2011 wrap-up, hello 2012!

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,300 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 22 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

 

I’m slowly trying to build up some motivation to push this project forward, but other things are battling for my attention, so it’s not easy.

Anyway, TRS is not forgotten and should see new things coming in 2012, the fourth year since I began this project.

 

Happy new year!

NIP – Nothing In Progress

It’s been a while since I reported progress here.

Well, the next build is ‘almost ready’ since at least a month now, but I need to really test it before I publish it, so it’s still sitting on my harddrive.
I wanted to spend a good amount of time polishing this build, but motivation has dramatically fallen this summer, for various reasons.

Sorry for the delay, and I won’t make new guesses for when I’ll publish the build. I hope soon, but I really don’t know.

Mixed news and features

I’ve got several things to say about TRS on very different topics, here they are in one single blog post.
 
First, I’m a bit ill, hopefully nothing too serious, but it might keep me from spending too much time on computers, as it affects my eyes. I’ve found some time to hack at TRS despite that anyway.
 
Next, I’ve created some tools to help me design UIs faster. I’ve been avoiding this for long, as I’m still worried by the state of Guichan: project isn’t actively maintained anymore, it’s still lacking important widgets I’ll have to design myself, etc… But, trying to integrate another UI kit in replacement got me banging my head against the keyboard, so, Guichan it will be for some time to come.
 
The first piece of new UI using these tools is a new global interface, which will vastly improve user experience by exposing features in a user-friendly way (mouse activated as opposed to finding keyboard shortcuts in a Readme file). The current widget set forces me to change the ‘speed up’ feature to become a ‘toggle’ instead of a ‘push’ mode. That bothers me a little, but not too much, let me know what you think.
 
Lastly, I’d like some feedback on a kind of dilemma I’m stuck in. I want to add loot to the game. And I see one interesting way of doing it, but it would steer the gameplay toward a much more active kind, and that wouldn’t be easily reversed afterwards.
My idea is to remove the monsters’ automatic respawn, so the player can collect loot as a separate phase from combat. If I went that way, I’d also add ‘attacks of opportunity’ to monsters. Then the player would have to manually manage a lot of things to make the adventurers act.
Another possibility is to put a much longer respawn than currently, or maybe tying it to the quest completion. That would also change the pace of the game a lot.

So, please, be my guest, comment or mail me!

Slowly readying next build

It’s been a while since I’ve given news, because there were personal changes preventing me from spending a lot of time on this. Well, now I’ve got a new job, things are settling, and I can think about TRS’ next build!

I’ve implemented a system to let ‘things’ affect behavior and battle outcomes for the Adventurers. ‘Things’ is a generic term here, although in the short term it will be only ‘personalities’ that I’m adding. I’ve still got to add more content to make it worthwhile, at the moment, I’ve done the ‘coward’ personality, I can easily make its counterpart heroic character, then I’ll find some more.

Oh, and I’ve given all creatures, including the heroes, a constant shadow, to give more depth to the visuals. This is a temporary improvements, before I overhaul the sprite/animation system to handle that correctly. I’ll make screenshots to show that as soon as possible.

Thanks for reading!

Old posts: comments disabled

I’ve changed yesterday an option in the blog configuration to disable comments on old posts. I’ve set the limit to 6 months or so.

This is not meant to discourage discussion, it’s meant to stop the spam on those posts, which takes some of my time to verify and purge from spam queue.

If you wish to discuss an old post, well, you can mail me at tinyrpgsim – at – free.fr, or post on the forum you come from, if you came from a forum 😉

New theme

The regular lurkers might have noticed a new theme for the blog. I was bored of the old one, which was too bland.

I hope you like the new one!

Still alive

Short version

I realize I’ve not given any news here for a long while now. I’ve not forgotten about this project, far from it, but it’s been going through an extended ‘idle’ state. I’d really like to push it forward, but it’s not happening right now. You can read below if you want explanations / personal life details, or just read this : I will continue working on this, but don’t expect an update very soon.

Reasons

Too many projects

As can be seen from other posts, I had too many projects running at the same time, all begging for my attention. TRS got pushed behind back in May, and never came back to the top.

Burnt out

After working on personal projects for 6 months straight, I blew up. I was hoping to make a living out of selling my games (not TRS obviously, this is a free (as in no charge involved, no as in FOSS) project), and my initial assertion of the market didn’t stand up to further scrutiny, while my inspiration and energy went down. This has a name for game programmers (among other professions): burnt out. No will left to go any further. Which leads to …

Looking for a new job

With no perspectives for my would-be business, I decided to look for a new job. I wasn’t happy doing this, rather bitter, and it didn’t go too well. No answers from companies reposting the same job for which I sent my (matching) resume again and again. So for this reason (and other reasons involved, won’t mention here), I’ve expanded my job search to include non-video game related jobs. Then I…

Took a long vacation

As my GF and I were both out of a job at the same time, we took a three-weeks vacation, away from computers and Internet access. A good part of that time was spent cycling, on a long leisurely trip over 500 Kms, 400 of those on the bikes (and with a ~25 Kgs trailer hitched in my case). That felt good, but didn’t help at all with my projects.

Took a new job

My search for a new job was finally successful, outside of the VG industry. Obviously, this leaves me with very little time and energy to invest in personal projects.

Now what?

TRS is a project that matters a lot to me. I want it to reach at least a ‘playable’ state, where it’s really enjoyable, even if it’s only enjoyed by myself and everyone else finds it boring. I don’t have my Todo list at hand right now, but I know there are some major features I want to include : useful buildings, magic spells, guilds, multiple towns and other proper world support. Of course more content will always feel better, but that’s not entirely up to me, I’m hoping for more contributions by others (I have some unused data left, more monsters and adventurers).

Having said that, it should be OK, right? I want it to move, I know what needs to be done, I have some data, I can find some tiny amounts of time to work on the project, should be alright? Nope. I’m still feeling burnt out. I’m actually slowly healing now, but I went to a point of total ‘coder block’ where I couldn’t write a new line of code for any of my projects. Not feeling any interest by anybody (*) for any of my projects didn’t help.

So… I want it to happen, I will try to make it happen, but I won’t make promises.

That’s all for today!

(*) Ok, except one or two real friends that DO read this blog.

On priorities and schedules

I’ve got many projects to juggle currently. Well, I *always* have way too many projects at any time, I’m not talking about that. I have currently the time to actually work on my projects, and I have decided to do more than one at once, switching from one to the other as inspiration, energy, and outside interest change. This offers me some insight into how and why I prioritize things, very interesting.

Currently, I’ve switched my main focus back to Next Stop: Nowhere! (which means, away from TRS), as I’d like to finish it, for several reasons. First, it has received a huge amount of work, blood and sweat, one might say, and I wouldn’t want to see this totally wasted. Then, it’s my first attempt at a released XBLIG, and I’d really want to see it there, on the XBox Live Marketplace, even if it completely tanks, with 3 sales all told, all of them from my friends. And next, it’s not that far away from being ready. It won’t *ever* be complete, because that kind of game can never be really finished, there is always more content and more polish to add, but it can get to a state where I’m proud to show it to the world, and not ashamed by low production values. Finally, the deciding point is: if I finish this one, it’ll be a huge weight off me, one less project to think about, one less huge task list to clear.

Now, why am I posting this here, instead of there? Well, TRS is a ‘published’ project, so there are some people who know about it, who can already play with it, maybe have fun with it, NSN is not. That means here, some people might be waiting for the next version, hoping for new features and content. So I’ve come here, to let these people know that the next version is probably not going to make it for the month of May. I can’t promise anything really, but I’ll really try to make one before the summer comes, that’s a month from now.

PC crash but no loss

I’ve had a big panic moment yersterday as I was working on TRS.

There was a TRS window that didn’t want to close (I was debugging using VC++). Tried killing processes, no change. So I ask for reboot. Most programs exit cleanly, but this window stays, blocking the reboot. After some time, I turn off the PC using the power button.

And… Windows is broken. Cannot boot. While in the loading sequence, a furtive BSOD, then reboot, in a loop.

A couple hours later, including breathing breaks, my floppy drive re-installed, my Windows XP CD located, I managed to boot a rescue console, and a chkdsk fixed it. I guess a critical system file was damaged by my forced stop.

So, the time I was supposed to use on TRS was mostly lost on successive panic and system fixing attempts. I will work on it again today, as much as possible, but that might not be much.

Squidi.net forum is shut down

After taking some abuse from spammers, as well as other unspecified problems, Squidi has decided to shut down his forum. This means right now there is no more forum thread for TinyRPGSim.

You’re welcome to discuss TRS here though, comments are semi-open, which means you have to provide a name and email address, but you don’t have to register.

I will see how to give TRS a better exposure / place to discuss later. Any suggestions are welcome, as always.