Wednesday 11 April 2018

Tiny 2018 Update

Haha, I've been quiet for almost 2 months!

I'm in America right now, but I've still been ploughing on with DOSJUN. I've added music support for a certain tracker format, wrote new graphics loading code to hopefully avoid some of those horrible "out of memory" errors and done a lot of planning for the setting and denizens.

I realise that there's still plenty of work to be done. However, it is slightly further away from "I want to make a game" than it was. The scope is starting to creep a little, but I'm still fairly confident that I can release a playable version of the game this year. I'm thinking that I'll come back and add more content later, because J and I have come up with some excellent ideas to make the game deeper.

Friday 26 January 2018

BEWARE... I LIVE

DOSJUN is alive and well. Here's a quick look at the current progress.

You can walk around

You can load and save (in safe spots)

There are scripted events

You can fight random encounters

Technically, there's a lot going on in the background to deal with this short list.

A first person view that uses slices of textures

A scripting language (and compiler)

A dungeon editor (items and monsters too!)

It is my eventual goal to not only release this game when finished, but also annotate the code well enough that people can actually learn from it.

Progress has been slow for a variety of reasons: I play a lot of games (mostly long ones), I don't always want to program after doing it for hours at my day job, I watch people stream gameplay quite a bit. These things have been true for years, but I want to commit to this project a little harder than before.

I will release the game this year. At the very least, I can release a version then add more content later if the story remains unfinished. There will be at least 5 hours of work every week on it. Making the engine easy to extend has been important to me since the beginning; an example post-release task would be removing the hard-coded character creation and using scripting instead.

I'm also thinking about streaming the programming work. This might seem odd, but I recently caught someone using Rust to write a roguelike and enjoyed the experience, so there must be like minds out there. It should be a novelty for many current devs to see C and DOS!