Progress

I've knocked out some major steps that makes it likely that this project might actually playable at some point.  I've updated the picasa gallery with 5 new screenshots, check the entire album out here.  I'm nearly up to 150 submissions in my source repository so far, spanning over 2 years (with huge gaps, looks like I didn't touch the project for a year and a half altogether), and it's finally starting to get some legs.  Lots of work ahead of me no doubt, but I'm excited to have made it this far.

• Inventory is now implemented in a mostly usable form.  Creatures have a configurable list of body slots that Items can be equipped too, along with all the appropriate hooks for status modification down the road (cursed items, status changes, etc).  I spent quite a bit of time on the inventory screen as well, which worked well in testing out both the inventory and UI frameworks.

• Combat has been scrubbed a bit as I try to figure out how exactly the mechanics of attacking, dodging, and damage absorption should work.  I've gone and forth on a couple systems, but for now I think I've settled on the idea that items themselves hold the most influence on combat values, while creature stats and skills either scale those values or enforce a minimum.  Weapons for example dictate a base chance to hit, attack speed, and damage range, and a player's agility would modify the minimum chance to hit and attack speeds, while the matching weapon skill would scale the weapon's base values.  I have no idea if this approach will work or not in the long term, but for now I've got something in that I can start playing with.

• It's now possible to level up!  Coming up with an XP table generator is voodoo magic, and I ended up spending an hour or so playing with some weird combination of formulas that eventually generated something that looked "right".  The more important part is that it's now possible to go past level 1, so there's actually a point to killing all those goblins and rats.

• Level Generator and Populator classes are now roughly implemented, and I moved my basic cave generator into it's new (data driven) home.  Now it's trivial to tweak all the various parameters of the generation or creature population, and no longer requires recompiling the executable.  I think the growing pains with my property reflection/serialization system are starting to yield some awesome rewards.  It's very rewarding to watch all the individual components I've been working start to come together.  This shot shows the debug console with some of my in-game debug commands to inspect the  type registry, and then dive into the properties of a specific type/instace.

I'm looking forward to start adding more and more of the actual game bits now that the underlying frameworks are mostly working.  I can tell there's going to be more fun ahead already... I'm pretty sure my current implementation of time in the engine is going to be asking for a rewrite very shortly.

progress on the ol' roguelike

Been working on UI stuff mostly, added frivolous stuff like multi-colored strings, extended ascii character support, and more animation. You'd think it'd be completely wasted on a text-based game but it's keeping me entertained so that's really all that matters. Anyways, here's the first screenshot posted for posterity...

From roguelike

As you can probably see the executable is currently named aethrya, which I now think is pretty crappy for a title (and I really have no idea where it came from), but I've been too lazy to change it (and I keep telling myself it doesn't really matter until I get to the point where I want to release something anyways). According to source control the project officially started on August 12th 2007, and I've only recently picked it up again as of a couple months ago. I've spent quite a bit of time working on creating the base engine parts that are independent of the game to be made (honestly I have no clear idea what kind of game I'm actually going to make yet), which has been quite a bit of re-inventing wheels and whatnot - which has been incredibly educational.

I've been working professionally as a game developer for over six years now, and during that time I've always worked with existing engines, which means I end up taking a ton of functionality for granted without ever getting a chance to dig into the how/why. From simple stuff like templated data structures to more complex reflection systems and even garbage collections, it's been highly entertaining, educational, and a bit humbling.

I'm not sure I'll be inclined to start this sort of endeavour from scratch again in the future, but I'm definitely glad I've put the time into this effort, even if it never matures into an actual game someday - and I strongly recommend anyone with too much time on their hands to reinvent a wheel from time to time. Jeff's post at Coding Horror on this is a bit more compelling than my own: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001145.html.

Bit of irrelevant trivia - the player is currently bright red to test out the '!' for bold colors on the TextColor property importing. Exciting stuff, really!