Sunday, January 31, 2010

Plans for Iteration 8 and beyond

Now that iteration 7 and the second tech demo is out the door, it's time to sketch out some plans. The plan is two more tech demos to flesh out more functionality, and then I'll start with "slices". A "slice" would involve fleshing out content for say one class and some themed levels. Each slice would be a balanced mini-game within itself. Once I get a few of those slices done, I could release what I'd consider a "real" game.

With that, iteration 8 is planned to take a month and a half to two months. The headlining feature, taken from "How to Write a Roguelike in 15 steps", is "Experience". This'd involve different level monsters, a skill tree for the player, and increasing difficulty. Beyond that, I have a significant number of refactoring and rearchitecture tasks to handle.

The high level goal for iteration 9 would be hacking out the basic parts of the economy. My thoughts on that can be found here, here, and here.

2 comments:

Nolithius said...

Even though the quintessential "How to Write a Roguelike in 15 Steps" article acts as a solid guide, I've found that modifying some of the steps has worked well to keep the momentum moving.

For example, the language I am using has hassle-free object serialization, so while I will run across some challenges having to set up IDs to reconstruct object references, I foresee the save/load being relatively painless. In any case, I didn't want to fuss with permanence until I had something worth committing to a savefile.

Also, I find that I spend a good amount of time finessing the interface after I reach a new step and add new features.

These deviations are largely a matter of personal style, and, to be fair, encouraged by Radomir's fine article. Have you found yourself adding/modifying/deleting steps to those in the guide?

donblas said...

I've had my own modifications to the guide as well. Ones that come to mind include:

Levels came way before "It's alive", at least in terms of a single level being generated. The way I did things also made adding multiple levels trivial.

Data files came during items, not before. What would you store in step 8 before items?

Serialization was easy for me, partly since I've done it for a few previous attempts and partly since .NET makes it easy. I however did it right after map and player moving around room.