I will not betray my dream

4 December 2005

It is probably 10 years since I started to work on GenRogue. Since that time, many many times I started completely anew. The game became almost legendary because of that in the roguelike development world. But no code was published. And none seems to be published in the near future.

What is GenRogue? It is my dream. My dream of a game that will encompass all I wanted to see in a cRPG. My dream that represents also who I want to be, and what I want to do. I stopped playing cRPGs a few years ago – couldn’t take the idea that I have to look at them with my dream unfulfiled.

GenRogue is not a roguelike. truthfully said it never realy was one. I only took upon the medium of ASCII because I thought that if I do that everything will become simple. It didn’t.

My dream is unfulfiled, and my life is passing. I know that with every day the chances of completion are growing smaller – the older I get, the less time I will have available for it. The more time passes, the higher the standards of the game will need to be. With each day, GenRogue is dying just a little bit. Bit by bit my dream dies.

But I will not betray my dream.

Comments

Slash · 5 December 2005, 03:37 It is been 10 years now... how much has this idea changed?

I might know what your dream is... to encapsulate a world created and ruled by yourself and your rules... to create your own universe, and present it to yourself and others via a computer screen...

I want the same for Guardian Angel... and I also wonder if in the end the goal is harming the project and putting its sucess in danger...

I have been into it for almost 3 years now... and there is still nothing to show. I must however recognize that the idea has evolved a lot, and most of the fun I have had has been thinking and structuring the world and the way it would work... I have also talked a bit about it, and sometimes I wonder if it was a good idea... now there is people that expect a lot from it, and I dont know if their expectatives will be fulfilled... I dont even know if in the end the game will be interesting or fun... only time will tell...

However you must be able to define a starting place... I know you know that already (DoomRL, DiabloRL), but sometimes we don\'t do thing the right way even when we know it...

But you must not betray your dream... you must show something though; even if it is not as great as the time has made us suppose, I assure you nobody will be disappointed as we all understand how this process is.
Kornel Kisielewicz · 5 December 2005, 04:30 From the priority goals point of view the idea hasn\'t changed at all - A dark breathing world to live in, that reacts and reforms unde the players actions. As for the medium -- it has changed a lot. Let\'s face it -- a ASCII roguelike is nothing that you can show in your CV. And hardly will get any attention, except from the ancient dying race of Roguelike Gamers.

Creation of a World that will be only \"seeded\" and not \"created\" by me. I want to see a breathing, living child of my imagination. A child, that after birth, will no longer listen to his father.

3 years? Don\'t worry, you\'ve still got 7!

Expectations? There\'s a lot of those. Luckily most people don\'t believe in GenRogue anymore. And I do not protest when I hear that. The rush that I created over GenRogue was a bad idea, a very bad idea for the project indeed.
HK · 13 January 2006, 04:18 Sorry to ruin your dream Kornel...

scourge.sourceforge.net

it\'s a roguelike game, in full color, and they did that under well, i dunno, at least not more than 10 years.

what im pointing out here is that you can use the engine to make or extend GenRogue (if it exists) or get help from other people like what the authors of this game did. if you have the ideas completed now, you can also just hire programmers, artists and people (or find some that will do jobs for free) to help you finish the game faster.

Trust me - it\'s better that way. Don\'t be too inferior and hide your works from people, there are enough many people who liked you games already, DoomRL and all, and don\'t focus on too many projects at once. And if possible, just use your subprojects to release parts of the GenRogue engine, just like what you did in DiabloRL.

Also, im suggesting a major rewrite for DoomRL. So you can use the current GenRogue code, and also im suggesting you switch to C++, pascal is old and c++ has many free sources available on the net to help you complete your project faster and c++ is based on c which is somewhat based on pascal or the other way around, or maybe even use Java, to make it portable to other platforms. My point is that making an all-new engine for DoomRL which will just later be superseded by GenRogue is a waste of time, and you should focus on GenRogue more, so using the GenRogue engine on DoomRL would be hitting two birds with one stone.
Kornel Kisielewicz · 13 January 2006, 05:52 I did think of using an existing engine to base GenRogue on, no worry. The problem is that NO engine supports the MOST important feature I plan for GenRogue. What feature is it? Well -- fully random content. Down from the models (randomly generated) up to the World itself. There is a reason behind that feature -- if I accomplish to generate everything, I wont have to spend 10 years on producing content.

As for hiring anyone, trust me -- programmers/artists willing to work for free don\'t grow on trees...

\"and also im suggesting you switch to C++,\"
Basicly meaning -- throw away all your Pascal code?

\"pascal is old and c++ has many free sources available on the net to help you complete your project faster and c++ is based on c which is somewhat based on pascal or the other way around,\"
Well, my friend, here you are very wrong. First - Pascal is as old as C, and Object Pascal is as old as C++. FreePascal (that I use) is a modern OO compiler, having almost all the features that C++ has. Secondly -- thanks to FreePascal I can bind any library that I find for C on the net simply via DLL inclusion (I did so with FMOD in the last DoomRL release).

\"or maybe even use Java, to make it portable to other platforms\"
DoomRL runs on my Linux, and I bet it will run on any Linux, MacOS or whatever system. The point is I don\'t have time to package it. FreePascal is a lot more portable language then C++.

\"My point is that making an all-new engine for DoomRL which will just later be superseded by GenRogue is a waste of time, and you should focus on GenRogue more, so using the GenRogue engine on DoomRL would be hitting two birds with one stone.\"
This also is a very invalid argument -- DoomRL and GenRogue are completely different games, and have a completely different design. It\'s like trying to make a common Engine for Diablo 1 and Neverwinter Nights.
HK · 17 January 2006, 06:56 Have you clicked the link yet/tried the game?

\"As for hiring anyone, trust me
Kornel Kisielewicz · 20 January 2006, 02:57 > built entirely on free artwork, music and some free code.
GenRogue has also another problem. It\'s vision is realy strong -- so strong that I would need the team to exactly follow my vision... and experience teaches that artists do not like to follow anyones dream. Also the graphics that you\'ve shown in that game are far from what I want GenRogue to look like. I don\'t need pixel-graphics. I need modelers that are programers at the same time. I need texture-artists that love perlin noise. I need people ready to break the
\"sound-barrier\". And I need Susumu Hirasawa to do the music ;-).

> Pascal code can be easily converted to C++, if you can spend an hour or two.
And the other way round it\'s also true. The difference is that I know Pascal from the internals -- I debug it a helluva quicker, and know exactly how fast a given solution will be.

> Not much free code on the net for it though.
But I have no use for code from the net. Except for the graphics and the music (for which I already have the neccessary libraries -- OpenGL and SDL), everything in GenRogue is rather original, and it would be bad to try to railroad it into available designs.

> That