Sword in Hand

I downloaded and played the 7DRL Sword in Hand today. The first thing I noticed was that the game had a massive amount of files. Many of them were HTML. There were also a lot of map files. Whew. This must be a huge game.

The game takes over your whole screen. That is nice. I don't like it when I have to resize a window, or worse when it does not fit on my screen. I ran into a number of non-player characters in the game that seemed to be busy with their own duties.

I was a little disappointed that I found a lot of items, but the game told me I had no interest in them. Because I personally have a lot of interest in some plate mail laying around the house. However in this game you are a sword. So I can imagine that a sword does not use armor.

One thing I found confusing was when I entered the room with the kings. All I seemed able to do was play back some low-resolution animation of a war. Maybe I need to spend some more time with this game to change that outcome.

Hello World

I just read a post about a veteran game developer. He shared his advice on how to break into gaming. And no, you should not start out trying to write a doom clone. Instead you need to take some baby steps. Your first program must be Hello World.

Well I decided to follow the steps exactly in the order that he recommends. I tried learning some Java in the past year. Now I am getting a little rusty. So I banged out a Hello World Java app in a little bit of time.

Now comes the next challenge. You got to write a Tic-Tac-Toe game. It don't need any fancy graphics. In fact, it does not need any graphics at all. It just has to work. So let me go off and code it. I had a hankering to write it up in HTML (my current college class), but I will stick with Java.

Don't worry. At the end of the 10 program journey, I will be rocking with a Pong clone. No it won't quite be Doom or Quake shattering 3D. But it will be a fun journey. I think that is what my guru is trying to teach me here.