Hey, everybody.
I'm a 29 year-old from the United States' West coast. I came to rougelikes through Diablo II, as I'm sure many of us have.
I took a semester of C++ at the local community college when I was in high school, which was a great foundation for learning Java later on. I'm definitely in the "hobby programmer" camp, rather than all you professionals out there.
While I'm working on my first rougelike, I've programmed a few other games thus far; a few ports of boardgames (Mastermind, Battleship), and an original tile-swapping game (think Bejewled, but with objectives).
I'm currently working on the game that's been kicking around in my head since I was 15, though it has obviously undergone a lot of changes since then. I suppose it falls into the coffebreak category, because it'll lack a lot of the intricacy of many rougelikes (only 7 equipment slots!?! Blasphemy!).
I tend to move pretty slowly, as I've got work, family (I'm a dad), and not letting myself get fat again all eating at my time. I'm trying a more structured approach, with a solid design document before I start out, because I keep stalling out at the demo stage (small hard-coded map, functional enemies, movement and basic attack functional).
I've tried a pretty wide variety of RLs, but the ones that hold my attention are the ones that are easy to get into. As I get older, I find that I have less and less patience to learn new, intricate systems. So my most-played RLs are Diablo II and DoomRL, though I spent enough time recently (maybe 20 hours or so) to be disappointed by Pokemon Mystery Dungeon.
