Goblin-COM

Operate the elite organization, Goblin-COM (Goblin Combat Unit), to protect your castle island from invading goblins. It's an XCOM-like squad combat roguelike for 7DRL 2015.

Download

Windows

All needed resources are embedded in the executable, so there are no other files to zip up with it.

• gcom.exe (64-bit)
• gcom32.exe (32-bit)

Other Platforms

For all other platforms it should be easy to build from source.

Implementation Details

The save file is just a memory dump, so it's not necessarily portable. However, it's unlikely anyone would want to port a save across architectures anyway.

No libraries will be used except for small, embeddable ones. I want this to be a single, simple, tight executable. Modding the game will require changing the sources, but since it will be trivial to compile that shouldn't be an issue.

A mini ncurses-like, panel-oriented library has been written specifically for G-COM as its display driver. It minimizes required updates to put less load on the terminal emulator and use less bandwidth in the case of telnet play.

The game is designed from the ground up to support modern (UTF-8) ANSI terminal emulators, telnet play, and Windows' console in its default configuration. The display driver is a least common denominator of this subset (16 colors, limited Unicode support).

Unicode

G-COM's Unicode support is only partial, just enough to display some interesting, pretty characters in the game. Full support would require including the big Unicode tables. The limitations:

• Can't input Unicode. Just ASCII.
• Can't handle combining characters. It thinks they take up space, so
  stick with precomposed characters.
• Similarly, no support glyphs that are more or less than one space
  wide.
• Can't handle characters in the astral planes. This is emphasized by
  the uint16_t type for characters. Fonts for the astral planes are
  rarely ever available, so those characters won't display properly
  anyway even in modern terminals. I also don't want to bother with
  surrogate pair encodings for the sake of Windows' outdated UTF-16
  support. This is kind of a shame because some of the best characters
  for games (trees, castles, mountains, etc.) are in the astral
  planes.

Unicode support in Windows' console is total rubbish, probably from not having been updated in 20 something years. This limits the character selection to essentially the old IBM code pages (but using the newer Unicode codepoints). Fortunately there are still enough characters available to be interesting.