Progress Frozen, Halted, Kaput

This project has really fallen by the wayside. I may pick it up again someday, but with everything else going on, it's not going to be anytime soon.

I AM, however, currently engaged on a brand-spanking-new project, which is yet unnamed. "It" has a much better chance of survival, as "It's" a collaborative effort of two programmers and an artist.

Many of the ideas are the same; however, "It" will most likely be an Action RPG instead.

Details to follow...

Any Progress Is Better Than a Sharp Stick in the Shpadoinkle

Pygame: accessible and portable. If I'm a bit crafty I ought to end up with something that runs at a decent clip even as it becomes more complex, and the hardware demands shouldn't be unreasonable.

So - enough with theoreticals. Onto news! I now uses ZB2 compression and cPickle for persistence. I won't know for a while yet how many file chunks the savegame will need to be split into, but the way it's written right now I'll be able to persist and retrieve the entire world with a few lines of code. Very cool stuff.

Right now it's still just a tech demo. I've got a dynamic gradient based on screen and tile resolution, and a character that can be moved by the various arrow keys in all directions. The state of "everything" is automatically saved and loaded appropriately.

I'm still at least a month or two away from having anything release-worthy to put up on SourceForge, but I'm redoubling my efforts to get most of the toughest early issues out of the way first so I can work on the fun stuff -- world and city generation. Then it starts looking like a game, instead of a sad, empty cry for intarweb validation.

Technology Shift...

After being rather inspired by the Adams brothers and their creation (a "little" game by the name of Dwarf Fortress, possibly the greatest RTS/builder ever) I've decided to go a different route entirely with the development. While the Adams' use OpenGL to slice up and display an ASCII tileset (with support for creature tiles), I'm going to try using Pygame (on SDL) to accomplish a similar feat.

The implication is that it will be slower; however, this is going to be a Roguelike, not an RTS, so I'm going to see how far I can push that envelope. Wish me luck!

Shadows: The Roguelike -- Project Kickoff

Well, it's official -- I've always wanted to write a Roguelike, and now I'm finally starting one. I have a ton of ideas that I want to implement in this game: urban areas with single- and mixed-zone buildings (residence/hotel/office/commercial/government), subway systems, sewers, corporate espionage, a police force with a hair trigger, dangerous pharmaceuticals, physical and mental upgrades, and tons of heavy weapons and ammo.

There will, of course, be more than one city in the world, and as such there will be wilderness areas with special activites and traits (for one, considerably less police involvement!) I also plan on implementing an innovative and semi-realistic new form of inventory system.

Some of my inspiration comes from the Takeshi Kovacs series by Richard K. Morgan; some can be credited to the world of ShadowRun (although you won't find any mages or deckers, per se); still more from Blade Runner and other flicks of the genre. Amongst all of this source material I'm citing, it would be awfully tempting to "recycle" a lot, but it is my full intention to "borrow lightly" and make it feel fresh and new... every game, if possible.

I would, quite honestly, like to write The Greatest Nontraditional Roguelike Game in History; but given the scope of what I'm looking to create, I don't think I can go it alone.

Volunteers needed! First order of business is to get my hands on a working curses implementation that I can invoke from the D programming language, and on Windows. I'm mocking some of the classes up in C# right now, but for this to have much of a shelf-life, I need to move to a portable language. Any takers?

The pay is terrible, but the glory...