I'm Ray Dillinger, probably better known as "Bear." If you saw a photo of me you'd understand why. I'm very tall, very large, very muscular, and also fat. People have been calling me "Bear" since once I dead-lifted the rear end of a pickup truck when I was a junior in high school. I'm originally from Kansas but these days live in the San Francisco Bay area.
I have a computer science degree and some decent programming and writing skills. My background is in Artificial Intelligence and I've worked a lot with various compiler and interpreter internals, Lisp dialects and, in particular, with parsing and generating natural language. These days I work mostly in software QA, chasing bugs in other people's code in nine different programming languages. I've undertaken to create something as a work of code-art and a personal challenge to myself.
I'm striving to create a game which is a synthesis of old-school interface and gameplay aesthetic with new-wave design and programming technique.
Firstly, it's written in C, because I like the old-fashioned hardcore-ness of C. I could do it more easily or more simply in other languages, but it wouldn't have the same old-school aesthetic integrity. The old-school aesthetic extends to user interface, meaning it runs in an ordinary text-mode terminal window and is playable in full over a telnet or ssh connection, never requiring the user to touch the mouse.
My primary inspiration for the gameplay was Nethack, because I like the way items, intrinsics, etc can interact and have multiple effects and uses there, and the way monsters behave differently from one another. I like the complexity and depth that kind of complicated behavior can give the game. But that complexity's been added to Nethack one case at a time over many years, on top of a codebase that wasn't really initially designed to support it. So I set for myself the task of constructing a codebase that really is designed to support a highly complex roguelike game in which items, behaviors, attacks, effects, intrinsics, etc can all interact in pretty arbitrary ways, and building a game on top of it.
So, since this idea came to me, I've been hanging out on rgrd. I've started over from scratch a couple of times because I realized important parts were missing, or would be too difficult to add given the design mistakes I made on the first two attempts. I've taken 'hiatus' from several months to two years from the project before coming back to it several times. But at this point I'm pretty sure that I have the right overall design and know what the constraints are. From here to the releasable game is just the long march of coding and occasional smaller design decisions that fit into the now-established framework.
There. Was that a long intro, or a short book?
