Gearing up for a 7DRL

Plans are under way to choose a day for this year's 7DRL competition. Since I have been trying to get deeper into the JavaScript programming language recently, I figured I would be coding my game in JavaScript. The only problem is that it might be a fresh start. I only made one game in JavaScript a long time ago. And that game was weak. Thus I am on a trek to improve my JS skills. What is a developer to do?

I had a library of Java code that was minimal, but helpful to do roguelikes. I think I might just have to port that code over to JavaScript. Today I took a look at that library. It consisted of about 12 Java classes. They do some minimal work. At least the code was clean. Now the work is to figure out how to make that code work in JavaScript.

Item and monster data is hard coded. But that is okay. Lots of other features are controlled by constants in the ode. Time to get to work porting this code over to JS. I got a good month or two before the 7DRL contest begins.

The One Borg

I used to try to game a little time each day to play Angband. But now with finals at school, a full time job, and many books to read, I find I have not played in a while. Luckily a guy on my team is working on a little project. He is trying to create a version of Rog-o-matic that can play all kinds of versions and variants of rogue.

Now I am familiar with The Borg. That was an automatic Angband game player compiled into the game itself. That thing was fast. And it would not die too often. That is probably because it was a very conservative player. It was fun to see how Borg could get a player leveled up easily.

Anyway my team mate is working on some really old C code. He is trying to create a separate Rog-o-matic program that can hook up to an old version of Rogue. He thought he could upgrade the legacy code to C++. Turns out that was a chore. And he still has not connected Rog-o-matic and Rogue successfully yet. Nice little project though.

Malevolence

Just read a post on AltDevBlogADay by Alex Norton. He is the indie creator behind Malevolence, Sword of Ahkranox. Yeah. That's a mouthful. This is his first commercial game. Or at least is will be when it releases. Check out the nice trailer on the main game page.

Alex tells of how it is hard to break into the gaming business. And if you do, you might be saddled in some mind numbing testing job. Or at best you might be writing some scripts for a game. Instead you can try the indie development way. But there will be some naysayers along the way.

I have not seen the actual Malevolence game yet. It is plannedf for release next month. However the trailer looks cool. There is some nice artwork involved. The game claims to have infinite non-random georgraphy. That sounds a bit suspect. But that is the angle there.

I did take a peek at the credits page. There were are a lot of people involved with the development and testing of the game. However one thing seemed a bit off. Alex listed himself like 20 times in the credits. Yeah I get that this is his game. But that's a bit ridiculous. Just put your name down once as the King Poo-Bah. People will get the message.

Clash of Clans

Have you heard of the Clash of Clans app? Me neither. That is, I had not heard of it until today. Apparrently this game is from a 60-person development company in Finland that is making a whole lot of money. They claimed to be making $500k a day a month ago. Now the estimate is up to about $750k a day. Whew.

Supercell is the company behind the Clash of Clans game. The game is an app that has caught on like wildfire around the world. Supercell has about 60 employees. Many founders seem to have worked at another company called Digital Chocolate. Never heard of them either. But I bet we are going to be hearing a lot more about Supercell in the future.

The apps business is a volatile one. You could be making millions one day. And then app users move on and you might get left in the dust. I think Supercell has another app that is gaining traction. Let's hope they can keep it up. I am not too concerned. They are quickly getting rich by the minute.

Curiosity

There is an app out for the iPhone called Curiosity. The full name of the game has been changed to "Curiosity - What's Inside the Cube?" This app is being called an experiment by its creator, Peter Molyneux. The game consists of a huge cube made up of smaller cubes. There are a lot of those smaller cubes. You tap the cubes to remove them from the big cube. It is a multiplayer game. The goal is to be the person who removes the final smaller cube.

I tried the game out. There is nothing earth shattering about it. In fact, the user interface was not intuitive. After a while I figured that the little arrow head on the screen was pointing me in the direction of new cubes to remove from the surface. You can buy tools with gold. But you got to click a lot of small cubes before you can afford even the cheapest of cubes. I also found it strange that I would click maybe 50 to 60 percent of the cubes in a region, and then the whole region would disappear.

Other developers seem to have harsh words for this app. They thought the implementation of this massive multiplayer game was lacking. I thought the idea itself was pretty interesting. I wonder what secret message is in the last cube, and whether the player who unleashes the message will share it with the rest of the world.