Progress Update November 2014

Earlier this month I finally released my first development snapshot in over 14 months. It's kind of depressing that it took so long, and when objectively comparing the difference between the old snapshot and the new one, it almost seems like a step backwards, not forwards. The last 14 months has seen some extensive refatoring going on behind the scenes. I completely ripped out my old inheritance-based creature/item/etc classes and replaced it with an Entity Component System, which has taken a little bit to get used to it, but now it seems like its always been there!

In addition to that, I started switching the entire game project to Unity for a few months before deciding it was not for me. I also found it hard to dedicate any time to the project for many months, and time just slipped away so fast. I've remedied this in recent months and finally decided to polish what I had and show it off to my friends and work colleagues to get some feedback. I managed to get quite a few people involved who'd never seen it before, so the pressure to have progressed from the last snapshot wasn't really there. I got some great feedback that re-energised me and I've made great progress on the new snapshot, which has seen some exciting new features implemented, and some UX/UI improvements.

All in all, the experience was positive, and I'm keen to produce snapshots more often. By next post I hope to have some exciting news to share about the project as a whole. We'll see how that pans out.