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.

After working on Icefall for so long, I was amazed at how quickly I was developing the code for the new program! When writing Icefall, I might create a single new source file in a night’s work, or maybe make 4 or 5 moderate improvements to existing code. On the media app, I was churning out half a dozen new source files at a time, and I had the entire application virtually finished in about three days.

Thinking about my observations of the difference, I eventually came up with the following formula:

Development Speed = Effort / (Complexity * Quality)

For a given amount of effort, I can get a lot more done on the media app, because A: it’s far less complex, and B: I care much less about the quality of the code. Multiply those factors together and you can see why Icefall development is approximately an order of magnitude slower: it’s a complex system, all the code has to be correct, robust, speedy, and extensible.

I’m convinced this is part of the reason why so many “we’re going to create the perfect application, that does everything and is open source” projects never reach version 1.0. With all the effort in the world, they’re just throwing huge numbers on the wrong side of the divisor.

Obviously, in an online-, or otherwise multiplayer game, class balance is critically important. If your wizards can always beat your warriors, the game will NOT be fun for people who choose to play warriors. And they won’t switch and play wizards, either: they’ll just stop playing and find another game.

But is class balance critical in a single-player game, like Icefall? In many roguelikes, the classes aren’t balanced: some classes and races are substantially more powerful than others (e.g. High Elves might come complete with bonuses to all their stats, Resist Poison, etc etc – with no downsides), and players are actively encouraged to start with the easier classes.

A third alternative is to balance classes not for ‘difficulty’, but for ‘effort’: you might be free to roll a powerful Immortal instead of a lowly Human, but the Immortal will require twice as much experience to gain every level.

I’m not at the stage of class balancing yet – but I’m thinking about it.

To cope with the huge expected demand for information about Icefall (hahaha), I thought it was about time I updated the website, as the old one was created in Notepad using handcrafted HTML over ten years ago, and it hasn’t aged well!

I am slowly working around to migrating the site to a CMS (I want to design it myself, to improve my ASP skills, so it will take some time). In the meantime, the least I can do is update the styles a little so it’s not quite as painful to look at. The main news page is using Wordpress, so at least it’s searchable / RSS enabled.

Going forward, here is where I’ll try to blog about the development of Icefall, including the challenges, decisions, and anything else that seems relevant. If you’re interested in the non-professional game development process, hopefully this should make a good read for you!

Archives, Old Content…

If for some strange reason you want to look at the previous News content of the website, this is The News Archive link.

Some people may also still find The CPUID Guide handy, although it hasn’t been updated in several years.

I have updated the About and Links pages to remove obsolete information. The “Projects, Guides and LX5suite” are still way overdue however!