…For I cannot build a castle…

Oh, wait – YES I CAN!

(Yes, I know those aren’t the right lyrics. But that’s how most people hear it.)

Okay, finally got something I like. When the Minimalist theme was announced my first idea was a minimalist RPG, like a Roguelike. And I’d been thinking about writing a Roguelike for a while…but I don’t think I could write a good Roguelike in two days.

After getting some sleep I thought of a very simple action game – top-down, 2D. You start in the center of a room and must avoid enemies until a weapon spawns, at which point you can pick it up and kill them. Unfortunately this is almost exactly what MrFun is doing…and he’s actually a good way into making his game.

So I came back to thinking about the minimalist RPG idea, and of course of the first games I thought of was the original Legend of Zelda. (Except that some people claim that Zelda isn’t an RPG at all. Why? Because there are no stats to improve. You don’t level up and gain abilities; all your abilities come from things you find in the world. Want more health? Find a heart container. Want do to more damage? Find a better sword, etc. I can see their point, but I don’t think I agree with it.)

And then I remembered a game I played a long time ago called Castle Adventure. It was a very good real-time RPG similar to Zelda, where you picked up items that gave you new abilities and allowed you to explore (and ultimately escape) the castle. Combat was a bit lame, however – it had Roguelike combat, where you just ran into an enemy and whoever was tougher won. I liked that there were a lot of puzzles in the game, though. You used treasures you’d already found to access new areas of the castle and get more treasures.

Both of these games seem to strip the concept of the RPG down to its roots. So I’m going to write a game similar to them, but adding improvements of my own. It’ll have Zelda-style action combat but it’ll also have Castle Adventure-style treasure collecting and puzzle solving.

And it’ll be in text mode 🙂

I finally come up with an idea and discover that MrFun is already doing it.

Minimalist.

And it won by a huge margin.

What the heck? A Ludum Dare game is pretty much “minimalist” by default!

At 9 PM local time, actually. Which means that I’ll have to resist the temptation to stay up real late.

Here’s the list of final theme candidates:

Anti-Gravity
Backwards
Bleeding / Leaking
Bumper Cars
Cooperation
Defense
Endless
Escape
Flood
Icicles
Minimalist
Morph
Slowed Time
Turn Based

The final theme will be one of these, although we won’t find out which one until time begins. The current favorite appears to be “Endless” which I’m not a huge fan of. I’m also not a huge fan of “Bleeding/Leaking”, “Morph” or “Slowed Time” because I think it would be hard to write a game using those mechanics in 48 hours.

I’m going to be doing a lot of blogging over the next 48 hours. I will try to mirror all posts here, but most of it will be at the official Ludum Dare site. And of course I’ll be hanging out in the official IRC channel – #ludumdare on irc.afternet.org.

Saint Peter, don’t you call me, ’cause I can’t go
I sold my soul to Patch 2.4

One of the things that has prevented me from wasting a lot of time on World of Warcraft since I hit level 70 has been the dearth of things to do if you don’t do instances.

Unfortunately, last Tuesday saw the release of Patch 2.4, which rebalanced the battlegrounds and added a whole bunch of daily-repeatable solo quests.

So this weekend saw me get absolutely nothing done on Wizard. Again. I did make over a thousand gold questing and finally won my first Warsong Gulch, though. I’m sure that makes you happy!

But in the end, let’s face facts. The reason that I haven’t been working on Wizard is because I don’ wanna. It was originally written as nasty, one-off code and I’ll have to spend a day just cleaning it up before I can add any new features like enemies. (Lesson learned: Don’t write nasty one-off code under any circumstances.)

So I think I’m going to move on to my second game. I have already decided what it’s going to be, but I’m not gonna tell you yet 🙂

I was supposed to finish up Wizard over the weekend, but Easter messed that up for me. Then I was supposed to finish it up last night, but chillun aggro messed that up for me. Now I’m hoping to have it done by the end of the week, and I’m reducing the number of little games I’ll make before the competition from three or four to two. I will happily take suggestions on what the second game I do should be.