Let's Make a Roguelike: Fashionably Late

Had you worried, didn't I?

I almost had this weeks segment done last night, but I was quite tired and decided to put it off. That was apparently a good decision, since I put several hours into it today before wrapping up! This was mostly poor time management on my part, but I'm happy that the delay was small this time.

As for the content, I'm trying to accelerate the early bits a bit more than in my previous iterations. Even for a long-running series, it's important to keep the readers engaged, and the shape drawing from last time didn't seem up to snuff. I'm taking a bit of a write once, refactor later approach this time: I present the technique in a fairly simple and "bad" way first, then show how the implementation can be refined and improved later. This allows me to frontload much of the exciting stuff, while still providing some basic design lessons down the line. We'll see how that goes.

This series has really been a bit of an interesting experiment for me. There are so many things wrong with my approach to writing these that I almost want to start fresh again, but for the sake of actually getting things done I'm resisting that urge. I think this series is helping me learn a lot about tutorials though, and future seasons will benefit from those lessons.

Here's the link to the new part.