ChaosForge 2009, post-mortem
31 December 2009
Traditionally, I’ll split the New Year’s post into two — the past, and the future. Well it should be traditional, but it wasn’t, for 2008 was a very bad year for ChaosForge. This year however, was busy, yet not as busy as I know would like it to be..
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Doom, the Roguelike
As usual, a new release was the highlight of the year. But for me it was not a normal release — I finally broke through many barriers that I couldn’t brake through since years. I’ve pushed through brick walls of features that I couldn’t force myself through. I’ve gained energy that I haven’t had since years, mainly thanks to a close soul that literally fell from heaven with a big bang.
0.9.9 has been released. And while many of the major milestones of DoomRL development have not been addressed in this release, the walls have been shattered. From now on I decided for a more active release cycle, 2010 will see major features come to light. Finally.
Donation Drive
The second highlight for me was the Donation Drive. To be honest, I never expected it to work — I counted on gaining about 1/3rd of the needed money for the PC. Yet the effects truly surprised me, and granted my everlasting love to the ChaosForge community — I love you, people, and thank you :). I’ll do my best to repay you with quality games for what you have invested in me.
Community
The Donation Drive and the 0.9.9 release gathered people together — I’m moved and happy about all the people that offered their help. I’m beginning to rely on others… and let’s say it clearly — I won’t be able to accomplish my goals if you won’t help me.
The biggest highlight of the community is the newly formed PR team under the lead of the irreplaceable MaiZure. Already it has it’s first successes — the Donation Drive, and Phobos Times — ChaosForge’s monthly newsletter!
I’d like to extend my special thanks to the people who supported ChaosForge with their dedicated work — MaiZure, Tavana, Madtrixr, Anticheese, and many others (please don’t feel bad if you haven’t been listed, I think about you all!).
Collaboration
This year is also the first year where I finally decided to ask for help, not only in promotion, but also in coding and content creation. Melon gets the honorable mention here as being the first one to actively join, and maintain really high spirits all the time — thank you, my friend!
There are more and more people willing to collaborate, and I think this is the only way to go for ChaosForge. A big thanks to Michalis, Tavana, sorear and Herschel — I hope you keep up the spirit!
Derek, I’m sorry, you know for what. However, I plan on redeeming myself this year… let’s do it!
Neko!
Neko is going through an identity crysis (you can read about it in the previous posts , yet that doesn’t mean that development on it didn’t bring a lot of good and useful code. While we don’t have any roguelike to show off yet, code will be refactored into the new library structure soon. Hopefully Neko! will often peek around the corner this year!
I’m more and more convinced that a collection of independent but immediately useful libraries will be much more useful to the community, and bring more developers to it.
And now…
Have a great New Year everybody — ChaosForge will be tuning right up in January with the post on ChaosForge’s plans and future!
Sincerely Yours,
