Re: [Adonthell-devel] Happy New Year!

[James Nash]

Hi Kai,

Happy New Year too!

I know I haven’t contributed anything in a long time and, to be honest, my last 
few contributions were pretty minimal. For that I’m sorry. Truth is, with work, 
personal life and other hobbies there’s rarely any time left to do anything 
worthwhile for Adonthell. In the early days of this project I was still at 
school / uni and I was single (:-P) which meant I had lots of time and energy 
to put into Adonthell.

I have fond memories of the early days when we were a vibrant and active team 
that produced Waste’s Edge. Thinking back to that time and what we created 
still fills me with immense pride! Occasionally I think about our grand 
ambitions for the v1.0 Adonthell from and (half-) jokingly wonder whether 
that’s something we can resume making once we’ve all retired and once again 
have plenty of time on our hands! 

I’m intrigued by your dungeon game idea. If the Adonthell code (and gfx?) can 
find some new life there, then that would be lovely! I can only imagine how 
much passion, time and ingenuity has gone into that code over the years. Do let 
me know if you go ahead with that, I’d love to follow the progress and at least 
be a beta-tester :-P


In any case, thanks for all the hard work over the years Kai! Lots of people 
have contributed to this project, but you’ve stuck with it for the longest of 
all!


Kind regards,

James

--
Personal site: http://cirrus.twiddles.com/
Twitter: @c1rrus



> On 11 Jan 2015, at 14:50, Kai Sterker <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> 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 ;-))
> 
> Cheers!
> 
> Kai
> 
> 
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