Hands up, people who saw this coming

So yeah, interest in Duckbill got shot to hell. What happened? At roughly the same time, I burned myself out trying to write complicated networking code when I have only the most basic ideas of how networking works, and my artist got a real job and an internship. Yeah I had an artist working with me on that. Yeah I didn't mention that to avoid getting anybody's hopes up (not that the four of you reading this didn't already know).

Shortly after my desire to program anything hit rock-bottom, I started playing WoW.

Over a month later, here we are.

So, no games coming from me anytime in the near future.
That said, I'm gonna program bits of things. For starters I did a thing with nth-order Bezier curves that's pretty nifty. I'll put a link up [eventually], once I figure out how I'm supposed to distribute Qt programs. Screenshot then-ish.

Also I'm gonna try making 3D random dungeons. Not in a trivial way, either; i.e. where there's a bunch of 2D dungeons stacked on top of each other, or a 2D dungeon rendered in 3D. No, I have an idea how to do those things, so they're not quite as interesting. No, I want to make a dungeon with more complicated stuff in it, like a drop from a higher room over a ledge into a lower room. Or ramps. Or non-discrete height levels because the dungeon is more cave-y. Or something. Who knows. I don't know how possible this all is. From the start of this paragraph on, I'm really just brainstorming. As such, it might be a bit less coherent.

Drops: one-way doors where the door is a ledge. Simple breadth-first search normally will show connectivity, assuming two-way edges. When one-ways get involved, need to make sure every room is reachable from every room, not just from the starting room. This is before putting in lock-key puzzles; that only needs to be done from the start room. 

Ramps: for starters, let room boundaries be constrained to a single height per room. Then we reduce the problem of ramps to "how to put ramps in the hallways connecting rooms". Then we'll need an upper bound on the steepness of the ramps, preferably the maximum steepness the player can climb. OR we can allow steeper ramps, but we'd still need to check the steepness to make sure we appropriately flag this passage as "one-way". This also serves as a generalization of drops; a drop is just a 0-length ramp with y-height. But then you also get ramps which let you slide down, which is more interesting I guess.

Connecting rooms: start with a straight passage between the two and see how that goes. It'll look terrible; so constrain it to discretized turns (originally was going to say "of 90 degrees", but given that we're working in 3D, we can do fun things like have them bend in 45s, or even 30s. This of course makes figuring out proper placement increasingly nightmarish, because now 1. both walls of the corridor need to match up [not too horrid if we have clever models and a clever way to tile-ify corridors] and 2. if we allow the same rotations of rooms, it makes picking where the connections are - already difficult, mind - even ghastlier). And partition the ramping to only occur along parts of the pathway, not the entire length of it (and if the steepness is too great [if we decide to care in this stage, which given the difficulty to offset we probably won't], add an back-and-forth bit that does nothing but ramp up/down, turn around and keep ramping).

Making that last bit fully general is going to take a lot of work and possibly some skullduggery.

That might be enough of a starting point to... start?

I'm going to try and document the process. Which means I'll have a screenshot from it being halfway done, and I'll talk all about the parts of the process I remember a week after finishing/giving up. We'll see. I'm really - really - not intending this one to spiral out of control and be a heavy-hitter of "oo and this would be cool too". Just something I'm somewhat curious about. I'll probably start talking about a few more procedural dungeon-making bits really soon. I'll probably start that post before the night is through, frankly.

And I'll also start blathering about game design in general here again. If for no other reason than to sort through and possibly codify some high-level ideas I think I have about the whole thing.

And I'm gonna try writing fiction again. It's fun. I'm planning to start with some random scribblings of sentences and try and make things that sound cool with no context either given or withheld. My writing blog can be found [this is where I write something clever that tells you to click the link like "here"].

Also I'd like to announce that I'm running for president in 2012. Not that I particularly want to lead the country, but while I'm mentioning a bunch of stuff that probably won't happen I might as well, right? These things are all assuming I don't kick my WoW habit in order to switch to LoL (I just started playing a few days ago; it's really fun, but nowhere near as addictive).

Skimming back on this post, my final thoughts: "oh, stream of consciousness, how I've missed you"