Older News

• 28 April 2003 I created a LiveJournal so that I could keep of diary of my development activities. Site updates and big announcements will go here, posts about what I implemented recently and rants about spending hours looking for stupid bugs will go in the LJ.
  
  I think I'm starting to make pretty good progress towards my first major milestone (which in my head I call Wa 0.2.0).
  
  
• 25 April 2003 I have rudimentary support for storing the wilderness maps as 'level templates'. I decided to go with XML files because Python will take care of most of the parsing details for me with built in modules.
  
  Also, it looks like Python's object serialization module (Pickle) is going to make save files a breeze.
  
  Here is a screenshot of a character exploring a wilderness load from file.
  
  Adam Vandenberg has been working on a curses module for Python on Win32. (I believe the various *nix versions come with it included) It's an alpha, developer release but will hopefully make it easier for people to make cross-platform roguelikes in Python!
  
  
• 23 April 2003 Added a description of the character classes which will be available in the game. (See section below news)
  
  
• 21 April 2003 I've written basic code that allows the user to talk to shopkeepers. I still haven't created a format for the wilderness maps. I have to think about many things like how to deal with permanent town residents, save files and all that stuff. I'd rather design it properly the first time so that I'm less likely to break stuff in the future.
  
  
• 14 February 2003 I wrote a random name generator for the game. Some of the names it has generated: Kiekoto, Tsukotomoe, Asaori, Murakoto, Sukeiku, Haniko, Sakuko. Since Wa is set in a sort of pseudo-Japan, I needed to have a way to give names to the npcs encountered. One option would have been to simply compile a list of names, but once you have that, you may as well use them as seeds to generate even more names.
  
  I've also started working on the townsfolk (merchants, etc) towards having enough of the pieces to make the Prologue section of the game. (Once I have the prologue done, I plan to do an alpha release of the game)
  
  
• 7 February 2003 It's been a while, but I've picked up the code again. To get warmed-up and back into the swing of things, I've written an article about my cave generator which is based on a cellular automata method. You can read it here.
• 26 September 2002 Changed the look of the dungeons to be a little more spiffy. I've been bug fixing for the past week, but I think the code is (for the moment) in a state where I am content to add more features and such. I next plan to design how I want to store the static levels, such as the surface towns and wilderness. Most likely as XML files, but I have to decide the format.
  
  Someday Wa might have random wildernesses, but I don't think 1.0 will.
  
  I think, to save some truly tedious work, I'm going to have to write a map editor to generate the XML files.
  
  
• 20 September 2002 I spent the last few days doing some optimization and code re-organization work, all part of my 'Get The Code Infrastructure In Place Before Coding The Game Itself' strategy. The profiling tools that come with Python have become my new best friend. I also squashed some low-level bugs in the LOS, pathfinder and - of all things - the priority queue class I wrote long ago. I took the plunge and began using some of the newer Python language features (like generators) meaning that Python 2.2.x will likely be the minimum base Python version that Wa will run on. Moved Skills into proper, self-contained classes.
  
  Björn Bergström posted my river growing article on www.roguelikedevelopment.org!
  
  
• 16 September 2002 In respnse to a requestion rec.games.roguelike.development, I wrote a demo showing how one might create random rivers when you are generating the world dynamically as the player explores, but still want to have rivers that cross into other regions. I don't know if Wa will have randomized wildernesses, but it seemed like an interesting problem and I think I've come up with a reasonable solution. Python demo included!!
  
  I enjoyed writing the development article about the river, so I think I'll write more about some of the stuff I do in Wa...on the off chance someone might find it useful.
  
  
• 13 September 2002 Added a new screenshot featuring the product of a maze generator I wrote this afternoon. Most of my development effort lately has been getting getting the codebase ready for implmenting some anticipated changes and generally making it more maintainable (I decided I wanted it all fixed up nicely before I started throwing a lot of features in the game). Items now stack on the floor.
  
  
• 9 September 2002 Inventory stacking is done and along with that, the Throw command so ninjas can toss shuriken at their foes. Extended the drop command to allow the user to choose the number of items in a stack to drop. I still need to modify the dungeon square data structure to stack dropped objects. Added a style sheet to the website to make it easier on readers' eyes. Did another batch of code cleanup.
  
  
• 6 September 2002 Posted a new screenshot! Currently I'm tweaking the inventory code to allow item stacking. (Thanks to the magic of Python, it only took about ten minutes to make the switch, but I have to update the various inventory manipulating commands to deal with the changes)
  
  
• 2 September 2002 I gutted and re-wrote my LOS algorithm to use one based on Bjöorn Bergström's description of a shadowcasting algorithm at www.roguelikedevelopment.org. Realized that implementing traps would be trivial based on how my terrain objects operate, so I made some test ones.
  
  
• 26 August 2002 Did a bunch of work over the past few days. Built my inventory data structure, started the class hierarchy for items in them.
  
  Also implemented the Drop/Pick-up code, wield weapon and wear/remove armour commands.
  
  I next plan to add in elementary melee combat and possibly redo my LOS algorithm since mine currently still has blind spots.
  
  
• 31 May 2002 I've finished the character generation code, so Wa is a step closer to having a playable demo! This involved adding much functionality to the user interface for displaying menus, asking questions of the user, etc. Cleaned up some ugly code (a LOT more of that to be done...), also.
  
  I've also got several pages of written notes of ideas on how combat, shopkeepers, skill training and other things might work.
  
  Will try to post some information about what characters in the game will be like, how skills work, etc.
  
  
• 11 May 2002 I've finally put up a webpage and a screenshot for Wa.

© 2003 by Dana Larose