In the lands of the depressed, the happy man is King…

NB: The title above is not any indication of my mental state – thought I should clarify that given my last post.

Anyway, a new month, and a new blog post to boot!  Plus a new mini-project that I’m throwing to the sharks.  Because sometimes it makes them jump.

But I digress…

Broken is continuing apace; there’s actually more content down at the Supa Sekrit Wiki, and, despite some distraction from Real Life (TM), there should be even more soon.  Hell, there’s actual real numbers now! The thought of it!  That aside, I’m kind of happy with how it’s going, hopefully on track to have something more substantial for the summer.

Wanderer is also making some actual progress, albeit on paper.  It’s headed for the survival-orientated roguelike slot, with a bit of attention to terrain manipulation and, hopefully, some interesting AI behaviour – I’ll be focussing less on populating the Ruin with a thousand and one kinds of monster, and more on making the tribes and packs on mobs more intelligent/stupid-seeming.  So that’s all good.

The Mini-Project is Chroma, an RPG about colours.  Set in a City from which all hope has been drained by its rulers; the Black, populated by the downtrodden Grey.  The players will be Hues and Whites, using the Chroma, the colour of their soul to bring hope to the Grey masses, and tear down the Black regime.  Pseudo-industrial/steampunk with anarchistic superhumans maybe with a slightly noir-ish feel eventually.  Don’t want to get too bogged down in this, keeping it fairly light.  Initial spiel is over here, with more to come when it hits me.  By current accounts this should coincide with any particularly fruitful episodes on my commute, or in the shower.

Comments, impressions and contributions are welcome!

New Year’s Irresolution

After long (half an hour’s) thought, I’ve decided I’m against the idea of making any new year’s resolutions; a) because the notion of trying to impose artificial restrictions on what I do annoys me, and b) because I’m lazy and would probably never keep them for more than a week or so.  On the other hand, there is a certain symbolism to the new year; a fresh start, new hope and all that jazz, so I figured I can still set some kind of goal in the grand scheme of things, and not worry about pinning myself down with the little details.  As usual, most of these relate to the various projects, coding and otherwise that I really, really should have got further with by now…

1. Broken.  There has been progress, but it’s been bloomin’ slow, and I’d really like to get it into some kind of playable state my the middle of this year.  So there it is… my first vague, indefinate resolution is to get it into a state whereby I can run some kind of playtest, and to actually carry out said playtest.
2. Wanderer, my proto-roguelike-thing, has now solidified a little bit, and is looking like it’ll approach the pseudo-RTS style, similar to Dwarf Fortress or Goblin Camp really.  Probably more on that on the other blog in time.  I really want to hack away at this, as it could be fun.
3. Mimir, which has been glossed over briefly on the other blog, but is basically a rather less interesting data-structure/retrieval/aggregation engine, largely work-related.  Once again, this has proven to be an interest thought-experiment, and might even be practical, so this comes up as irresolution #3.

So there it is; three different things I want to make some progress on, preferably by the end of summer.  Who knows if I’ll get anywhere with them, but I sincerely hope so.