In case anyone was wondering, CyberpunkRL is no longer maintained.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 |
That's a bit hard to hear, but it's nice to know what happened after that last post. It's hard to find the courage to do hobby programming after you've been programming all day for your job, that's understandable!
ReplyDeleteLooking at my local VSS, I see that I usually work on my game in spurs of one weekend - 5 days about once every 6-8 months. That doesn't seem like a lot, but I managed to cross some big features off the list and it's some form of progress.
Even if you don't consider your old code up to your standards today (and who does?), if you find someone to care for the repository (manage pull requests and hack every now and then) it might be worth it to open-source. People would get to play an alpha stage and that's cool. Maybe ask if anyone's interested in a new post?
Either way, best luck and thanks for posting :)
Good to see you comment! You, Reefpirate, and the other regulars would always make my day with your input and enthusiasm. It's you guys that inspire me to want to make this game. I almost feel like I owe it to you. If only I could somehow work on this project full time.
DeleteAh...man this is so depressing. Such an original concept as well, how many Cyberpunk themed games are there, let alone rogue likes? Hardly any. I hope one day you build up the courage to keep going, hell even if it takes you a decade you should still stick with it.
ReplyDeleteHi Nihilanth,
ReplyDeletesad that you've given up for the moment :(
Don't understand why you're not proud of your work^^: your screenshots look good and you've definetly talent ^^
I know it's tough to be day programmer@job and have motivation to code in the evenings. I've the same issue ;)
I'll try currently also to create a cyberpunk rl...acutally I've started yesterday ;)
Are you still sometime on #rgrd ? Maybe we can chat someday...
Have a nice holiday season!