Day 1

Day 1:

I decided to join the Terminal Jam Reboot today, which was good timing since it started about mid day for me. After a brief period of panic where I thought 'what have I gotten myself in to?', I started making a list of ideas to work on. I'll admit I didn't get very far on that list before I had one I liked; an RTS.

I've worked on a few different RTS games over my career, but never actually made one as part of my personal projects. The idea of doing it as an Ascii game appealed to me. The next step was picking an engine or framework for the work. Again, it was a short list based on the timelines involved and my late entry. I wanted the game to be available on the web, and I wanted something I could iterate on quickly. My previous experience in Unity seemed like a good fit, but I also wanted to focus on the code and data, not the graphics. Unity can be a great tool but it always entices me to spend time on things like particles and futzing with the editor. A pure code framework was what I really wanted.

Luckily I had experimented with RetroBlit last year and I thought it could provide what I was looking for, the cross platform support from Unity but a more 'pure code' framework.

To start with I selected a square 16 pixel font. I then built a small prototype (read: crappy throw away code) that would build a 'map' and put a border around it. The entire game's tileset is using just Ascii code page 437 in a single spritesheet. In fact, I grabbed 'Something Boxy' by Rogue Yun, on the Dwarf Fortress wiki: https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/File:16x16_sb_ascii.png

More tomorrow!