Another year over and not much progress on Adonthell / Dun Barethsol. Always makes me wonder if it's finally time to quit and move on.
One of the early goals, to make Linux more popular through gaming is slowly but steadily fulfilled by others. Last year I've been enjoying Broken Sword 5 on Linux, currently I'm having lots of fun with Civilization Beyond Earth and I'm really looking forward to Divinity: Original Sin, which should make its appearance on Linux in Q1, hopefully. A lot more games on top of those are already running natively on Linux too and many more are in the making (Torment: Tides of Numenera and Kingdom Come: Deliverance are two I am especially excited about). So, mission accomplished?
Of course, none of the above are free software, so there might still be a case for continuing the effort, but as I said earlier, doing it all alone is not that much fun. The really good thing about Adonthell was working with you guys, discussing things on the ML, passing ideas back and forth until something better and greater emerged than anyone could have thought of on his own. So thanks a lot to everyone who has lent a hand over the years! Hope you are all doing well and are up to something nice :-).
So one bit that really bothered me over the last year or so is to let all those contributions, all that hard work, go to waste. Out of that came the idea to maybe try something less ambitious, and salvage most of the code (and maybe some of the artwork) with that. At that time I would also have liked to have a more casual RPG, something you could play for half an hour, then quit and come back a couple days later and continue without having to recall which quests were open and where to go and what to do next. Something with the look of Dungeon Master or the original Bards Tale, maybe (to reduce the amount of graphics needed). That, of course, would require a different world module, so early last year I set out to get some of the dependencies between the Adonthell modules cleaned up. That had been my last commit. Since then I have been doing a bit of coding (random dungeon generation) and a bit of design work: game mechanics, mostly, some quest ideas. If anybody is interested, I can produce more details, but the overarching idea is to have a dungeon-crawler that encourages meta-gaming. It would have smallish areas centered around either Warrior, Thief or Mage gameplay, divided by doors that show what kind of area follows behind. Stairs would lead down a level (and thus increase the difficulty), and there would be small quests that would resolve over the course of 2 or three areas, but take different turns or require different solutions depending on type of area players chose for each stage of the quest. Game time would only progress when the player moves, there would be only one game state (possibly kept in an SQL DB) that gets updated as moves are made and death means game-over.
As stated above, I do have more complete designs/ideas written down, and more yet in my head. The goal would be to build upon Adonthell's code without requiring much in terms of graphics or map-building (so no need for complicated tools, animations or great 2D pixel-art). If there is interest, just let me know ... otherwise I'll keep refining things and may come forward with some kind of prototype eventually. (Unless, of course, I fail to resist making just ... one ... more ... turn ;-))