Since developing Millenipede years and years ago I find that my method of coding hasn’t really changed all that much. I’m sort of surprised, but then I guess it’s like handwriting – although it may vary slightly over time, the basic style will stay the same. Because of this, I’m still programming myself into the same old corners by rushing to get something working instead of planning it out. Though I am acutely aware of its necessity, planning scares me because it’s dull, and dull things have made me abandon projects in the past.

Anyhow, the Unnamed Dejenol Demake Project has reached its second milestone and was considerably more work than I expected – I hope this doesn’t set a trend! As the project is still moving forward steadily enough I want to spend a little more time blogging about my progress than I’ve done with my other projects in the past. Yet this is also a slightly scary event, considering I can’t guarantee the project will ever see the light of day, and I’m wary of getting people’s hopes up (even the whole 2 of you who may be at all interested in this ). Maybe the aura of disappointment I spun at the cancellation of Return to Dejenol – nngh, there, I said it – has made me too cautious…

Ultimately, though, what’s the point of hobby-coding if you can’t gush enthusiastically to the world about what puny triumphs you’ve made? It’s about time I started dishing the dirt on what this project might become, and based on past experience and my current level of experience, what features it will and will not have.

Click through the break and let us begin a journey through a +1 wall of text!

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Okay, so here’s how things are standing with the project-with-no-name – after using some industrial trussing-up code, I’ve finally gotten an ancient and embarrassingly simple bug in the dungeon editor to stop making everything else fall down repeatedly! Friendly advice from one coder to another: Don’t save values as signed Integers and then load them into an unsigned Byte variable. Just don’t. The number formerly saved as -1 is not amused at such shenanigans.

I’m nearly done with Milestone 2, and possibly might have had it nailed today were it not for the aforementioned editor malfunction. Tomorrow I intend to finish defining debug monsters for each of the 18 spawn types – as close as I am to nearly being able to list all of the categories off the top of my head, I’ll spare you the detail – and then, I can crosswire the now-properly-loading dungeon spawn area IDs into the part which keeps track of all the monster spawning, and finally the dungeon will be rid of the Random Monster army!

And after that? A change of pace. Items! And a way to look at how awesome they are! And perhaps if I use enough exclamation marks in this sentence, I can persuade myself that interface design is fun after all! Yeeaah… no. Not happening.

Indeed, I think the new trend in games should be not naming your monsters at all, and instead giving them descriptive labels like what are in this ‘ere clump of pixels.

What? You don’t think it’ll catch on? BAH. I’d argue the point but a whole flock of Strange Creature 73 has just flown up my trouser leg, so do excuse me a moment…

To elaborate on what’s done today: A decent amount, yet not as much as I hoped. I spent far too long iterating the layout of what I am calling the “encounter panel”, but I think this present design uses space nicely enough for the time being. As you can see, I’m using the Oryx tileset (otherwise known as the retro coder’s best friend) since it’s just so easy to work with and is pretty much the best free set of graphics out there right now. I don’t mind that they’ve been used in so many other things – they can be replaced later if needed and it’s way better than looking at dull placeholder squares. Oh, and I know it doesn’t have chests yet; they’re in a later Milestone.

All that remains before Milestone 2 is complete is to finish getting the spawn areas to randomly populate – by which I mean they won’t take account of what monster spawn types (humanoid, insect, devil, etc.) the dungeon file says should actually appear in any given location. Then it’s just a case of actually feeding that “real” data to the encounter panel. Easy! Except it probably won’t be.

To temper my own excitement as well as any you, dear reader, might be feeling, I should say that I’ll update as often as I feel there’s something interesting to mention. With Christmas around the corner, updates may be less regular, but we’ll see how it pans out.

I have made the occasional tweet in the past about being involved in some flash-in-the pan project for this and that (Ho-Hum Piano Dungeon, anyone? Lordy, what the deuce was I thinking…), and they’ve always somehow petered out before they became interesting. Or they just failed to be interesting in the first place. Just to give you fair warning: This could well be just another project. But this is one is far closer to my heart than pretty much anything I’ve coded in the last few years – it is, in fact, a return (*coff*) to a project I abandoned in the days of Firestorm Productions, never to be mentioned again…

This video should instantly tell you what game I mean!

Yes, it is of course an attempt at an 8-bit “demake” of the often-overlooked Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol, released in 1995 by David Allen and now owned and marketed by Decklin over in Decklin’s Demise. What the video shows is the program’s completed first milestone: It can load a dungeon using the file format of the old game, and have a “party” of one character move around and explore, respecting walls correctly. For the next milestone I will add an interface to displays monsters and get the spawn areas (i.e. rooms) to individually populate.

Ten milestones are planned to take this idea far enough for it to be a playable game engine, some bigger and more involved than others, with one further milestone required to add the final content and make it playable. Any and all feedback is much appreciated to keep the motivation at its current high level!

On a related note, if you’ve played Demise, the strangely-titled rough diamond that was the sequel to the first game, you might be interested to know that Demise: Ascension – an update that includes even more content and the ability to run natively on Windows Vista and 7 – has recently gone into a public testing phase. You need only put your money down to order it from the Decklin’s Demise page above and you’ll receive access to all current and future versions. If you’re into retro RPGs with many, many hours of playability, you really should check it out!

Hey hey! Sorry to wake you up, but here’s the announcment you’ve been waiting for…

Poing! PC version 1.0.1c features a few small aesthetic fixes but, far more importantly than that, also comes with 2 new levelsets (that’s a whole 16 new levels) contributed by Poing fans around the world.

You can get the goodies from the Poing! PC homepage. My most sincere apologies for the delay – happy Poinging!

Today’s post starts off by me saying “sorry”. Again. I wish I could break the habit, but hey, this place just wouldn’t be what it was if there weren’t the frequently incorrect release dates and hopelessly inaccurate promises!

We’re talking about the Poing! PC community level pack, of course. I won’t harp on about the why of it, but you’ve probably noticed that it wasn’t released last weekend as I said it would be. This is, of course, entirely unacceptable. As some minor compensation, here’s a third and final peek at a couple of the new levels that you’ll be able to play through (thanks to Mauft for both of them):

When will it finally become available? Erm… “imminently”. To say more than that would be foolish, I think…

E3 has come and gone, and I can’t say there was anything in it that really grabbed me by the throat. Well, apart from perhaps one thing…

First of all, if you didn’t get sucked up in the miniature hype tornado that appeared around Mythos before it sadly disappeared off the face of the internet, let me explain a bit. It was a point-and-click action RPG in the vein of Diablo and Dungeon Siege, and it had a ton of potential. Unfortunately, Flagship Studios – its ill-fated developer – went bust early last summer, taking Mythos with it. But in a twist to the story, it turns out that virtually all of Flagship‘s development team has been signed up into a new software house called Runic Games. What are they working on? Well, it’s this little ol’ thing called Torchlight…

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It seems to be a tradition here in the UK to use bank holidays in order to get rid of all those DIY jobs you’ve been meaning to do for ages… so, in recognition of this, I’m not going to do anything constructive whatsoever! Alright, well, maybe a bit. My recent obsession with Minecraft has stolen time away from stuff I really should be sorting out. There’s a whole slew of other recent indie games that I want to talk about, not to mention some coding that I’ve been neglecting for way too long.

As you possibly noticed by the lack of the announcement, submissions for the Poing! PC community level pack are now closed. I’m moving the estimated release date back a week to somewhere around the first weekend in June. When it does arrive, though, you can look forward to at least two new levelsets with new graphics and a new “pastel” brickset to use in your own levels if you wish. I’m resisting the temptation to do a full visual makeover of the game because, honestly, with no access to the code in order to fix its long-standing bugs, that would be wasteful. It’s an old game and I think from this point it needs to grow old gracefully

Yeah. Any more work I do on a Poing-style game would be better spent on making a sequel… and sorry Poing fans, but no – that’s not a hint at a future project. Not for this year, at any rate!