01.10
Long time, no update. My holiday from my real job is almost at an end, but the good news is that I have spent a lot of time with Icefall and it’s actually starting to come together!
I had developed a lot of separate pieces of game infrastructure (random map generation, character creation, character death… etc), and over the last couple of days I have successfully integrated them all into the main Icefall build. This means that what I have now, for the first time, is a *fully* playable game! You start out creating a character, you can explore, find items, kill monsters, and be killed in turn.
There’s still thousands of features missing (I had thought I was pretty well progressed on the UI side of things, but now the framework is in place, I can see there are quite a few gaps I need to fill in) but now I have something that feels like a game, I can start iterating on it and trying it out.
The game has killed me several times already – I have added a few ‘tough’ monsters for the deep dungeon, but I haven’t really added any high-level equipment yet. So it’s possible for my character to be wearing all the best items in the game and still get owned by the monsters. This will be fixed as I add in more content 😀
I didn’t meet my goal of having it completed over Christmas, but at least I have made significant progress. Overall, I’m pretty happy with how far along it is.
Finally, anyone who has played a roguelike will be very familiar with the death screen. Here’s Icefall’s current version (more information about how/when/why you died will be added in future):
The Icefall death screen quickly becomes familiar.