Moonlanding

Back in July, I was working faithfully on the r/rougelikedev 2022 code-along before I hit a small snag.

The start of the trouble was that I was working without a proper keyboard, hunched over my laptop in  temporary deskless working conditions that was causing me to develop real pain.

So, of course, I over-engineered a solution.  I did a lot of research into split-ergonomic keyboards that I had always had an interest in, and ended up with a Moonlaner. 

LOX week 3

 Continuing the r/rougelikedev 2022 code-along into parts four and five of the tutorial.  I have started going down some wild tangents last week and I've been rambling further down those paths.

It took me most of the week to get through part 4, partly because of my home-made screen rendering but mostly because I had to learn what shadow casting was and how to implement it from scratch

LOX week 2

Continuing the r/rougelikedev 2022 code-along into parts two and three of the tutorial I start to diverge in a couple of ways.

In part two, I've been building up a lot of technical debt.  And in part three, I decide to compound the problem by turning the map generation system inside-out.

OSRdF Revisited

In January 2019, I signed on to Tam H's OMGAM project to create one micro-game per month.  Over the course of that year, I produced 12 tiny games for the project as well as a few others for various game jams and challenges.

The very first one was called OSRdF, or "Old School Roll-under, dF".  I also wrote the first real content for this blog in that same month of January where I talked about the intentions and thoughts behind that game.

Very briefly, and without any of the philosophy, it is like this:  

• You have six stats because that's what White Box had, though the names have changed
• You roll under them to do things because that is what you did back then
• You roll randomly for your stats for the same reason, and because of a bunch of other baggage
• There is no dedicated combat system because we already have the roll-under thing and don't need anything else
• It uses Fudge dice for two reasons:  First, I like them because they only have + and - and I always thought the very notion of them really gave the middle finger to the notion that complex dice systems were important.  Second, a few people had recently (at the time OSRdF was released) been really hostile to the opinion that Fate Accelerated is in spirit an OSR game, and I was feeling a bit sassy about it.

I have made noises a few times about expanding this game and making modules for it, and that starts now. There is still a lot about this game that I implied without stating, and one really has to look sideways at it to spot any traditional fantasy gaming in there -- so here is a teaser:

	Brawn	Grace	Creativity	Logic	Will	Empathy
Brawn	bend bars, save v poison	bows	melee	scale rough surfaces	lift gates	intimidation
Grace		impersonate Elf, move silent	dodge bonus	pick locks	scale sheer surfaces	pick pockets
Creativity			Cleric spells	spot traps	save v wand	persuasion
Logic				Wizard spells	save v charm	read languages
Will					save v death	henchman limit
Empathy						Druidic spells

Now, there are some place-holders in here, and a couple of tongue-in-cheek jokes that wont make the final cut.  But this is the basic form of how a skin of OSRdF emulates the kind of fantasy RPGs that I played in the 80s.

I have four of these drafted that evolve the basic system through forty years, taking on slightly different styles and varying the rules at each decade.

A produced version of it was going to be coming for Zine Quest for 2022, but between the pandemic and other events that didn't quite happen.  I might still lay it out for print, commission an artist, pay an editor, and put a game (or possibly a collection of multiple games) into peoples' hands to play.  But that is probably a couple years off when I take a realistic look at my other commitments.

LOX week 1

Wow, this is a lot harder than I thought it would be.

I've been working on the r/rougelikedev 2022 code-along and I thought I could just re-use my code from the Broughlike tutorial and be most of the way there.

I was both right and wrong.

Ode to Code page 437

There are modern typefaces with smooth vectorized curves on all their characters.  With dynamically scaling fonts, and clean kerning. There are 144,697 characters in the v.14 Unicode standard, which is more than twice as many as they have bits to represent.

The modern digital typesetter is truly spoiled for choice in breadth and depth of style, content, and quality.

But I long for the grid.

Doing the Stroll

Just as Robert Plant wrote, it has been a while here.  Honestly, I'm slightly surprised that it has only been a year since the last post, but here we are.