Breath is just a clock ticking...
1 January 2008
Time for a traditional New Year’s post. I’ll split it up into two parts. This is the first “sentimental/pessimistic” part discussing the bloody year 2007 that ended, an “visionary/optimistic” one will follow, praising the new 2008 year that came.
So what has happened on ChaosForge in the year 2007? Not much unfortunately…
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The first quarter started fast — a new Berserk! release that showed where the game would head, and the surprisingly successful release of AliensRL — bringing him into the position of my most popular 7DRL. I must strongly thank DaEezT at this point, for AliensRL wouldn’t be so good without his ideas, which he posted in insane quantity in the design forum.
However, things came here to a halt — I did manage to push in a DoomRL release in May still, but it became apparent to me, that DoomRL has reached the stage of maintenance instead of development — some more features are still being added, but except for the lack of Graphical mode, this is as far as it goes. Sure, I could go on, and put everything and the kitchen sink in, but that would reduce it’s uniqueness and speed of play. Even now, as I add Unique Items to the game, I just can’t help myself pushing in some ridiculous stuff from completely different sources. I guess I can still say it’s OK, because Unique’s are rare, and each game should have it’s easter eggs, but I now see that the further I will go, the more ridiculous, and less doomish the ideas will become. Fortunately I DO still have a few aces up my sleeve, so you’ll still see something good in DoomRL ;).
Thus came summer, and the dreaded Google Summer of Code. I was completely unprepared for the challenges it lay before me, and hence completely failed in time management of my own time. Luckily I had enough determination to finish that project itself, but it definitively pushed all my own work to a complete stop. Right after GSoC, I was hit with a “Finishing Move” in the form of my Master Thesis and Exam, which left me dying on the battlefield.
Recovery took some time (way too long). I gathered up my strength, and decided not to allow myself wasting this year completely. The first decision was a painful one — I concluded that I don’t have time for lesser projects — the first one to be put to a halt was DiabloRL. However, to be true to my ideals, I decided to release it’s source — I can promise that any project that I will abandon will have it’s source released. Just as I suspected, there was no crowd of people who would fight over who would take the project over :P. I’d probably do the same with AliensRL, but I feel an obligation to DaEezT and zaimoni to at least implement what I have promised. I hope I’ll find the needed surge of energy to do that soon!
That leaves Berserk!, and you may probably ask, why do I insist on developing it when it’s the least popular of my roguelikes. Well, if I ever was a fan of anything, it would have to be Berserk. I love that anime and manga, and the world presented in it, and working on Berserk gives me an opportunity to write my small part of it for myself.
Getting back to the description of the previous year — after OS’ing DiabloRL, I released a new version of Berserk — quite insignificant, but it gave me the needed burst of energy to resume work on DoomRL. A LOT of refactoring was done, which unfortunately was not visible to the player in 0.9.8.8. Needless to say, DoomRL 0.9.8.8 was released just in time for Christmas, with only a few new features. However, the refactoring cleared the code up to the point that again it was fun to work with it — up to the point that immidately after the 0.9.8.8 release work has started on the 0.9.8.9 release. I must say it’s already got some nice features, so expect 0.9.8.9 to come out real soon :).
A BIG help with recent DoomRL development was setting up the bugtracker — and I would like to express a big thanks here to Malek and Blade for keeping the bugtracker up to date! You guys rock :D.
Donations have been gathering the past year, and I am really happy that I could cover website costs from it. However they’re still far from a level that would allow me to at least cover any hardware costs to work on my games if I were on my own (the computer I work on is not my own), I hope that will change once DoomRL’s development gets more active, and when the more immersive projects will show up on horizon :). Yet I would like to express my big thanks to DaEezT and zaimoni for being exceptionally great in terms of support!
I’m on a coding spree right now. And I’ll do everything to keep it up, for I have a lot of plans for the next year. What plans? This will be covered in a seperate post!