Emergence

I've been sick for a long, long time. I'm still a bit ill - but it's starting to improve, at long last. There's light at the end of the tunnel now.

So, I need to start thinking about what I'm going to do with myself once I'm fully recovered. My old job at MCG is unfortunately not likely to be available any more, and I'm not sure I want to go back to embedded anyway.

So what to do?

Well... I can't leave Aberystwyth. My wife is settled here, it's the perfect place to bring up my daughter, and finding somewhere to live that's as well-adapted to Cerys' needs as the place we have now is almost impossible. 

I'm a practiced coder, and my capabilities are returning rapidly. I've been a technical support officer and I've run a company of my own. I have a lot of skills that would make me very marketable if I could leave the job wasteland that is West Wales, but that's not an option.

So, once again, I'm going to have to make my own opportunities. I'm going to try to dredge together what support I can, get control of my IPs, and then strike out on my own. I've done it before, after all. 

This is probably going to be difficult, but I can do it. More details to follow once they exist. See you all the other side :)

7DRL - Flagging

Having some nasty kidney problems this week, which combined with work are mostly killing progress. I have menus and an @ symbol moving around a map, and I have 3 more days. Not looking promising.

7 Day Roguelike Challenge Entry

So. I've decided to take the plunge and enter the 7DRL this year. My entry is going to be called "Chosen".

I've been very vaguely playing with a command-line based Exalted combat simulator for a while now, so I've decided I'm going to take advantage of 7DRL to turn it into a Roguelike. It'll mean moving away from a lot of the Exalted systems, and obviously because of the limitations of this codejam I'll not be able to implement some of the really cool bits of Exalted such as mass combat, social combat, or the newly released Creation-Ruling Mandate rules.

Since I will be working and/or looking after the little madam for much of this week, I'll need to ensure the feature list is as small as possible. This is going to take Some Planning.

The Unconquered Plan

So, I need to decide what to focus on. First things first, I need an engine (since I won't have time to roll my own), and since I've been working in C# quite a bit recently and what little existing Exalted code will be usable is all in C#, I'm going to use the libtcod .NET wrapper. I should be able to get to "something moving around in a dungeon" nice and quickly with that.

Next up, priority features:

• Simple chargen - pick a Caste and use a standard starting loadout.
• No overland. Pick from a list of generated quests.
• Each quest takes you to a different dungeon.
• Populate dungeons with Exalted monsters.
• Implement combat vaguely based upon Exalted tick rules.
• Cursor or numpad based movement, bump-to-attack.
• GUI needs to include obvious visuals for Essence pools and Health Levels.
• Quick-key selection for attack/defence powers.
• Include a selection of 4-5 attack/defence powers for each Caste.

Non-priority tasks:

• Destructible scenery. Everything can be smashed to smithereens. I may in fact have "smithereens" as an item type.
• The Chosen of the Sun give off sunlight when they use their powers. The LOS system in libtcod is perfect for this, and it'd be a nice change from light source handling in most RLs.
• I'm thinking modifier keys for alternate modes rather than as shortcuts for running etc. Especially for attacking. Martial Arts moves might require quite a few modifier keys.
• Use lower case for all commands. Upper case is special - Shift+anything means "use my Excellency to do that if I have one." (In non-Exalted terms, "Do it awesomely using magic".)
• XP award per quest (and maybe other situations). Allow levelling up between quests.

Further info forthcoming shortly, this is just to give an indication of what I want to do. Visually I'm thinking very crude, probably ASCII in fact, unless I have plenty of time.

Long Delay

Apologies everyone. Post GDC, everything went rather crazy and I eventually quit MCG and games dev around October. Burnout sucks. I've been gradually returning to strength during the intervening months and am currently doing non-game-related development to bring in the pennies.

So, development has been mainly stalled. If anything changes, I'll let y'all know.

Back from GDCE/Gamescom

Well, I survived!

I have a hell of a lot of thoughts running around my head after this last week, and I plan on putting them down in words here over the next few days.

Quick comments in the meantime:

- Many of the speeches really didn't feel worth the effort.
- Lots and lots and LOTS of triumphal nonsense about social games taking over the world. Unsurprising but still annoying.
- A few genuinely awesome talks, however. I'll get lists of actual names later, but the standouts were the guy from Epic talking about company history and storytelling, the guy from Bioware talking about Mass Effect monster design, and the guy from Doublesix talking about marketing Burn Zombie Burn. All of which were an excellent mix of hard data and inspiring verbiage.

Meanwhile, I've officially entered Gestalt into the Indie Games Arcade at LGS/Eurogamer Expo in September. We'll see what happens.

GDC Europe and ZX81 Roguelike

Well, this time next week I'll be in Cologne at GDC Europe. I've actually bought a Main Conference Pass as much of the stuff happening in the Independent Games Summit is actually of limited interest to me compared to a lot of the things happening in the mainstream track, and I couldn't quite justify the additional expense of an All Access Pass. About the only thing worthwhile in the Indie Summit would be the networking opportunities, and to be honest that's something for further down the line. I'm much more interested in what some of the foremost voices in the industry have to say, to be honest. I've never been much keen on the ghettoisation of indie developers.

After that, Gamescom. I have a couple of meetings lined up but for the most part I plan on simply enjoying the festival. And I also plan on enjoying Cologne once again - it's a truly beautiful city and I have the massive benefit of a couple of friends there. I'll be travelling with another friend, a fluent German speaker, and we plan on making the most of a week away.

Finally, my colleague Ian is working on a game for the ZX81!

He's been working with a new internal memory expansion for ZX81s, which is enabling us to provide collectors with original ZX81s upgraded to 16k or even 32k of RAM. For this reason, we decided to produce a game which could take full advantage of these memory expansions, to give them more than simply collection value. It's currently untitled, but it's essentially a roguelike adventure game (although Ian is insisting it isn't for some reason, against all evidence to the contrary :D ). We'll be getting a video made later on and I'll link to it here. It's well under development and should be finished quite soon.

Mired In The Middle

Or, Why Games Design Is The Easy Bit

Well, I'm currently having a little bit of trouble with Gestalt. The design is solid, but there's a lot of annoying little things that need to be done and I'm mired right up to the eyeballs in them. Even getting to first playable is proving to be an exercise in deep irritation. The game needs to be working already, but I'm spending what little dev time I'm allowed (in between personal crises and annoying business tasks and trying to squeeze enough cash out of my friends to pay the office rent) implementing a whole bunch of structural crap to prevent me having to do too much of this again later in the line. And ProtonSDK, while handy in that it gives me a shiny Android and iPhone build path for free, keeps throwing up more and more stupid bloody problems.

As an example from Gestalt, the template system is wired into the rules system, which is in turn wired into the paradigm system. All this stuff is designed to work via some easily changed text files, but since I only have 3 templates right now, I've cheated and put in some hardcoded basics. But then I discovered that I needed to cache the currently active ones. Which should be easy, except it turns out that the VariantDB structure contains no capacity to modify its content and, here's the kicker, actually destroys all of its objects on clearing! So no VariantDB for me. Except I used VariantDB for a reason, as at some point in the future my Entity-extending Templates will be actual renderable EntityComponents, and so now I'm in a situation where I have to filter things out of a VariantDB (effectively a Variant dictionary) into a VariantList, a straight array-like collection. Aaaaaand then I discover VarintList has a hardcoded maximum of 4 elements!

I should perhaps be clear: all this crap is not unusual for a development period. But this is the bullshit fucking about period that takes time. If I'm working as part of a team I have a constant inbuilt drive to finish each element in order to permit my team-mates to progress on their work. Working alone, however, means I'm mainly just floundering in a sea of annoying petty issues and stupid bugs. It's this period that always consumes my home projects, and I'm having to fight hard to prevent it consuming Gestalt, especially with paid work floating around waiting to steal my time in the office.

Really, I should at the very least try to remember what I said right up at the beginning, in bold. Games design is the easy stage. No amount of Unity or similar middleware can take away the need to actually build the game, and that will never be easy. The Development Swamp - located between Creative Surge Design Land and First Playable City - is a dangerous and unforgiving place. Hopefully I'll be out of it soon.