TL;DR – It went well.
Click ‘read more’ for cake.
The cake is a lie. Here’s more.
The Artifact Fiasco
I’ve started planning few days before the start weekend and settled with a cool (I think), concept of procedurally generated items that would be passed between dying characters, and some other fun stuff. I started coding at 10:45 GMT on Saturday, and spent whole first day splitting my firstrl (dead link) code base into various modules. The effect you can see here (dead link).
It became a terrible mess, because I didn’t really have any idea what I was doing.
That in itself wasn’t the biggest problem, however. It quickly became obvious that I overshoot with my plans, and on sunday afternoon I’ve decided it is hopeless. I’ve failed. I’ve spent almost entire monday (work started, so only about 3-4h per day to code) brooding over my failure. Of course I wouldn’t be myself if I didn’t bother #rgrd about it.
New Hope
That was a Good Thing however, as tametick and the rest of the bunch helped me realise I can do something much simpler and it still could be called a roguelike. I still had most of the challenge time at my disposal.
Next morning I had an idea that became Warden. Much smaller scope, no inventory, the only thing truly unique is the health/power system I’ve figured out after a discussion on (heh) #rgrd-ot with Joshua Day and Derrick Creamer if I recall correctly. I will probably elaborate on it more when announcing Warden 1.1, as it seems some people didn’t get what it’s all about.
[Insert movie reference paragraph title here]
I’ve started working on the game itself on Wednesday evening, after I ported firstrl to libtcod 1.5.1 RC1 and fixed some bugs that became obvious during my work on Artifact. For some reason I’ve skipped a day. No idea what I did with that time beside work.
Either way, without much more drama I’ve managed to make a game before 10:45 GMT on Saturday 17.03. However I’ve released the game on the next day as the school interfered a bit with me ‘fixing’ a windows build crash (probably a windows libtcod.dll bug).
Overall I am quite happy with how things went. I wish I reserved some more time for testing, as bugs are the main complaint of people who played the game and commented on it (Thanks! Keep it coming!). Overall the polish is not strong with this one.
That said I plan to release a 1.1 version to address most, if not all known bugs, polish the interface, add more font sizes (Apparently 1920×1080 screens are still not very popular!) and fix typos/spelling/etc. errors (Hi Tanthie!). Gameplay and balance tweaks may be included in this version. Probably will.
I plan to start work today, enough of the break already.
Again, thanks everyone who played the game and provided feedback! Give yourself a hug!
Cheers,
M.