Not as much progress this week as I’d like, but progress nonetheless. Last week, I pretty much put major feature development on hold as I wait for the upcoming 7DRL to pass, and that turned out to be a really good idea given the week I’ve had.
Early-week was spent preparing a presentation on KRL that I gave at our local Tulsa Game Development group. I’m not entirely sure how well it went, but I felt alright about it. The thing about presenting on a niche genre is you can pretty much spout any nonsense that comes to mind, and they’ll believe you 😀
Great time at the Tulsa Game Developers meeting tonight at @36degreesN! Thanks for the talk @KitchsTweets! #gamedev pic.twitter.com/28bYx12wjY
— XPO Gaming Con (@GamesXPO) February 24, 2016
The blank stares when I referenced some of the major and minor roguelikes…. even 868-HACK. 868-HACK! Who hasn’t played that?
Seriously though, it’s a really great group, and a lot larger than I expected for the area. I encourage anyone out there to look into their local scene… you never know who you’ll meet. (Like maybe someone that actually worked on games you grew up playing!)
Then, I had the pleasure of a nice, good old fashioned hard drive crash. Yeah. I got completely back up and running after a day or two, as I’m really good about backing stuff up. However, it was still time spent doing something other than working on the project. I think it actually turned out to be a good thing, as it allowed me to start the development environment over from scratch and really optimize source control and backups.
In the time I’ve not been preparing talks, or reinstalling software… I did take the component based design idea to work with me, and have the concept implemented in a project we are working on. So far, it’s been really solid, and that encourages me… a lot. I’ve been doing a lot of back-end refactoring of the KRL code base, in order to prepare for the transition. I don’t think it will take more than a week of work once the trigger is pulled, and make most the things component based.
A lot of thought has gone into my 7DRL ideas this week. I believe I have cinched it down to be highly focused on the combat mechanics. You know how fighting games have their “moves”? Something like that… but a bit more roguelike. I don’t want to spoil too much… but I’m really jazzed about this idea. It definitely goes on the “if not this 7DRL, it still needs to be made” pile.
As far as new KRL features, really the only thing added was a framework for talking with web services. This allows for things like analytics, leader boards, etc. It’s a rather easy thing to implement with today’s modern shenanigans and goings on, but I always put it on the back burner. I realize a lot of this is going to be very application specific, so I just implemented the basics for sending and recieving web based calls.
Next Sunday update may be a little different, as I’ll be in the thick of the 7DRL! I plan on updating daily during the week… but only if the time spent on the update will not cut into the development of the game! During Ludum Dare, I try to post a short update at least every 12 hours… I find it gives me a break and can actually add a bit of focus. Those usually consist of a short blurb of text, and a screenshot. I’ve never done this over 7 days, so we’ll see what format, if any, even works. I’ve totally accepted the idea that this may just be a series of my typical “old man yelling at clouds” posts 😛
Love
Ross