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!

It begins with a dream: A vision of an RPG game that reaches back in time to capture the essence of sublime, mid-90s nostalgia, and forwards to preserve it by forging a game more flexible, more intuitive, and more playable than before. The notion of Mordor: Return to Dejenol was born. But see… after glowing brightly, the dream falters and stumbles; slowly but inevitably it collapses into itself under the weight of its own ambition. The memory fades…

…but not entirely, for it is still remembered well enough to illustrate a point. The most important thing I am keeping in mind for this new project is to start small and grow, just as I did with Millenipede. Do not obsess over that which is unimportant. Get it playable, then refine later if need be. With that in mind, here is what I tentatively expect the limits and features of this attempt to be:

• Style the game as a “demake”, with low-resolution graphics and a relatively small set of game content
• Create a storyline that is acceptable to Mordor lore-junkies but explains the game’s primitiveness
• The game will be single-player, with no consideration given to online play
• You will likely control only one character, rather than a party of four, though this may change
• There are no monster companions, nor is there a Confinement in the town
• There are no guilds, as such; the character may pick “perks” at regular points to diversify their skills
• There will probably not be any magic in the first version
• No more than 3 or 4 dungeon levels to explore
• Don’t bother to hide game data in obscure files – store and edit predefined information in plain text

So, already we’re chopping out a good chunk of stuff, for better or worse. Also moved off the drawing board for now is the idea of having individual “user accounts”, each with their own individual knowledge of the dungeon, shop stock, and characters. It’s something I want to put in eventually but after there’s a game for it to fit onto.

Limiting the game so tightly is quite important – it drastically increases my chances of success! If the project becomes playable then it will mean there is a solid base to build from. While I may not be adding things like guilds or monster companions yet, I’m not forgetting their importance for later – I’m trying to design the game in such a way that these features can be added without the need for refactoring (or, in non-gobbledegook, without having to put the code through an industrial shredder and start from scratch).

So far, Milestone 1 has “put something on the screen” by displaying the dungeon and allowing the “party” to walk around. This only involved a re-jigging of existing code from Dalyn’s Quill and so didn’t take an awful lot of effort. But a couple of days ago I got to a stage where I was happy to call Milestone 2 done, and a good deal of code which didn’t exist before is now thrumming away happily:

• A simple file handler was created to read data from a plain text file
• “Monsters.txt” was created and holds at least one monster per spawn type
• The data structure for dungeon spawn areas was expanded to allow actual monster encounters
• Areas will populate themselves correctly from defined monsters, based on area spawn types
• Monsters of the same type and level can be weighted so that some are more commonly picked than others
• The screen now shows what monsters are in a room

Soon after capturing the video for M2 I decided the existing 8px monster portraits weren’t going to cut it, so they’ve since been increased to 32px (David E. Gervais tiles, yay!). I’m still fiddling with the exact encounter display layout – you’ll probably be able to see the results in the next vlog.

For the near future these newly-generated terrors of the underworld will be able to live without fear of being turned into experience fodder for the character – combat isn’t scheduled until M4. Meanwhile, what is to be done? The third important step is to make the game understand the concept of “OMG epic lootz, neeeeed!!” and have UIs added to show the player’s inventory and their stats. In view of the limited 320×240 screen space, this is where I will also try to create a tooltip system to summarise an item’s stats as the player hovers the mouse cursor over its icon, removing the need for a separate “info” pane like the other Dejenol games have used. Given my tendency to nitpick over such things, I must try to restrain my perfectionist instincts and make something reasonable without taking weeks over it!

That’s all I’ll say for now, but as long as the bits of rust keep flaking off the cogs that struggle to bring this project to life, I’ll try and keep up the more open style of blogging about whatever progress there may be. If you’ve enjoyed this random outpouring of words then my job here is done! Should you have any constructive criticism then please, let me know it – pretty much anything and everything will act as motivation for me to continue onward.

I shall see you at our next meeting, when perhaps the project may actually get a name…

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.

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.

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!

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!

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…

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…

Now, with Diablo III well and truly in development, only a serious betting man would suggest that Torchlight will be king of the “click ‘n’ kill” hill, but one thing that’s definitely in its favour is that the initial release will be made later this year – that’s way before we’ll get to bash on some demons in Sanctuary. Also, you’ll see that I said “initial release” – at first, Runic intend to debut the game in single player mode, with an MMO multiplayer aspect coming around a year later. They also claim to be shipping the first version with extensive modding tools that will let you create your own dungeons, skills and spells.

At a first glance the game looks to have a Dungeon Runners-esque cutesyness about it, but I don’t find that a huge barrier to get past. All I care about is variety. Content that doesn’t look like it’s all the same just with a different texture. Dungeons that are random enough that you can’t predict where the dead ends will be, or where the really nasty monsters are lurking. A game that is challenging yet doesn’t make you feel that you’re grinding toward an anticlimatic ending. So… yeah, the holy grail of ARPGs, I suppose

You can see for yourself some of the other screenshots over at Gamespot, then check a short teaser video at Perfect World. Finally, get involved with suggesting things or just asking questions over on the Runic Games forum.

Whatever the level of hype Torchlight ends up getting, I’ll be keeping my ear pressed tight to the ground on this one. You can never have too much shiny loot!

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!