CSharp, Monogame, ‘game lab’
Sandpit because, to me, it sounds more British and possibly slightly funnier than say, ‘Sandbox’. Or ‘Labs’.
This is an ongoing occasional project where I am slowly building a hackneyed, trope-heavy Rogue-like. And the number of times I mis-type ‘rogue’, I think if I ever finish it, it will be released as ‘Red Sandpit’.
The initial premise was – how would you make a randomly-generated dungeon (or any kind of map, really). One or two YouTubes in, I’d gotten something working using Binary Space Partitions. But the output was all text, so I dragged in Monogame and started drawing coloured rectangles. Then I added characters (NPCs) that would move around.
Then I added a player. Then I started adding characteristics, and line-of-sight with A*-type movement so that the monsters could ‘follow’ you once you’d been spotted. And then I watched a YouTube on how to do isometric projection, and now that’s in the process of getting chucked in.
The goal isn’t really to get to a polished, released game. There isn’t really a simple goal at all, other than for this to be a way of exploring and learning how to approach various well-trodden problems and solutions, in CSharp (now with MonoGame for the UI, player input and any audio).