I am ecstatic to announce that backend developer extraordinaire Justin “LordTakuban” Oakley has officially joined the development efforts of Legends of Aesthir.
His current focus is on refactoring the backend by adding better model classes, revamping the data layer access layer with PDO and Memcache, and cleaner database access in general (I will admit to having a good amount of queries strewn about at the controller or even view level).
Hark not, the lack of updates on the Legends of Aesthir project does not mean progress has halted, only briefly paused (mostly on account of Skyrim). In retrospect, having set a hard deadline for completion of the minimum viable product was unwise, since I had little room to play with either the scope or the timeline (and, as with anything fairly complex, something always has to give).
In any case, these are the items from the roadmap that I managed to complete:
Whereas the focus in the past few weeks has been in tightening up the interface, the focus for the coming weeks will be on getting Legends of Aesthir to a playable state.
With the latest design and UI update to Legends of Aesthir comes the opening of registrations for the playable game. The registration is, at the moment, a means of collecting the information of prospective alpha testers, but, as you can see by the presence of the login area, development continues steadily!
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!
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?
This September 19th, the first Annual Roguelike Release Party will take place. Not quite a literal party, the ARRP is a community-driven event in which roguelike developers are encouraged to put out a release with the intention of garnering, among much fame and fortune, increased visibility and feedback. As of now, there are 24 entries in the official announcement page, including Dance of Death version 0.6.
The goals for the Dance of Death v0.6 release revolve predominantly around world generation, wilderness generation, and integrating these radically new features into the existing game. No small task, by any means, which is why I have devoted an entire version to this set of features, and also why I have made the decision to scale back on three non-essential items:
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!
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.
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.