When in doubt, blog it out [some random thoughts]

3 days ago

3 min read

So, Tales of Akash 9 finally went commercial. I should've seen this coming, it was only a matter of time. Little did I know when I started writing it with a Notepad and testing the engine in a browser that one day I'd be writing code in Visual Studio using Python and actually selling the finished product.

People did show some interest in it, but so far I haven't sold a single copy despite my (rather amateurish) marketing attempts. Maybe I'll toss some money into Facebook Ads next week and see how that goes, after all I enjoyed the game quite a lot regardless of writing the code myself. Maybe it's the randomness and dice rolls that makes up more than half of the gameplay.

The graphics are lousy, people probably did better in the 90's than what I sketched in MS Paint. I did try some advanced textures and whatnot using GIMP but the result was horrible so I kept the original pixel art. Space shouldn't be an issue these days but after compiling pretty much everything the end result was close to 200Mb. Thanks to the custom game engine that essentially takes a text file and converts the characters into tiles I could squeeze the graphics into a few .png's that are used throughout the game, instead of rendering every screen individually.

This also made it possible for me to code a randomly generated dungeon. In those instances the game engine rolls a dice and picks a corresponding tile in the middle which is the depth view.

So this is what the game GUI looks like. There isn't much to it, on the left there's the dungeon view. Next to it are the movement buttons, and below them there's the "social" section that consists of the PvP&utilities and a chat which opens in terminal. In the middle there's what's going on in the dungeon, player/opponent modifier rolls and so on. There's also the player info and stats, XP and turn number as well as the button for equipping items.

On the right hand side there's the market and a healing system as well as a button for checking the IG currency balance (gold). But yeah, it's very simplistic and there's no menu diving (because I'm not an expert in Tcl/Tk).

I can't really tell much about the future updates but there's a trading card system patch 1.1.0 on it's way once I get around to implementing it, currently it is very buggy and there are missing functions for the module. Other than that skimming through the main module's 1000 or so lines of code plus a few tricky modules to implement it may take some time, not to mention testing it!

Unfortunately due to some technical problems and circumstances as well as financial issues there are no plans for a sequel. Also I'm very much out of ideas as I've been coding for 8 months straight.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the free game. You can make all the necessary changes and then compile the game; it's 100% possible but I hope you support the cause and buy the official release.

For Endor,

-ef

PS.This post is essentially a draft from last Sunday, but I never got around to publishing it. Not much has changed since, but I did release some kick-ass drum'n'bass, three singles this week to be precise.

Here's the highlight track IMO, it turned out really well. Not something that goes with a dungeon crawler though but inspiration struck and I got it fresh out of the DAW in less than 3 hours.

Here are the store links :

efinque - Sagittarius

Buy Now

efinque - Psycho Circus

Buy Now

efinque - Solar Plexus

Buy Now

Hope you enjoy them!