Eat To Live

Made for Linux Game Jam 2023.  An exploration of some features for a Rogue like game.  I have played Nethack many times and enjoyed it lots.  All of this was done with only the ASCII character set (256 characters).  One day I came across Unicode, and all of a sudden came the idea of making a Nethack like game but with nearly 150 thousand characters.  This could open up the possibility of adding a new dimension to the game.  This would be a major effort, so the thought was to develop a number of smaller games as part of some game jams to work out how to do different aspects.  ETL is the first of a series of these smaller game in hope of one day build a more fuller experience.

One major difficulty was unicode itself.  The standard does allows a number of different character widths even for mono spaced fonts.  My solution was to create a standard size canvas in the GIMP and render a transparent png image of the gliphs of individual unicode characters.  Also there are not any fonts that implement all of the unicode characters.  What I did was to specify a font family (Sans Serif) and allow my system to find an appropriate font that had the character that I was after to put the text into the GIMP.  I only have the default fonts that are available when installing the operating system (Debian Bullseye).