The role of magic

I've always seen the typical magic in role-playing games too powerful and having too big role. In some cases it's impossible to survive without magic in some form (magic items if the character class can't cast spells). I wanted to avoid the same mistake and for a long time I had difficulties to think about the role of magic in Kaduria.

The big problem is that you want to have "magical" things, like creatures, in the gameplay. Without them everything becomes kind of boring. At some point I decided to remove spells, but it started to seem odd, because the game world has magic in it.

I've been working on bringing spells back, but it's not going to be old school fireballs etc. It's more tricks and illusions rather than spells that simply kill everything. The way magic works in D&D based (almost all role-playing) systems is that it's fixing the balance issue coming from fighting thousands of otherwise tough creatures. Then again the combat system of D&D also has the same flaw, it makes the player eventually a godlike creature that can kill everything.

I feel like I'm now experienced enough to design spells that will work in this game, when in past I would have been only using similar spells that were in every role-playing game.

On success and failure

I think many people understand success as results. Developers release games and possibly get money selling them, which is seen as success. But you could think it another way, success as opposite of failure.

Some roguelike projects fail, because developers not only abandon the project but they sometimes completely end their game programming hobby or career and move on to other things in life. I guess it's ok, but it's an actual failure: you failed in whatever you tried to do. But if you just keep on going and don't give up you can't fail. You will always be successful as a creator, and that can't be measured by achievements or the amount of money you make.

There is something in the way people react to long term projects. They try to ridicule it, but I think secretly they wish they had the same kind of persistent willpower to never give up. In many cases people who do become successful in real life terms (money etc.) have that trait and for them life is all about trying to reach something, some kind of goal that's always around the next corner.

I guess I'm a bad case of that trait, because I never understood people who abandoned their game development life. Why would they do that? What made them stop?

Implementing ideas

One of the things in roguelike development is that you should be careful about implementing too many ideas. But what if you did implement all or most ideas you had? I started to think about it and it could be something to try. At least with Kaduria, because I really don't have any kind of pressure to release it any time soon.

One idea I had the other day is a randomized cargo lift. With that it would be possible to move something heavy between levels, like 'movable' objects (barrels etc.) which you can't pick up anyway. The source and destination levels could be more or less random, making it interesting sub-plot to find out which lifts are connected.

I've started to change notation type enums to namespaces the same way I did in Teemu. It's not very important, but makes the source code more manageable I guess.