Hey it seems I've been summoned here. This thread is a good dive into the past. It's been so long it looks like it was another life for me, but it's good to see some things never change in the roguelike community and the pillars are still strong. Slash being the guardian of the temple and good ol' Krice still trolling as always
Anyway this is the long and sad story of The Chronicles of Doryen.
The project started quickly after I discovered roguelikes. I wanted an ascii game with the depth of nethack, but with a modern and intuitive UI and a more diablo-like gameplay.
After a few iterations (notably a C -> D -> C++ language loop), I had something promising. This version can be seen in the youtube videos
here.
The combat system was still bashing @ against everything, but with special attacks and cooldown. Since expanding and balancing this combat system was tedious inside the game, I created The Doryen Arena as a testbed. As far as I know, this game can still be downloaded
here and hopefully still runs nowadays. The Doryen Arena showed that during intense real time combats, bumping into things wasn't that great. It's one thing to kill a rat in a cave, but fighting 5 or 10 gobelins running around was actually painful.
The project stalled for some time until I created Pyromancer! during a 7DRL to test another combat approach, much closer to diablo (click instead of bumping). Pyromancer! also brought a lot of improvements in ascii graphics with lots of bells and whistles (anti-aliased shadow casting in ascii ? yes, that's a thing!).
In parallel to all those wanderings, libtcod had started a life of its own and was consuming a lot of my time. People wanted it on every goddamn OS and every goddamn language, not mentioning every goddamn compilation system on Earth. I finally gave up libtcod. I lacked the strength to stay focused and not try to please every people interested in the project.
At this point I was trying to expand Pyromancer! code into a new TCOD engine, through other 7DRL (The cave, then TreeBurner). But developing a complex game engine using 7DRL crunchs is not the right way to do it, at least for me. Eventually, the code collapsed under its own crappiness as I had to spent months in debug hell to add a simple feature.
This was 7 years ago. Since then, there hasn't been a year without a new try at a TCOD version. I have 3 or 4 C++ libtcod based versions, a Unity 2D sprite version, an ascii typescript/phaser version based on yendor.ts that can be found
on github, an 3D voxel openGL version using the Rust language and more recently a 2D Godot version.
So the project is still alive, is still one of my main projects, but there's no point making noise until I've got something else than fluff.
