These are the tiles I have made for my new game project.  It's inspired by Advanced Heroquest and Roguelikes.  This is my first real effort at creating something that is more than just 'Programmer Art'.  These were all hand drawn in Gimp using a Bamboo tablet my wife bought me a while ago.  She saw something in me way back then that I am only just realising now.  I love you Meli :)

Millionaire

I have learned something new recently - myself.  No longer do I feel adrift and on autopilot.  I have a purpose, and that is purpose is providing for my family.  I'm designing an application to help me visualise monetary abundance.  I know money doesnt buy happiness, but it sure as hell helps.  The program is called Millionaire and  provides a visual graph tracking my process towards my first million dollars.  I can also add in objects I call 'wishes'.  These represent material goals, like my new computer desk and my Dodge Challenger.  Once I have enough saved and have purchased these items, I can mark them as purchased ingame, depleting the current savings by the appropiate amount.

I've recently come to see how important visualisation is.  I've kept things bottled up for so long but now I have a beautiful wife at my side, no matter, I feel like I can finally start living again.  Life is good :)

For those who want to know more about how I managed to pull myself through a dark time, read up on the Law of Attraction.   It worked for me, otherwise you wouldnt be reading this.

Cleaning Up

It's been a long time since I've updated this - Updates will resume soon, I promise :)

The juicy stuff

Made some great progress on writing my own tile engine and random dungeon generation system for use in my RPG. So far it is automaticaly generating small, medium or large rooms.  Next will be randomly creating exits for the room, and randomly generating corridors to connect the rooms.  I am considering creating several different kinds of corridor objects and randomly selecting them from a list to be added to the level. 

Something that occured to me earlier is that an interesting problem of random level generation is ensuring that you dont create an "unwinnable' level - I will need to find someway to ensure there is always a clear path of progression to the next level.  I'm looking forward to the challenge :)

A Great Weekend

I had a really good weekend.  Went to dinner with our friends Amy and Greg, Joe and Holly, John and Angie.  It was really good seeing everyone.  I watched Star Wars and an Animanacs movie for a lazy Sunday afternoon with my family.  Meli got 'The Seeker' title in World of Warcraft - thats 3000 quests completed!  She is well on her way to getting her LoreMaster title, she is determined to complete it before the expansion launches.  I love my gamer girl :)

I made some great progress on the tile engine for my RPG today.  Meli, I'm about to go balls deep into the technical theory behind my game, so here is a pic of Justin Furstenfeld to keep you occupied while the rest of us geeks skip ahead to the juicy bits.

Progress

I have been able to spend a little more time on my battle system today, and I have made some great progress!  The mob is now able to fight back (and the hordes of test subjects cheer), combat takes place in a turn based matter.  I still only have one attack type, but different mobs will do differing amounts of damage.  Mobs will also award XP and gold upon death.  I also wanted to test having different mobs appear based on your current XP level, when you hit level 5 a stronger mob appears.  The player now has the ability to use healing potions and the mob you are fighting has a 33% chance to drop one upon death. 

A productive day :)

Links to Snippets

AutoScroll a C# textbox/richtextbox - http://bitmatic.com/c/scrolling-a-c-richtextbox-when-adding-text

MagicStones (Puzzle/RPG Game) Postmortem http://www.gamedev.net/page/reference/index.html/_/reference/103/postmortems/magic-stones-postmortem-r2440