Furtual Rabbit was my first game in a year. It was revealing how out of practice I had gotten. It might be time to start doing more One Hour Game Jams. On the other hand, I got a lot of experience with computer graphics and simulation techniques which was my main focus during the academic year.
So what will I focus on this coming year? On the top of the backlog is getting some graphics research written up and sent to journals. Next up is improving my LibXOR library for #GameDev so that I can prepare for a 7DRL. And one last goal for good measure is creating a real-time ray tracer to go with my Unicornfish network rendering concept. For this blog post, I will talk about the latter two in a bit more detail.
The 7 Day Roguelike Challenge (7DRL.com) happens in early March. Roguelikes are inspired by the game Rogue. They often feature some combination of turn-based gameplay, grid-based environments, permadeath, and procedurally generated levels. What would mine look like? Topologically speaking, I want a procedurally generated overworld and fairly shallow levels with keyed off areas. I have some concepts in my head how they might play out, but I need to work on some prototypes first.
And finally, graphics wise I want to experiment with Realtime Ray Tracing and to that extent, I want to integrate it with my network rendering API Unicornfish. This means that I need to start decoupling it from the Fluxions Library. There is a lot of work to be done in that department, so I will need to spend some time charting out how the library works. There are a lot of TODOs on the current backlog, so this coming year will be quite busy, but perhaps I can drive two publications out of all that work.
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