Something Old Before Something New

It's been a few months since my last update.  The project still continues.  In fact, I've spent most of my time redoing whole parts of it and rethinking a lot of the character creation.  I also changed how exploration will happen to more closely resemble the Gold-Box games and have been working out the details of how combat will come about.

There will be screenshots forthcoming when I feel it's ready.  I haven't reached that point yet.  But, I will say that some people will feel it's a step backwards when it happens.

I spent too much time listening to other people tell me how the game should be instead of doing it the way that I wanted to do it.  So, I ended up withdrawing for a while to pursue the project the way that I wanted, free of outside influences.  The game now more closely resembles the version that I was working on last year, which is what I wanted to do from the beginning.

And speaking of beginnings, I managed to find some screenshots of a really early version of this project from all the way back in 2010.  Wow, it has changed a lot.  A whole lot.  I thought it might be fun to share those screenshots.

The first version of the game's character creation screen looked a little something like this:

Only four classes and not a lot of options.

During those early days, I used a lot of copyrighted artwork to fill in the blanks.  I didn't yet have a clear idea of what I wanted to do or how I wanted to approach it.

The exploration screen.

The game worked okay, and I even remembered sharing it with a friend.  Of course, he wasn't an RPG player, so he couldn't make heads or tails of it.

The original combat screen.

I remember spending two or three days to get the combat screen working just how I wanted.  It was all primarily text based, as I didn't have the knowledge at that time to get full graphics working how I wanted.  The game was probably written in Visual Studio 2010, using Visual Basic.

After getting that version working, I decided to revamp it slightly.  So, later in 2010 I did a more "advanced" version and spruced up the graphics a bit.  It was still primitive compared to what I'm doing now, but there was some evolution going on.

Character Creation Screen 1 - Choosing a Thief

Character Creation Screen 2 - Choosing a Warrior

At this point, I was still using Visual Studio 2010.  I had taken a few programming classes, but still hadn't figured out how object oriented programming was supposed to work.  I'm sure if I could find the code for this thing, I would probably laugh at how amateurish it was.

Generating Attributes - 2010 style

In the end, building this game has been a real evolutionary experience for me.  I've learned a lot as I've gone along, and I continue to learn.  It's fun to see where I've come from.

In the next post, I hope to show where I'm going.