During the past few weeks, I’ve kicked the development efforts of my latest project— sneak peek below— into overdrive, targeting a completion date of end of August/beginning of September. Here are some updates of note having taken place during this period of relative blog and Twitter silence:

Even though reception for The Adventurer’s Guild has been excellent, a few bugs, especially one particularly fatal one, have stopped players from diving as deeply as possible. These bugs are no longer.

I have uploaded an updated version in which I was careful not to fiddle with any game balance issues so as to keep with the spirit of the 7-day roguelike challenge. Here are the details:

I am proud to announce my first entry and success into the 7-day roguelike challenge, The Adventurer’s Guild!

Developed in Flash with ActionScript 3 (and playable in the browser, as usual) starting Saturday, March 10th at around 1:00 PM and finishing today, March 17th, at around 6:30 AM.

Even though I’ve been working on non–roguelikes for the past year, I’ve been itching the entire time to return to my beloved roguelike and eventual tour-de-force Dance of Death; and what better way to springboard into roguelike development than the 8th Annual 7DRL Challenge on March 10th-18th?

It’s finally here! The Color Guessing Game— where you can both test how quickly you can type out color names, and how imaginative you dare to be. Common color names are worth the least points, while rare and unorthodox “colors” will net you the most. Be as creative as you dare; if your guessed color is not found, assign it to a swatch at the end of the game so that it can be added!

Announcing The Color Guessing Game! A Flash and Papervision3D-driven word game where you battle against the clock to name as many colors as you can remember. Rare colors, those which have only been guessed by a handful of other players, net you the most points, and common colors a meager offering. If the color is not in the system, assign it to a swatch at the end of the game so that it can be added to the list!

Fresh out of the oven, my first entry into an nDRL challenge (a 4DRL, no less), Chronophase!

These last four days have been really intense. Tough choices could not be awarded the luxury of a night’s sleep, as I normally prefer; they had to be resolved within the minute. It really gets down to the core of what game design and development is all about.

I have officially entered into the 4DRL (4-day roguelike) challenge as of yesterday, with a space-based roguelike, Chronophase. I have been kicking around the idea for a space-based roguelike for a while, and what better time to tackle it than a 4-day-cut-the-fat-and-focus-on-what’s-important challenge?

In the past few months, Dance of Death has seen rocky progress. Development momentum came to a crawl while I took a brief break after work got particularly busy with an Oracle/Ironman 2 project that completely tapped my AS3 mana reserves for a few weeks.

Recently, however, I’ve made slow but steady progress, and am down to the last two features for version 0.4!

Normally, in regaining momentum for a project, I’ll pick it back up and work on small-ticket items just to get into the groove again, then work my way into the larger items. Though this time I have done the opposite, I finally have a handle on one of the larger features for version 0.4: custom keymapping.

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.

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.