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Saturday, May 3, 2014

Just a random update

I decided to log in today and was poking around at my traffic statistics for this blog. In the past month, there have been 300 page views. It's not a lot, but it's also a non-zero value. It's interesting to see that I still get hits from my RogueBasin profile and random Google searches.

In case anyone was wondering, CyberpunkRL is no longer maintained.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.
One of the more recent, and more radical spiritual successors of CPRL
Nothing would make me happier than to eventually release a solid, fun cyberpunk themed roguelike game, but sometimes my perfectionism, work life, and personal life get in the way. Just know that at any give time, I probably am working on some re-imagining of it so maybe some day you will get to play CyberpunkRL. Who knows?