A recent post on rec.games.roguelike.development made me realize that I am really focusing too much on frills instead of developing important features, such as gameplay ones. Why that ? There are several reasons that I will enumerate and see how I could change my evil habbits.

The eye candy syndrome

Lands of Elderlore has graphics, so a part of its development requires adding eye candy features. The challenge here is to set the limit between pure decor and gameplay impact.

Of course, it is satisfying to have a nice GUI or round buttons with pictures, or nice alpha channeled shadows. And having graphic effects will definitively attrack new players to the game - specially RPG players that don't want to try ascii roguelikes.

But the goal of Lands of Elderlore is also to immerse players in medieval worlds, push roleplay as far as possible, and provide a feeling of gigantism and freedom through procedural generated content.

The blogger case

Speech less, code more ! I like to discover new web technology, try website engines, learn new ways of publishing on the web. But I don't have so much spare time, and each hour passed blogging or mounting web services around the game is an hour with no new feature and no new bug erased. I really need to code more. Hopefully, now that this website is launched, I should be able to focus on the code feist.

The selfish developer

As I am approching release 0.1 - the first truly playable release -, I feel strangely more and more reluctant to publish my precious. Right now, I'm the only developer, and I wish to stay in that state, even if the game is under GNU /GPL. I've been giving a lot of time and energy in that game, and I guess that somehow I am a little anxious about the feedback from the first real players that will appear after that release.

More than that, once this playable release published, the game will not only be mine, but will belong to the community. I've never published an open source code like that before - well, except TomeTik, but that was just a hack from Tome -, and perhaps I am just over reacting. But I guess by reading other roguelike dev blogs that I am not the only one having a hard time to publish the first real release of my code.

The shortest path

After all those considerations, why do I still want to release ? My main concern is that my spare time will probably be reduced in a couple of monthes, with the arrival of my second little hobbit.

And, well, I'd really like to know what the gamers think of Lands of Elderlore. Taking care of one's ego is never a bad thing !

So here we are, here is the short list of features I still need to add in the game before 0.1:

• Create a short list of weapons and armors, with flavors giving different strength to them
• Add sellers in cities, with the OcempGui window for buying and selling
• Add basic dungeons under world cave tiles
• Add simple monsters in mountains and dungeons
• Add close combat to animals and monsters
• Deal player death and heirs

Once these feature are added, I swear it by the name of the dark lord of the forgotten code, I will release Lands of Elderlore 0.1 !

So be it.