map them to some Minetest items from various mods. Some Brogue items haven't been made in Mogue yet; those will be chests with books in them saying what else should be in the chest.
• Generated Brogue levels 1-10 in Minetest and connect them with ladders.
• Use mobkit for mobs and pull in mob models, sounds and textures from Mineclone2 and other mods on contentDB. Map monsters that spawn on levels 1-10 in Brogue to those Minetest Mobs. Mobs are pretty dumb right now.

My goal for v1: fully playable balanced first person Roguelike using most of the monsters, items and mechanics from Brogue. Compressed game play from levels 1-10.

What's left for v1:

• DONE Spawning the Amulet and getting it.
• DONE Basic game mechanics of spawn, respawn, when to regenerate levels, end game (winning).
• DONE Create custom items and effects that map to Brogue items and their functionality (ie, staves, wands, potions, weapons, armor and charms) - including strength and enchantment
• DONE Traps!
• DONE Custom mob behavior that maps roughly to the way monsters behave in Brogue
• Over world mechanics of storing items from successful runs as trophies.

Possibilities for v2 (more Brogue functionality):

• Port over Brogue machines for map generation (locked doors, keys, swamps, complex traps, etc)
• Prisoners that can be freed for allies
• Add in more mobs that correspond to deeper dungeon level mobs in Brogue

Source Code: https://gitlab.com/billy.covert/mogue/-/tree/master

[Lone_Wolf]

Oh dang, I'm going to have to take a peek at this later o.o

[Mantar]

This is a pretty nice start! Get an A* pathfinder going on those mobs and they'll be a lot smarter. You should also scale at least the collision box on some of them down a little bit, as they can't fit through the doors. Watching a goblin struggle to squeeze his big head through the door was humorous, but it made fighting him too easy
Also I'd suggest adding "pointable = false" to the node definitions for your grass and other decoratives, so they don't interfere with fighting and opening chests.

Getting the dungeon generator into a voxelmanip would speed it up, too.

[Nininik]

Hold up isn't that yellow block you are holding is from the light mod from some minimalist game?

[Blockhead]

Hold up isn't that yellow block you are holding is from the light mod from some minimalist game?

It would be the one from Minipeli, which the game is based on originally.

[covertiii]

This is a pretty nice start! Get an A* pathfinder going on those mobs and they'll be a lot smarter. You should also scale at least the collision box on some of them down a little bit, as they can't fit through the doors. Watching a goblin struggle to squeeze his big head through the door was humorous, but it made fighting him too easy
Also I'd suggest adding "pointable = false" to the node definitions for your grass and other decoratives, so they don't interfere with fighting and opening chests.

Getting the dungeon generator into a voxelmanip would speed it up, too.

I appreciate the feedback. This is my first deep dive into making a Minetest game and there's a lot I don't know. A couple of these sound like pretty quick wins. I'm pretty busy the next couple days, I'll update it later this week.

Hold up isn't that yellow block you are holding is from the light mod from some minimalist game?

Yes, I left it in there. I wanted to go with a build up strategy for creating the game instead of starting with MTG and removing everything I didn't want. I wanted to avoid the "mod soup" problem that a lot of people talk about on here. I've discovered a lot of mods depend on default. I've shimmed a couple of things and updated some mods to remove references to default. It's been a fun journey.

[Nininik]

Hold up isn't that yellow block you are holding is from the light mod from some minimalist game?

It would be the one from Minipeli, which the game is based on originally.

Yep.

[covertiii]

I've been working on this the past few months and made a number of updates. The most important update is the game play loop. The goal of the game is to descend to level 10, find and retrieve the crystal, bring it up to the surface and place it on the pedestal. Level generation is done lazily now, as you go down a level another level is generated. If you die in the attempt to retrieve the crystal, you respawn at the surface with no more items in your inventory, the dungeon is regenerated and you need to try again!

I added many new items to the game to make things interesting.

• potions (life, descent, fire, creeping death, strength)
• strength requirements for weapons to be used effectively
• different ranges for weapons
• staves (lightning, fire, poison, obstruction, blinking)
• charms (shattering, recharging, health, levitation)
• scrolls (shattering and recharging)
• traps (trap door, fire and flood)
• Gold coins for score
• bows and arrows (regular arrows and fire arrows) - I used the bows mod from TenPlus1

The game play is not balanced - if you find good armor early on, then the game is pretty easy. That being said, my kids still can't beat it, but my brother, an experienced Minecraft player, beat it his first try.

Multiplayer has some limited support. If you die in multiplayer you respawn at the start of the last depth you went to and your bones are left and you need to retrieve them. There's a bug though where sometimes you respawn at the beginning. The game is even more unbalanced in multiplayer, but it is fun.

Here's a list of items I want to tackle next: strength requirements for armor, more player and monster effects (like poison, gases, paralysis), more items based on those effects, item enchantments and smarter monsters (their AI code hasn't been touched since last time), then try to balance the game play.

Here's the git repository: https://gitlab.com/billy.covert/mogue

[covertiii]

I've continued to work on this the past month. I've implemented a lot of my goals from the last post:

• Strength Requirements for Armor
• Item Enchantments (you can enchant weapons, armor, staves, wands, rings and charms)
• Rings (Transference, Wisdom, Reaping, Stealth, Regeneration)
• Wands (Polymorph and teleportation)
• More scrolls
• More potions
• Mob defense and accuracy
• Mob regeneration
• Player defense and accuracy
• Player stealth
• Mob Ability and Behaviors
• Got flying mobs working better
• "Monkeys" hit, steal and item then flee
• Bloats will explode on a hit
• Goblin Conjurers will conjure swords to attack you
• Goblin Mystics cast protection for their goblin buddies
• spiders will shoot webs at you
• spiders will poison the player
• acids degrade armor when they hit the player
• acids degrade weapons when you hit them
• blazes will set the terrain on fire if it's flammable and set the player on fire when it hits them
• vampire bats have transference (they steal player health when they hit you)
• mobs will follow the player through shallow water when hunting

Fighting a wolf:


Aftermath of throwing a potion of incineration


Fighting a goblin being protected by a goblin mystic


I uploaded another youtube video with me doing a play through: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SzQrnIFnf8

I think before uploading to ContentDB I want add a few more mobs and mob abilities, add an identification system (items are fully identified right now), then do some more play testing to catch bugs and other balance issues. I'll update back here in another month to report progress.

[Nininik]

This is quite similar to dungeon crawl stone soup! 💯

[Mantar]

DCSS is descended from Rogue, yes. (This is more of a rogue-lite, but it's super cool anyway)

[Astrobe]

I've played some Brogue, really good work, very promising.

Minor bug: the text for "RIP" signs are behind the signs (on 5.10).

Minor bug: when under water, the "breath bar" overlaps with the player's stats.

Q: the game lets players dig chests and sand. Works as intended?

Suggestion: change the default crosshair textures. The default ones don't show well enough when you're in range, and weapon range in this game is unusually short. A color change would be good, I think. Related texture names are crosshair.png and object_crosshair.png.

[covertiii]

DCSS is descended from Rogue, yes. (This is more of a rogue-lite, but it's super cool anyway)

Yes, this is more of a rogue-lite given it's real-time nature. That being said, the mechanics and core dungeon generation code are shamelessly lifted straight from Brogue :-D.

I've played some Brogue, really good work, very promising.

Minor bug: the text for "RIP" signs are behind the signs (on 5.10).

Minor bug: when under water, the "breath bar" overlaps with the player's stats.

Q: the game lets players dig chests and sand. Works as intended?

Suggestion: change the default crosshair textures. The default ones don't show well enough when you're in range, and weapon range in this game is unusually short. A color change would be good, I think. Related texture names are crosshair.png and object_crosshair.png.

Thank you for playing and thank you for the praise!

The two minor bugs are known issues. I haven't looked too hard into them yet; they're not game breaking so I've put them on the back burner. The signs are editable too - something I want to turn off. I used Signs Lib and tried to figure out how to programmatically place signs with text, but couldn't get it working 100% right. It was "good enough" and I wanted to work on other things. I'll try to fix them before submitting to ContentDB.

I left digging chests on, because there's a rare bug where a chest will spawn in front of a door leaving that space impassable, which could break level navigation. I haven't fixed it yet, so I left diggable chests as a work around for now.

Same with digging sand, the wooden bridges and the ladders. Sometimes the link between the levels break and it's nice having some blocks to help navigate. It's another bug on my list.

I'm not 100% sure if I'll remove those being diggable or not even if I fix the navigation issue. I'll wait to get more feedback from people to see what others thing.

There is an interesting meta-game with chests, ladders, sand and wooden ladders being diggable. You could bring them up to the surface, build a house on the grass and store some of the stuff in the chests for latter runs. :-) Also you can craft doors from the wood. It's not the point of the game, but more of an easter egg. These are left over from when I was originally playing with Minipeli and I haven't removed them yet. The dungeon area and highscore signs get regenerated each run, but the grass area (outside the high scores) are untouched.

I've kept the weapon range short to make it more challenging. When it was longer it was harder for monsters to get a hit on you and you could easily mow down most of the enemies. Different weapons have different ranges - the spear and glaive have the longest. I'll probably increase the default hand and the dagger so you can easily pick up items off the floor and decrease the range of non-weapon items like the coins - those are still at the default range.

I'll look into changing the cross hairs, I didn't realize that could be done. I usually play with hit boxes being outlined, but I think most people don't, so I'll have to make it more obvious if you can hit a monster or not.

[covertiii]

I feel like this is far enough along to dub it at 1.0 now. Here's the updates since last post:

• Added a pillager to shoot at player
• Toads blind player
• Added acidic jelly
• added sounds to all mobs that were missing sounds
• reworked lighting system to make it more like Brogue, light is in a radius from players and that radius gets smaller the further the player goes down
• changed the default cross hairs
• weapon, armor and ring intrinsic enchantments are hidden from player (can spawn cursed)
• weapons auto id after 20 kills
• armor and rings auto id after wearing them for 500 seconds
• added scroll of identity so player can identify enchantments of weapons, armor and rings
• try to spawn monsters during game out of players field of view
• try to spawn monsters out of the field of view of the upstairs
• use cobble stones from exile for some decorations
• update range of all items to 1.5
• increase range of hand and dagger to 1.5
• added sound for traps
• don't show breath in HUD
• highscore signs are not editable now
• wood, chests and sand do not drop anymore
• the readme is now more of a players manual
• refactored how items are registered to make it easy for mods to register their own items in the map generation
• fixed bugs with stealth and flying mobs
• fixed issue with chests sometimes spawning next to secret doors making the space impassable
• fixed issue with link between levels getting disrupted by chasms
• fixed texture issue with some mobs wielding items
• fixed issue with high score sign text being off

I made a 3 minute video to highlight the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTe2jm57gYY

Here's some screenshots from the video:

Fighting a Goblin Conjurer:


Fighting some Dars:


Found the crystal:


I'm going to do some more play testing to try to find some bugs, then release it to ContentDB.

[covertiii]

I released two small updates since this was released to ContentDB:

• v1.1(2025-05-11) - Tried to fix an issue with mod loading order reported by a player
• v1.2 (2025-06-29) - Fixed warnings during game start up & Swapped the cat for a chicken. My kids and a player reported they didn't like hurting cats.

What's next? Astrobe gave a great suggestion of moving most of the ContentDB description into a help tab in the inventory screen. I'll try to get that done this summer.

Once the weather gets cold, I want to look at these items:

• Add more gases and rework gas physics (paralysis, steam, healing, confusion, explosive, nausea)
• Add more player & monster effects (like nausea, paralysis, negation, confusion, darkness)
• Improve mob pathfinding and behavior (some mobs that can go in liquid and land. can fly and walk)
• Add more weapons and unique weapon behavior (like rapier, whip, ax behavior, spear behavior)
• Add blueprints from Brogue (puzzles to get keys, treasure rooms, boss rooms, swamps, goblin encampments)
• Add more mobs
• Allied mobs