What is YARL
YARL is going to be an epic roguelike adventure to once and forever fight off the Lich that keeps invading your home village. You are designated to descend to a dungeon filled with filthy monsters and destroy the Lich’s phylactery. It seems that your folks don’t like you anyways. But YARL is not there yet. Now you just kill those poor Sloths.
Download v0.3.0. Requires JRE 8 and will run on your toaster. I’ve just checked it - IoT toasters are officially a thing. Still better than IoD.
Open Source to the core
YARL is licensed under a permissive MIT License. You are free to reuse any piece of code you like as long as you mention me somewhere and provide an original license text. Don’t forget to let me know what you are up to - I’d love to see your accomplishment!
I organize my work using a public Trello task board. To a degree I try to implement Scrum, which works pretty well. I work alone but I put some effort into writing Daily Scrum notes. I don’t really stick to fixed sprint length or capacity. I run other (rather small) side projects and have some fun with my uni. The closer I am to finishing my degree, the more fun I am having with this project. I don’t feel compelled to strictly follow Scrum Guide. The worst that can happen is my result not being Scrum.
I am a member of /r/roguelikedev community. While I mostly lurk and upvote, I take the opportunity to participate in weekly Sharing Saturday threads. It’s a great place for holding myself accountable. It’s insane what these guys are capable to come up with in just a week!
Oh, I also run a dev blog. There’s nothing in there yet, but I’m going to use it extensively once I have some relevant stuff to write about.
Development stack
YARL is written in Java. I had close to no experience with this programming language prior to starting the project. I mean, I created a calculator app in my high school. How hard can it be? I just thought it would be a viable choice. There is a plethora of resources on interweb and some really cool libraries and frameworks. I went through a Trystan’s tutorial and decided on a set of tools and here I am.
I went for an MVC approach. They say games don’t benefit from MVC but I don’t necessarily agree. It makes for a nice separation of concerns. Roguelikes are intricate things and anything that leads to a better architecture helps. They also tend to have graphical overlays which makes it a reasonable choice.
I heard there is a nifty ECS design pattern and it’s pretty much a game dev standard. Guess what, now I’m all in love with it. Ashley is my weapon of choice, it resides in a model layer. The only caveat so far is tedious component mapping. Not really a concern for now, but I have my eye on it.
I utilize LibGDX framework, mostly because SquidLib kind of requires it. It allows me to target every major platform. They also handle display. YARL is a roguelike because I don’t want to dive right into graphics stuff but I’d like the possibility. I’m fond of roguelike graphics being as simple as outputting an array of characters. This means I can twiddle more with mechanics - the heart of every game. Furthermore, the tandem provides me with some useful data structures and robust toolkit.
I might not be proficient in JUnit, but I use it for my unit tests. I struggle to write every single one of them and I certainly plan to put some more focus on them. I’m just uncertain when it’s going to happen and it bugs me. I guess not every issue can be addressed in the foreseeable future.