#sdl2

Incursion (PC)

A classic roguelike with fairly elaborate ASCII dungeons, an apparently very elaborate skill system, and a sort of hardcore emphasis on slow/elaborate character recuperation/healing, character alignment (and consequences?), and item descriptions.

There’s a lot to take in and the fonts aren’t the easiest things to read; there’s a lot of stuff in dark blue, which is hard to see.

Compared to Angband, for instance, it feels like the design intent was to make everything complicated to make the game feel more “robust.” ; ) It might be really good, but it feels like it’ll take a lot of effort to find that out. Just comparing items, like a newly found set of armor, feels arduous–or heck even collecting items, like I had a room on the first level with just piles of repetitive items to sort through. And another room filled with traps I couldn’t figure out how to try to disarm–I may not have had any disarm skill? Was there one I could have picked in the elaborate character generation process for my Human Warrior? Jump skill gave me a -5% chance to jump over the trap, so I had to (I guess?) just walk into the trap to get into the room; it destroyed one of the unidentified (this might happen over time? there’s no town to which to retreat and identify things–apparently the original game plan was to have an overworld with towns and multiple dungeons and stuff but this was abandoned) potions I found in the first room. One trap I didn’t detect blinded me, and I was soon killed by something I couldn’t see as I blundered around.

I had the No Death option (there are a lot of options…) selected, so I respawned immediately in another room on the level. That was okay. Then I got into a new room where I was instantly pinned by a uh snake or something and killed by a little cluster of enemies that surrounded me. Hm. Respawned again into a room with those frighteningly thick piles of objects and just didn’t want to go through trying to sort through them.

Makes Angband feel super-streamlined! One to try if I ever get tired of Angband, maybe. Although I’m not sure I’ll ever get over my current dislike for elaborate skill and recovery systems so maybe not.

Mostly just not really using Tumblr very much.

Progress on Amazoom Blimp Jockey ‘69 is ongoing. A new demo will release tomorrow showcasing the updates to the game engine, which is nearly finished.

This project has really evolved a lot over the last year-and-some-change and I am excited to finish and ship it this year.

...and then I guess I can get back to work on Cat Story or something.

I am making progress with the new engine paltform/dll architecture.  Migrating my previous code to this new style will take a while.

Here’s what I got so far.

1. I have successfully managed a clean split between layer code (SDL2) in a barebone launcher and the game inside its own dynamic library.

2. I have a very basic custom preprocessor going.  It supports generic programming and has some basic facility for introspection.

3. The compile times are kept to a minimum through a single translation unit design for each component.

4. The memory is allocated just once by the platform, leaving the engine dll the care to manage it.

Some observations, early on:

I can see how the low compile times, if they are sustained when I migrate the bulk of the engine, render pointless the idea of scripting.

I can also imagine what a custom preprocessor can yield in terms of programming power to generate gameplay code from data.

The custom memory management makes me strangely more wasteful in my usage.  For some reason, it makes memory feel cheap not to have to ask for and delete it all the time.  So I am still to figure out best practices for that one.  It’ll come when I integrate back some of my systems, though.

Also:

I  made the transition from vim to emacs and I have learnt quite a lot in the process that may be useful to vim expats. So I might post about that at some stage.

I had an idea for a game mechanic earlier this week and wanted to get a prototype done by Saturday, aka today. I did the thing!