IllFate - Very early development feedback

[RantingRodent]

My roguelike, called "IllFate" is still in its infancy. There's very little to it at the moment, but I want to have a place here for people to post whatever feedback they have on what is done. The earlier I can catch little details that feel wrong or clash with roguelike standards, the better. My overall goal is to build a world with enough complexity to get some emergent history out of it, Dwarf Fortress style.

IllFate is developed on the Flash platform using Flex Builder. I am adopting Test-Driven Development practices, both because I think it suits an expansive roguelike very well and because I want to gain some experience with it.

Development blog is here: http://blog.andrewtraviss.com/

I'm using (bad) haiku poetry to describe each immediate development goal. Every "Verse completed" post has the latest version of the game embedded in the post. That's not a screenshot.

[george]

Hey RR, I like how you're going about things on that blog  . I'm also curious about your experience with Flex Builder, have you been using it a long time? When I looked at it, it seemed too complicated for my purposes (compared to just writing actionscript and compiling that to an swf)...what benefits are you getting from using the Flex framework?

About the game, it's good so far (though wasd is a little non-standard for roguelikes, it's not a big deal). The verse where you skid around the ice was a little buggy (crashing into walls when you weren't adjacent to them) but it seemed like more of a test anyway.

[RantingRodent]

I'm not using the Flex framework for this project, just compiling standard Actionscript. Despite its name, Flex Builder is not necessarily for builing applications on the Flex framework. Adobe is renaming the next version Flash Builder to make this a bit more obvious. I have used the Flex framework profesionally before, and found it to be extremely useful but occasionally a time sink.

I've been using FB since shortly after it was launched. I'm a huge fan. It has a lot of features that really speed you up once you get used to using them. As a long time Flash developer I'd always relied  on trace statements and observation to debug problem. Having a real debugger (that actually works) was like night and day on its own. To be honest, every time I'm forced to work in Flash CS3 or CS4 instead of Flex Builder I find it very painful now.

There are some other options out there; FDT and FlashDevelop, but I prefer Flex Builder's official support.