I didn't really have a theme in mind when I started this blog. The impetus to create it can be summarized as "I keep writing essay-length comments in reddit and other places, so I may as well put them somewhere actually fit for essay-length writing." Recently, I've realized that while I didn't intentionally create a … Continue reading Mechanic Overview: Shadowrun Returns Etiquettes
Author: Chad M
Roguelike Tutorial: It’s Over!
Last time a funny thing happened. I had what I thought was a super hairy, not-realistically-going-to-happen-alongside-real-life-obligations problem that I then solved the next day over lunch. So now I can proudly say that I did what I set out to do. Last time I had a couple of huge issues with the combat: The player's … Continue reading Roguelike Tutorial: It’s Over!
Roguelike Tutorial: Back on the Horse
Last week I didn't get much done but set some goals for myself. How did that turn out? Goal 1: Jazz Up the Escape I ended up going with the Necromancer idea. I'm mostly happy with how it turned out. The biggest blunder was not realizing that if the Necromancer's Skeletons dropped corpses like most … Continue reading Roguelike Tutorial: Back on the Horse
Roguelike Tutorial: Blocked
Last time I mostly wrote about the roadblocks I was stumbling over. This post is going to be short because I haven't committed a single line of code since then. In addition to the roadblocks themselves I had some unexpected life obligations come up and gotten practically no work done on the codebase itself. I … Continue reading Roguelike Tutorial: Blocked
Roguelike Tutorial: The Beginning of the End
I'm mostly happy with where my little game has settled so far. My favorite change since last time came when I finally got tired enough of accidentally fireballing myself to do something about it. Since the game already had a TARGETING game-state as well as a targeting_item variable in the main loop, it ended up … Continue reading Roguelike Tutorial: The Beginning of the End
Roguelike Tutorial: n Steps Forward, n-1 Steps Back
Last time I thought the Wraith was a complicated feature. This time I found myself implementing an even more difficult one: stairs. If you're familiar with the finished game, you know it already has stairs. But really it's more like a "blow up the entire world, build a new one, then say it was from … Continue reading Roguelike Tutorial: n Steps Forward, n-1 Steps Back
Roguelike Tutorial Week 3: The Wraith
A brief note about the code samples: My goal is to make it possible to get the gist of what I did, but not to provide a full tutorial. If something makes no sense, please tell me, but if something doesn't run exactly as presented it's probably because it uses other code that's in the … Continue reading Roguelike Tutorial Week 3: The Wraith
Roguelike Tutorial Week 2: Sanding Some Edges
(If you're looking through the blog archives: no, there's no post about Week 1. I didn't blog about it because I was mostly just copying someone else's code.) Recently I discovered the roguelikedev subreddit was collectively inviting people to start a roguelike tutorial. I originally planned to follow along at the same pace, but then … Continue reading Roguelike Tutorial Week 2: Sanding Some Edges
Final Fantasy XIII: The Problem’s Not Linearity
A few times recently I've seen someone pose the question: "Why do people hate Final Fantasy XIII for being linear? I understand it's unusually linear for a Final Fantasy, but plenty of these same people seem to like Final Fantasy X which is almost as bad!" It's true that FF-XIII seems to draw particular ire … Continue reading Final Fantasy XIII: The Problem’s Not Linearity
Final Fantasy XV: The Malboro
I just finished an impressively terrible game. I’m a longtime Final Fantasy player, which is to say that I played the oldest ones when they came out and eventually wandered off but continued to halfway pay attention to what they’re doing. This particular game has convinced me that it’s no longer even worth halfway paying … Continue reading Final Fantasy XV: The Malboro