As is the way of things, I’ve managed to take another sweeping turn in my game development. I took a brief foray into writing a crossword generator in C# – which was moderately successful, but needed a lot of data. Since then however, I’ve been caught up with Oxygen Not Included which is a good example of the sort of game I like – lots of complex interactions which are hard to get right and some interesting side effects; a little bit of free form story, and a good dose of base building.
This game reminded me of Dwarf Fortress, which was my inspiration back in the 2000s to start my own games company, which lead me back to a game I wanted to write at the time and made some progress with, which had a working title of Troll Town. The difference between Dwarf Fortress (DF) and Troll Town as mostly the performance vs detail tradeoff; DF has a very large model of details which really were largely irrelevant, and ran very slowly. I wanted to hone it down a bit, so make a village of trolls in a cave underground, and subject them to various problems like invasions or seasons.
So I decided to reawaken Troll Town. Given this is a deep simulation, I thought perhaps I should try a more serious programming language for this one so I’ve dusted off my C++. I’m using SDL as the graphics library for this, as I expect it to be a largely 2d game. As I’m very rusty I’ve been following the SDL tutorials here in order to get started; I think they’re pretty good.
I’ve actually made a reasonable amount of progress – I’ve got some squares on screen and I’ve managed to make a system where you can stack up some orders and the trolls (also squares) will go and dig squares that you click on. It’s a start! Anyway, I’ll get to some real status reports later, just wanted to revive this blog a bit…