Introduction

Welcome to the featurecreeper manual.

This page seeks to be as complete of documentation of the game as is possible.

• Introduction
• What is featurecreeper?
• Who is featurecreeper?
• Manual Proper
• Basic Play
• Characters
• Changes compared to Madness
• Support Information
• Roadmap
• For Major Releases
• Features Creeping

What is featurecreeper?

This is a small game, based on the 2010 7 Day Roguelike "Madness"

Why the name? I wanted to explore, extend, and pay homage to Madness. I had no great idea for what to do, so I just began engaging in some old-fashioned feature creep. The name stuck :)

Who is featurecreeper?

The only developer is me, Jesse. I hack on this in my spare time, as the fancy strikes. Game ideas and play testing come from my friends and family. And my own head.

Manual Proper

Basic Play

featurecreeper plays like most basic roguelikes.

Move around using the numer pad, arrow keys, or vi keys (hjkl, yu/bn).

To attack a monster, simply move into it.

To examine your inventory, press i. To use or wield and item, select its letter from the inventory screen. Drop stuff using d.

When you start, you'll find a bit of useful gear in your pack. Be warned that darkness plays a big role in this game -- you'll probably want to make use of that candle, and find a more suitable light source before it runs out.

Characters

A Bestiary...

A Guide to your Game Board...

Changes compared to Madness

Spoiler Warning: See ChangesByRelease

Support Information

To run on Linux or Windows, one may directly run (from the shell or suitably-configured GUI) the file creeper.py.

On Windows, one may also run creeper.exe, a static build of featurecreeper which embeds the Python runtime and all needed dependencies. Most Windows users will want to start here for ease of play.

featurecreeper is written in 100% pure Python. It is written and tested using Python 2.6. Show-stopping bugs that surface using Python 2.5 are fixed as they bubble to the surface, but perfection is not guaranteed.

The game depends on the libtcod library written in C++. x86 and x64 builds are provided for the Linux runtime. A .DLL is provided for Windows.

The game also depends on SDL. A .DLL is provided for Windows; Linux systems are presumed to have SDL already.

Support for other platforms (namely, Mac OSX and BSD) is planned, but is not a priority as the developer currently lacks access to test against these platforms.

Roadmap

yes, a game defined by feature creep has plans

For Major Releases

0.1: Released

See the change history

This was primarily the summation of many small changes as Jesse learns the code.

• Insanity effects which affect gameplay
• Monsters which do things

0.2: The Next Release

• Lights besides the player's (deferred from 0.1 in the interest of making a release)
• More interesting monster pathing
• Time-limited effects
• Dungeon-mutating insanity effects (including those stubbed-out dungeon rotations)

Somewhere over the rainbow

• Create a long game
• multiple dungeons with flavor
• an overworld
• save files

Features Creeping

To be implemented whenever, preferably sooner

Better Platform Support

• Need Python bindings for the in-progress Mac fork of libtcod
• Need some mechanism to deliver a native libtcod if needed

Solid Ideas from Usenet/Forums

I'm noting these because I want to do them; I have plans to implement as part of a longer game

• Player Class differentiation
• Ability to carry more stuff