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.

Character creation is one of my favorite parts of both playing and developing RPGs. In some fondly remembered classics, such as the Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale series, the process of creating the characters and putting together your party was its own immersive minigame of sorts— definitely its own standalone experience.

Though Dance of Death doesn’t feature a party system, I could not resist in implementing a fairly thorough character creation system; though I briefly toyed with the idea of a light character creator, with most of the character development happening rapidly in-game.

Taking this approach is not without its difficulties, however. It is, at the very least, reasonably time consuming. In previous games, I have built out the player experience from “front-to-back”, that is to say, main menu first, then character creation, then the game screen. It is a matter of course to me now that this approach both cripples the development momentum, as well as boxes-in some engine-specific design decisions. Needless to say, this is why I have tackled character creation after having a basic engine, this time around.

I will be announcing the next release for Dance of Death this week! If you haven’t yet, check out the first playable techdemo— feedback is, as always, welcome.