Hotel Solipcyst - Official Teaser Trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYWCLx9pKiA

Well, there it is. The culmination of another summer's work. Thanks to Paperjack for post-processing the audio, and sorry for my horrid narration.

Well, as I've hinted, I start college in a few days. The time I've spent on MnemonicRL has been drastically dropping even before this point. Basically, the project is being shelved for now. All along, I haven't developed to create a game people would enjoy. I don't game much myself anymore. The fun in this for me is playing around with algorithms for monster behavior or dungeon generator, or dabbling in procedural animation or networking. Even some level design forces itself out every once in a while.

I've never enjoyed the step from transforming a tech demo into a game, though. The code for combat's there, I made up visual effects and rules for many attacks, but when it came time to get the numbers right for leveling and damage and such, I quickly grew bored. With Hotel Solipcyst, I tried to replace combat with other gameplay elements -- exploration, dialogue, treasure hunting, even a version of Snake where you herd a guest's unraveling thoughts into new patterns. But after implementation, tweaking them to be fun to play was again a boring task to me.

So the lesson I've learned through all these years of off-and-on roguelike development: I can't do this alone. Thankfully I'm about to be surrounded by a large group of wonderful, talented new people. I've never done a team project before for lack of a partner, but I look forward to it. Therefore, this is not my parting message from rgrd or game development. I am much more interested in simulating traffic than developing games, but thankfully games (or at least game-like things) happen to be a great place to showcase and play around with new algorithms. The next project will come, just maybe without masquerading as a game.

Thanks for reading, unknown readers. It's been a fun trip. I'll keep this blog updated with my exploits at UT Austin. Until then,

~ Dustin / Da-Breegster

Quick update

Hrmm, I'm really not good at this. In the last few weeks, I've been preparing to move, working with my company on web development (of the server-side sort, of course), and -- yes! -- filming the trailer. It's in "post production" now, I guess, which means that I have to record the narration, or sucker somebody with a better voice and no lisp to do it for me. Overall, it hasn't turned out anywhere near as good as the first did last summer. But I'll explain more in my message with the trailer... which should release in two or three days guaranteed (because after that, I won't have time for this sort of optional project.) Woo!