Mod Souls: Prepare To Die

I keep wanting to write a blog post, but things keep happening. So, I’m going to slam together this small one to address a few things, including a commission I took, my change of projects, and game modding.

First, I’ve taken a commission to write some articles for a friend - it’s low paying, but I’m fine with that, because at this point any help I can get for my finances is important. You can see the first submitted article, about NetHack, here. I’m quite proud of it, actually, and I showed it to someone today (a job search agency contact), and he was legitimately impressed. So, yay!

Second, after trying a library called libtcod for a couple of hours, I realized it was exactly what I wanted to do for my next game. I was building Toy in the hopes of using that for the same purpose, but after 7 months of the rewrite I’m worn down, so it’s time to work on a game proper. I will come back to Toy eventually, but for now, it’s shelved.

Third, I’ve taken an interest in game mods - this has been brewing for a bit, but I’ve never actually modded much outside of early Minecraft, and I’ve never really written a mod of my own. My interests are more academic for the moment, but I can feel that a heavily moddable game lies somewhere in my future.

Finally, My new project will be using libtcod, and I’ll also be writing articles to fulfill that commission. I’m particularly interested in the “fun value” used by Undertale, which assigns a random immutable value between 1 and 100 at the beginning of the game and enables certain secrets based on the value. That sounds like something I could explore using the roguelike format.

I’ll need to codify the playtest notes from the Curses and Blessings playtests - there’s a pair of recordings in a Dropbox folder, and I’ve gotten verbal permission to post these. This is low priority for now though, as CaB is a side project that I can fiddle with on a causal basis. For now, I gotta focus on my main tasks, specifically, fulfilling the commission.

Edit: “Oh, I think I should add a search bar, should only take 10 minutes.” FOUR HOURS LATER, it’s now 1am, and it still doesn’t work. Why do I do this to myself?

When I’m not falling behind schedule, I can usually be found on Bluesky or Discord. I also have a Patreon, which has extremely outdated graphics, wow.