Nostalgic moment

Went through my old floppy disk collection. Two boxes of Atari ST and one for PC disks. It was around 1990 when I got Atari ST so it's 20 years of bullshit with computers (well, I had MSX earlier). It's a long time, feels even more than it is. On two ST disks was word "Hack". I guess that means Hack the roguelike game. I think it was made for ST too. I don't think I liked roguelikes back then.

It's a funny thing wanting to go back in time and change something. Things would just have been different then, but better? Who knows.

ARRP: Teemu 1.1

As the Annual Roguelike Release Party (ARRP) is getting dangerously closer, I'm announcing that Teemu 1.1 will be one of the ARRP roguelikes. There should be plenty of time to program all missing features and maybe even try to figure out couple of new ones. Maybe I should make something every day and take that as leading motivation. I think ARRP makes a lot more sense than 7DRL, because there is no hurry, but at the same time you know others are trying to beat you and create something clever. It's not going to be that easy now, when Teemu v1.1 is announced.

It's on.

Icons

Stile: Keyboard commands work again. I missed the fact that you need to & modifier keys to get proper result. Now I'm refactoring icons, because commands are related to them. Before refactoring icons shared common order with commands, but it's not very cool. You need to keep commands in certain order to synchronize with icons and it's not good design. Now Icons have their own id and related data for command id. It's possible to create icons that have different command even if the icon looks the same and it could be useful in other places (in map editor for instance).

The class design of Stile is interesting, because I feel I'm facing classic problems with class design and ownership issues. I don't know any of that shit, but I'm slowly getting better. I guess.

Wasting my time

Writing some totally unimportant refactoring to Stile. I try to improve Stile's source code structure, but it's taking its time. The command structure is now data-driven which means each command is listed and given a keyboard shortcut (if defined) and after two days of work I can't get the keyboard to respond to the data. I don't know what is the problem, because I have very similar kind of system in Kaduria already working like a charm. Well, something is different I guess! The work I'm putting in Stile feels like great waste of time, but what the heck.. it's all about wasting. Nothing I have done in game development has had any meaningful results, so why not continue that way while I'm at it.

Firefly stories

Finally after days of programming the lighting routine is almost done. I'm in level theme five and it's going to be faster to finish level themes now that lighting is there. I think it could be nice to "hide" in darkness. When you go in dark area monsters could not see you.

Throwing items has become unstable and there are now nine known bugs which is a lot compared to two known bugs in the previous version. The more I work on this project the less I want to release the source code, but a promise is a promise.

The engine strikes back

I'm progressing in third level theme of Teemu. I needed something new for items: duration and a flag telling if the item is active. Adding something like this in object class is very easy, but when your engine doesn't support them it's time for good old refactoring.

The problem in this case was that items in inventory are not real objects. When you pick up an item it becomes just an int variable in inventory list, and is then re-created when you toss it back in the gameworld. This all changes when you have things like duration to store. You could, in theory, refactor inventory so that it has the copy of object's duration. In fact there is one that kind of variable already: the amount of items. However the amount is something that can be controlled quite easily. Duration is different story, because it's natively controlled inside the object class. So, in order to proceed in level theme three I have to refactor inventory to store objects instead of ints.

While I'm at it, I could unify the inventory and new tool inventory with one base solution. The inventory was kind of braindead from the beginning, but I think it was the fastest way to produce something playable. I blame the old school roguelike programming now biting me on the leg like a grid bug.

Teemu progress report

I think the "engine" is ready enough for action. I have been adjusting level themes (one at a time) for new game content and so far it looks good. There are themes that require more work, but some themes are ready to go. It's needless to say, but this version is far from ready. It could be interesting if someone is willing to continue the development of the official Teemu after I have released the source code, but I'm not expecting too much from that (developer people always have their own main projects). I will continue the development some day, but there is one small thing preventing me to do that right after the release: Kaduria.