Motivation

This is not the first game I've tried coding, and I dearly hope it is not the last. It is, however, most likely the furthest, most cohesive effort I've put together thus far. This is hardly surprising, because each of the proto-games I've made up to now have had similar backing.

And yet, invariably, my attention starts to wane eventually. I remember how much fun playing videogames is, or a fantastic new design idea jumps into my head and I feel as though that would be a more worthwhile project. Currently I'm avoiding purchasing Dragon Age: Origins due to the fear that it'll suck me right back out of this programming groove I'd only recently re-found (Borderlands managed to keep me from programming anything for over a week).

I ask myself what, ultimately, am I trying to do with this game?

I'm making a roguelike. As such, there's features it will have that can be described in terms of things other games have done already:

• Permanent character death
• Random dungeons
• Persistent dungeons
  
• Plenty of class-race options
• Lots of different enemies
• Magic/abilities
• Tons of items
  

That's well and good and all, but it's not exceptionally exciting per se, at least from a creation aspect. The reason being is that it's been done before, loads of times, in many/most other games in the genre. I can't speak for everyone on this, but I know that one of the main motivations for me to want to make a game is to take something I already like and make it better, or at least add some more features.

Here's an incomplete list of mostly-unique things about this particular roguelike:

• Multiclass characters
• Mechanics derived more from jRPGs (Final Fantasy, etc.) than tabletopRPGs
• Randomly-generated world
• Challenges that scale appropriately in difficulty
• Mostly random towns
• Acceptably realistic wilderness
• Varied, intricate item generation

Upcoming articles will have more to do with the second list than the first.

When both lists are reasonbly checked-off (i.e. implemented in the executable), I will consider the game v1.0. This is a very long way off. I'd estimate that the game is currently at around v0.0.7, and it's been around a month since I started (I forget the exact date). I'll call it v0.1 when I implement the message system and an attack command, because these are rather basic low-level systems that need to be implemented before I can rationalize giving the game any completion status.

I'll probably start releasing the game when I consider it v0.5 or so; where there's something that has a smidge of depth to it that's reasonably playable.