Wednesday 25 June 2008

Teemu news

Making good progress with Teemu. Today I spent only about an hour to add a new feature which is super fast and very different than adding a feature in Kaduria. The game world of Teemu is going to be very simple, but I try to create interactions with the world to make it more interesting as a gameplay experience. Here is a screenshot from Teemu:



The development of this game is actually fun, which is something I can't say from Kaduria.

Tuesday 24 June 2008

LambdaRogue

This one is pretty interesting new roguelike project by Mario Donick. Unfortunately it's also an example of game design issues that seem to plague roguelike development. There are two important factors of erratic design. One of them is that most roguelikes borrow user interface styles from ancient roguelikes like Nethack and ADOM, and they probably honestly think they are good user interfaces while in reality they are not.

The other more important reason for failure in game design is that some people think their ideas must be the best way to implement a feature. They are too selfish and don't realize why common interface rules were invented in the first place. User interface knowledge is something you need to learn to understand it and never just create something you think is cool and working like a charm.

LambdaRogue has these issues in user interface and its role-playing system too, but it's still a promising roguelike project and I'm going to follow the development of that game as much as I can.

It's actually the only interesting roguelike project at the moment, because you can see the effort he is putting into the development. It's something opposite than 7DRLs which are nothing more than simple ASCII action games. If I want to play an action game I play Pacman or something else with graphics (invented in 1970's).