The past two weeks or so, Google Analytics started to report incoming traffic from the Something Awful Forums (forums.somethingawful.com), directly into /dod. Across the past few days, this has become the 5th most popular referrer into the Dance of Death page specifically. The trouble is, I don’t recall having posted on the forums, nor am I able to find the source!

Back in my university days, I fondly recall when our professor for Structured Computer Organization, a seasoned computer scientist who worked on the EDSAC 1 back in the days of yore, asked, “Have any of you worked with Assembly?”. Having had the odd run-in with some flavors Assembly in previous microprogramming classes, I raised my hand.

In these early stages of development of Dance of Death, I definitely have my work cut out for me. I’m also grateful to have received such great feedback from the roguelike community, much of which has helped me determine development priorities.

Announcing the latest release of Dance of Death, version 0.2.23! This release continues to build up the main engine, and has at its core the new Character Creation system.

At this point, the game is still in a “tech demo” stage, insofar as not having a winning condition, and a number of incomplete or unimplemented features.

Development of Dance of Death is alive and well! This past week, I’ve been spending time in the roguelike community, playing games in development to get inspiration, and checking off items on my To-Do list for the upcoming release. Most of the items have been straightforward and painless, and I have left the best (and toughest) for last: character creation.

A few days ago, I stumbled upon the Wikipedia Article on Bézier Curves. As a fan of procedurally generated art, when I saw the fifth-order Bézier curve animation within that article, I was inspired to attempt my own Bézier curve drawing algorithm. This is what happened. In this article, on ANidea, I break down a basic Bézier curve algorithm and show how it can be generalized to create Nth order Bézier curves.

Although I have worked on two (albeit short-lived) roguelikes prior to Dance of Death, this is the first to feature a dungeon generation algorithm. While it relies greatly on brute force searches, especially for connectivity, I am quite happy with it, and it definitely gets the job done!

Firstly, I’d like to thank everyone who has taken the time to tinker with the first release of Dance of Death.

Although I’ve been able to get away with some major oversights given the fact that it is an early tech demo, I appreciate that you have pointed out potential areas for advancements and some items I entirely missed.

I am proud to announce the first playable release of Dance of Death! It requires Flash 10 to run, and, for the time being, a decent size screen.

Since I am taking the “release early, release often” approach, you’ll find with this release is a very early build of the engine, featuring basic dungeon generation, FOV, monster generation, item generation, and very basic combat.

Eons ago, in a long-fotgotten era that some call “the nineties”, I had my first exposure to a programming language. mIRC, the internet relay chat client for Windows, included a feature-rich scripting language that allowed you to not only customize the interface or have user events trigger custom functionality, but to develop entirely unrelated applications parsed, interpreted, and executed by the mIRC “virtual machine”. Aesthir was born.

In light of the announcement of 37signals‘ new book, Rework, I feel compelled to recommend easily the best book I have read on the topic of project management, application development, beta releases, managing feedback, avoiding scope creep, communication overhead, and pretty much everything that is involved in working in a development team: Getting Real.

The driving force behind the Dance of Death title and concept was a popular and often resurrected discussion on r.g.r.d.: how to make the warrior class something more interesting than a close-range mage.

In other words, is there a way to differentiate the way a fighter interacts with the world from that of a mage’s?

With the relaunch of this site as a blog comes a piece of great news: I am currently working on a Flash ActionScript 3.0-based roguelike game tentatively titled Dance of Death.

This time I am keeping it simple, staying away from the over-ambitious trap that bogs down so many indie games’ development.