Re: Angband: Maintain or Develop?

"Andi Sidwell" <andi@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:6tuck3FceigkU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

I spent a few hours over the last day or so writing a little article about my views on the future of Angband. I thought I should probably post it here for people to read, otherwise it would be a bit of a wasted effort. :)

http://takkaria.org/angband-develop-or-maintain.html

I expect that it will be slightly more controversial here than it will be on the forum, for whatever reason.

No controversy here - thanks for a really interesting article. I think the only one of your five goals which may be a little ambitious is the one about new players. While it is clearly helpful to have a better interface, prettier graphics etc. etc., Angband remains a complex turn-based game in a world of shiny shallow real-time games. Angband will only ever appeal to the sort of people who played D&D in the 80s and 90s (or would have done if they had been around then). That's my slightly crusty view, anyway, though I'm very happy to be proved wrong.

I'm particularly keen on your second goal, porting to handhelds. Another poster mentioned that SDL exists for the PSP; there is also an SDL version for Symbian S60, which is the 'other' dominant smartphone OS (other than Windoze Mobile). For all I know SDL may exist on Windows Mobile too. So if we focus on improving and abstracting the SDL port to the extent that the game can run on smartphones, that really might get you a whole new player base (Angband is way more interesting than most available phone games, which is not true on most other platforms).

(The alternative to SDL is a Java port, as almost all handhelds run it, but I suspect that's a lot more hassle.)

Finally, while reading your article I had an epiphany about TMJ and The Game Of Shopping: why not just get rid of stores entirely? Get item generation right and there's no need for them. Or, if that's too extreme, consider reducing them to a single store (and the home for storing stuff). The proportion of stuff in stores that anybody actually buys is minute (oil, ammo, !CCW, ?WoR, _tSelf etc. etc.), so I'm sure it could be adequately offered in a single shop (guaranteed stock of the usual items, with a small rotating selection of "interesting" items).

Ok so it won't fly. But thanks for the inspiration.

Keep up the good work,

CC

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Relevant Pages

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