In case anyone was wondering, CyberpunkRL is no longer maintained. I'd release the source, but it's really not something I'm proud of. In the nearly 4 years since CPRL originally appeared here, a lot has happened. I finished my computer science degree in 2012 and I'm approaching 2 years of professional experience in software engineering. In career terms, that's nothing, but in just that short period of time, I have felt an immense improvement in my overall skill level.
Nearly everything I did on CPRL was self-taught. I would blow off homework assignments to stay up late reading articles on roguelike development and C# programming. Looking back, my work on CPRL was cute in its naivety. I would just open up my IDE and hack away until things worked while scratching off tasks on a very messy paper todo list. If I broke something, it meant a late night of debugging. I didn't design things. I didn't use version control. It was frustrating, but it was also very fun and rewarding
These days, I find it difficult to get back into hobby game development. I work on enterprise software all day and there's a lot of process involved in getting something into the code base. There are so many aspects to development I didn't even know existed when I worked on CPRL. I love what I do, but it's changed me. It almost hurts me to start writing code without a JIRA issue, a design, a class diagram, and unit tests. This adds a lot of overhead.
I haven't given up on game development as a hobby, but I have a lot less time, energy, and motivation. CPRL will forever be one of my dream projects, and it has been reincarnated in so many different forms, I have lost track of how many times I've restarted it with a fresh take on the concept.
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| One of the more recent, and more radical spiritual successors of CPRL |
