20 years of development

Kaduria was started somewhere around 1995. The first date in source code is from 1996, but that was after I started to record the original date when the source file was first created. This means that next year Kaduria will turn 20. Some people even doubt if this project is real. The sad thing is that it is an actual game project. Then again Kaduria is relatively young roguelike project, ten years younger than let's say Nethack which I guess is still heading for the next official version.

The development of Kaduria can be split into two distinctive phases, from 1995 to 2005 and from that to this day. In 2005 I switched from procedural C to object-oriented C++. Looking back I should have started the project from scratch and not try to refactor the old C code, but back then I had so little knowledge about C++ (OOP) that I don't know if it would have been any better solution.

Since I'm not a programmer Kaduria was somewhat difficult learning process from C to C++. I didn't make lot of mistakes, but there were some. Even I'm not a very good programmer the biggest problem was (and is) the content and handling vast amounts of data rather than programming itself. I think C++ was a good choice for me, because I can work better with the concepts of OOP and create better source code with it by strictly following some of the rules of object-oriented paradigm.

What I find funny about this whole story is that even after 20 years I've not seen any games like Kaduria. It tells how difficult it is to create new kind of major roguelike games. Even creating an old style roguelike game has proven to be hard, because there are only handful of them created after Nethack and Angband which both represent the two archetypes of roguelikes.

The development of Kaduria has now become much more about managing the project than programming, but there are still some algorithms to write as well. How long it will take depends on many things, including how early I want to release the first version which no doubt will not be the final one.