June 7, 2022 - Working on Damband (and what is Damband?)

After finishing up my last DOS game project (Damaniel's Pixel by Number), 
I started thinking about working on the genre of game I've wanted to make 
most - a traditional roguelike game, something along the lines of Angband; 
hence the name Damband.  I've had some design documents floating around for 
a bit, based around the concept of socketed gems providing both the method 
of acquring all skills and stats, and a way for a player to mix and match 
skills to create a hybrid class (with class types determined by the 
proportion of each type of gem the player has).  I've also done a number of 
maze generators over the years, but I've never managed to take the next step 
and actually do something game-like with it.

Rather than target 386+ PCs in protected mode so I could have the extra 
(>640K) memory as a crutch, I've actually decided to stick to text mode and
target PCs all the way down to XT-class machines.  As such, I've had to 
abandon my old standby of DJGPP and pull out a copy of Borland Turbo C++ 
instead.  I've created a basic maze generator that's both fast and very 
light on memory (it pretty much uses one byte per space in the maze - plus 
roughly a dozen bytes of working memory - to do the generation, though the 
final structure will need to be larger to account for things like lighting 
and such), but yet again I haven't taken the next step.  

I think I'll try to actually break through for once and start looking at 
the socket idea again.  My original plan was to allow arbitrary rotation 
of different sized and shaped gems to fit in a single box, but I may need 
to scale that back to better fit in a more resource-constrained environment.