Reporting back

I think I must post more frequently in this blog… well, it is been a pretty productive year…

I released version 1.1e of CastlevaniaRL… it was a major release, and finally took castlevaniaRL to the level of completion it deserved; there are still things to improve, and bugs to catch, but the central idea is established.

I also participated on the second 7DRL contest, I was planning to make a game named ANT: The OP, about a secret ant agent, in service of the Queen. It was to project communities of evolved ants, with high technology and stuff but still conservating their social structure and stuff. It was and is a nice idea, but 7DRL was not enough to implement it… so… in the last day I changed my mind and went onto a remake of the ancient game, Escape from Mt. Drash; I was pretty happy with the results, altough the 7DRL release was a bit incomplete, as there was only access to one weapon altough all of them are implemented, but found no way to make them accesible to the player for the initial release.

Finally, I released a roguelike reviews website, with some of the 7DRL on its initial list; I plan to add more of them as time goes by.

So, what do we have? an evergrowing list of projects, some of which are finally showing some result… lets see:

• CastlevaniaRL: For now my most complete project, plans for the future include sounds and music support, tiles, and some bugfixes. The problems: Tiles require a lot of work, and I dont want to use the ‘generic’ Gervais tiles… dont get me wrong, they are great!, but I want something unique for CRL. After the release of 11e, I decided to rest from its development and give a chance to the other projects. My other plans are to make it work into java enabled cellphones, which would not be too hard, but still requires about 1 month of work. Recently, a teacher told me to present it both as a creativity fair project on the university and as a degree work, which I may do.
• Mt. Drash, the Roguelike: I am pretty happy with the 7DRL results, and I really have to release an updated version soon. That version will allow special combat movements for which you will be rated and in the end of each level you may get prizes depending on your actuation. I also plan to add ultimesque tiles to it and a website on the next release.
• SmileEngine: Mike and JZeth are pretty busy businessmen, so I dont think they will support this project. There are some good ideas, but they require time to implement and I fear I cant do it alone. So it is frozen for now
• Greekie: The Devteam seems to have forgotten about this… and all it needs is an initial implementation to get people interested again. If only one of them gets interested, I may get into it; also, some local workmates told me about their interest on the project and I may get along with them.
• History: yeah… this project was stopped two years ago, but I recently regained interest on it. It is a civilization clone with some unique features, based on some articles readed on alternatives to tech trees and stuff.. I want to make this game something different from my other projects, including probably 3D graphics. But I need to join with some 3D artists; I am thinking on asking at a local technology community, as I may find people there up to the job.
• Guardian Angel: Frozen for now, but the experiences on CastlevaniaRL and Mt.Drash, are really giving this project a hope to be completed. The combat model is being tested on Mt. Drash, and CastlevaniaRL gave it a new vision on simplification on the engine. I may retake this one on June.
• SCAR: Simple Cellular Automata Representation, a software I made for an university project, but never actually finished. It was pretty useful to design the cave generators for crl and drashrl.
• MechaBusiness: A web based game I am planning to implement, based on the GearHead Universe. Hope to implement it as a class project. Design is half the way already.

And that’s it, for now; the immediate priorities shall go into drashrl. I hope to release the updated version before next sunday.
After that, I will go back to crl and make the bugfixes and cellphone version; then I will go for SCAR, just to have products others than games to show!, this will go in parallel with mechabusiness. Finally, I will get a bit artistic and work on the tiled versions of both roguelikes, based on the Gervais tileset.

It will be a funny year hehehe