Slashware 2018 Rewind

And so, 2018 is over.

Another year of awesome indie gamedev. Here is the story… stay tuned for the 2019 plans, coming soon!

OpenArthurianX6 saw its first milestone completed although not nearly enough dev time was invested into it as planned, Expedition was brought back to life as a game with a modern UI and a 3D look, work in Ananias halted, I participated in 4 game jams, wrote 4 articles, went to 3 events away from home, did a retro animated video, learned a bit of Unity and C# and a lot of PixiJS. All in-between a challenging year where I went full independent with Slashware Interactive, started hiring people back and had a lot of client work in order for it to happen.

See also 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017 Rewind.

January

Ananias 2.4.4 was released after a long hiatus of dev, only to go to an even longer hiatus, with no further released being made over the year.

Created a page to gather resources for the maintenance of roguetemple. Worked on moving lots of content into its own private hosting, there are still some redirections to fix to make sure all migration is complete.

Created a couple of articles originating from my talk on the Roguelike Celebration 2017. The first one was “A short history of the “roguelike” term“, and the other one was What is a Traditional Roguelike.

Set up 7drl.com with an informative (and now outdated) page for the Seven Days Roguelike Challenge.

Did some work in OpenArthurianX6 for player’s party ranged attacks and mob AI, but didn’t really pick up dev.

February

What sad month, I was mostly completely busy with client work. However I did publish CvRL on itch.io

March

Participated on the fourteenth 7DRL challenge with Haunted Mansions, managed to complete it and it looks fine but wasn’t really happy at all with the gameplay. Did further work on it to produce a mobile version (not yet published), seeking to find funds to develop it into a full-fledged game on GDC (ha!)

Flew to San Francisco for GDC 2018, went to a lot of parties there, got some contacts mainly for Digital Distribution and/or Publishing for Ananias but didn’t follow up on them thru the year (gotta make a better job at it on 2019). Also organized a roguelike developer meetup there and meet some cool nerds.

April

Adapted the virtual stickers album I had made for Brazil 2014 World Cup, into Russia’s 2018. Invested a bit on it and got no money back.

Participated in Ludum Dare 41 with Golf Over Africa, was pretty happy with the results, a fun, focused game.

May

Did some work on OpenArthurianX6 on the projectiles, but again failed to pick up speed due to client work. At least created a fan-fic to guide further development.

Participated in a short, fun, LCD jam where I created Paladin’s Quest.

Took a stab at editing wikipedia’s roguelike article with my findings on the origins of the roguelike term. It has stuck there up to now.

 June

Finished implementing projectiles on OpenArthurianX6, but again didn’t really pick up speed. At least managed to lay some plans for work done in future months.

Thought on participating on procjam 18 with a pokemon town generator (with the intent of using it on a future version of MonsterTrainerRL) but failed, too busy. At least posted an article with a kind of deconstruction process that can be used to created similar generators.

July

All I managed to do was writing a pretty long article about “Ultimate Collector”, Richard Garriott’s stab at social gaming, and how it related to the Ultimate RPG project and Shroud of the Avatar.

August

Serious work put into OpenArthurianX6, including its first source code release for backers! Still at a very early stage but at least gave them the opportunity to play around with it and have an idea of what it can do.

I also created the retro-looking trailer for Roguelike Celebration 2018

September

Participated in the js13k 2018 with ArcherFire: Duet of Aces, a hotseat two players shooter with music and animations in 13 KB. Results were pretty good although the judges didn’t think so.

More work in OpenArthurian happened, adding support for ranged enemy attacks.

October

Flying around and client work let little time for indiedev. Went back to San Francisco for the Roguelike Celebration 2018, where I organized a tournament for Ananias and gave a talk about the connections between D&D and roguelikes.

Also attended Colombia 4.0 in Bogotá which was much better than I expected, got to meet some indie publishers and learned a lot in the talks.

November

OpenArthurianX6 had its own website created, and lots of work went into it to finally complete the first planned milestone.

Having finished some of our client’s projects, we started working in the Tech Demo for the revamped Expedition. For a long time was deciding what to do with it, finally settling to using Unity, and making a real-time game in 3D.

December

A lot more work was put into the tech demo for Expedition, you can sail around the map, there are different weather effects, you can land with your party and walk around, check your map, navigate storms, and some other things detailed in three updates 2, 3 and 4.

Wrote an article about the connections between D&D and roguelikes, based on my talk in roguelike cel 2018.