NOTE (14 AUG 2010): ROAR Engine is now known as GORE – Graphical Object-Oriented Roguelike Engine. See this post for clarification.

The ROAR engine that I am writing is about 30% done. Still craploads of stuff to refactor, but at least now I have a pretty solid idea of what I’m going to do with it. After today’s milestone, further development would be much faster.

For the 7DRL challenge, I’ve decided not to add in a pure randomized room generator. Reason? Too little control over gameplay pacing. My intention with InfestedRL is not to create mazes, but to create a replayable interior of an ancient ruin, where each room should afford the player a variety of ways in which to evade the monsters prowling within. Using a pure dungeon generator would require me to write too much code to achieve too little effect, and thus I’m cutting that one out and replacing with a simpler pre-generated room randomizer.

Before I sign off this entry, I want to end this post with philosophical ponderings. No, seriously. What do game designers enjoy? For me, it’s content creation. The freedom to exercise my creativity and seeing them come to live on the computer screen – I can never get enough of it. So that’s why writing an engine is so tiring and uninspiring, but once the engine is done I get a sudden surge of passion, because that’s when I can finally start implementing content.

So okay, enough pretentious shit. Back into the code!

Update:

Alright, Scene class is almost done. Engine now is about 40% done.