Well, it’s been a couple of months since my coding project was put on indefinite hold — a roguelike-in-development known as Gravel (a portmanteau of Gravecat and RL), which ultimately ground to a halt after I realized simply that what I was doing was largely futile; as much fun as I may have been having, there’s too many other roguelikes out there which do the exact same thing, most notably Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, which had already accomplished much of what I’d hope to achieve. After much tinkering and two major rewrites of the code, the project was put to rest, until a time that I’d come back and resurrect it with a new purpose and goals.

That time has now come, and dusting off my old code, I’m beginning with rewrite numbero tres — the old code is simply too haphazard and poorly-organized to make a viable base, and I’ve made somewhat of a breakthrough with my display routines since then. My new project, Kobiak, stands on the shoulders of (and re-uses much of, albeit repolished) Gravel, and aims to be a roguelike/tactical RPG hybrid, something which I believe is at least somewhat unique and original compared to the original plans. Rather than a lone adventurer exploring a dungeon — as is roguelike tradition — the plan is to employ an entire party of like-minded adventurers, with combat being far more tactical than simply butting heads with a dragon until one of you dies.

It’s still early days and I don’t want to say too much so soon, but I’ve got big plans for this one, and my restructured code is being designed specifically with future expansion and easy modification in mind, so hopefully I won’t run into the road-blocks that forced me to re-write Gravel almost from scratch twice over. I’m already very happy with the display engine, though, which — in classic roguelike tradition — is ASCII all the way, but with a twist that I’m keeping under my hat for now.

I’ll doubtless be rambling more in future as the project takes shape, so keep your eyes peeled!

It’s been a while since I’ve updated this blog; largely due to having little to say, but I feel I should update and say something, if only to confirm that — yes — the doom and gloom is over, and I’m back in a relatively sane, healthy mental state. With that in mind, something has been vexing me lately:

I live in a small apartment building, the kind where it looks like a regular house on the outside, but each of the three floors is a separate apartment with a common stairwell and front door. Mine’s the one at the top, and when I moved in here, the building was all mine, so to speak — nobody else lived in the other two, and life was good. Now begins the mystery, however, of whether or not someone has moved into one of the other apartments.

Evidence for started with a repairman coming to the house to fix the intercom for flat 1, mysterious sounds which may or may not have originated in the stairwell and could easily have been from the neighboring house (which I know is populated), and a partial boot-print on a couple of letters that were on the floor by the front door (which could just as easily have been caused by the postman, the cleaners, or any other maintenance staff). Evidence against is mostly blind hope — as I like the idea of having the building to myself — and a stack of letters to “the occupier” of flats 1 and 2 from things like the city council and the TV license folks, which have been uncollected for quite some time. I also haven’t noticed any letters addressed directly to anyone but myself or to a generic “the occupier”, though they could have simply been collected if the neighbors are more dilligent than I.

It’s all quite mysterious, and perhaps even vaguely eerie. Am I alone in this building, or are others lurking about, unseen, unknown, but living mere feet away from my front door? One thing’s for sure: If I do have neighbors, they’re pretty damn quiet.

Thoughts on the past indeterminate period of time:

I look worse than I feel, but that’s not saying much, I look pretty dreadful. Food didn’t stay down, but that’s okay because it was terrible anyway. Started smoking again, missed my sweet, sweet cancer-sticks. Reality is about as interesting as it can be, which is to say, not at all. Been having extremely vivid and more-bizarre-than-usual dreams lately, which I’m sure is a sign of something, but I’m not sure what. Google’s latest foray into mimicry vexes me only mildly. A brief addiction to Pepsi Max has been quashed by apathy. I don’t miss people, per se, but there are some folks who I feel like I should talk to more often. I’m so used to lies, that sometimes I forget how to tell the truth. I think everything would be better if I could just learn to chill out and not be angry at things. I had one other thing to say, but deleted it because it sounded stupid. I think the problem with the world is that I don’t feel like I belong here. On a brighter note, my debt’s going down pretty steadily, albeit slowly. End of line.

Please allow me this moment of introspection and self-pity, because they come all too infrequently. Perhaps it’ll offer a little insight, for those curious, into my deeply neurotic mind.

50 gold coins wasted and some bruised egos all around. It should have been an easy run — perhaps that kind of confidence had made us complacent; arrogant, even. It should have been easy, but everything went to hell for reasons that nobody could agree on. It’s easy to point fingers, of course, and everyone points away from themselves, but sometimes things just aren’t meant to be.

This is the point where I realized — or perhaps I should say, it was the last straw, the last thread on an ever-so-long rope — something which spans further than mere raid groups in World of Warcraft, but also extends to my out-of-game personality. By habit I tend to play a support role in online RPGs, most notably the archetypal healer whose job it is to keep the group alive — stemming, I think, from earlier excursions where the ‘group’ tended to just be a core body of 3-4 friends who’d play online games together, a team I was comfortable and happy enough with to easily support my compatriots.

Sadly, herein lies the problem, an issue which has been troubling me with increasing intensity for weeks, and finally culminated with the realization that no matter how hard I try, no matter what angle I look at the problem from, nothing can change the simple and undeniable fact that I’m simply not built for this — or, more specifically, not willing to put the responsibility and safety of others in my hands, even if only in the context of online games, tenfold when applied to reality. The expectations of others — and, indeed, myself — combined with what eventually becomes crushing stress and self-doubt, thoroughly abandons the realm of what should be considered ‘fun’ and enters into much less favourable places.

To clarify, while I wish I was and certainly try hard to be, I’m just not a ‘team player’; I don’t easily handle the responsibility of being the lynchpin of failure or success upon which others rely, and except when given fairly menial, low-risk tasks, the combined stress and self-doubt accumulate into what eventually becomes an aversion so great that I’m unable to react with anything but an overwhelming sense of avoidance. Indeed, I’m not much of a team anything, being a person who tends to flourish in very small groups, but when at large social gatherings or parties (and I would consider a ‘large’ gathering being that which has more than 5-6 people present), the urge is almost overwhelming to quietly occupy a corner and interact with others as little — and avoid drawing attention to myself as much — as is possible. Indeed, I’m even known to abandon a group entirely, when the combined weight of numbers becomes too much to bear.

The lesson learned, I think, is merely that the greater the concentration of people — whether be it a real-life social gathering or an online game — the less I want to play a prominent part. It’s less a case of apathy, laziness or unwillingness to contribute, and more that I’m just not comfortable leading the charge, having people rely upon me, or being the centre of attention during a group discussion. I mostly just want to do my own thing — the archetypal ‘lone wolf’, as it were — and when I do have to rely on others, do my part in the most subtle, unassuming, and unnoticable way possible. I don’t want praise for being a good team player — I just want to do my part in such a way that, failure or success, neither the blame nor thanks land on my shoulders.

Things I admire: Mechanical engineers, astronauts, Stephen Hawking, monocles, leaf-cutter ants, medieval alchemists, and cats for their aloofness.