Happy Birthday Chronicles IV: II

Today is June 28th which means that two years ago today I decided to try to #gamedev again and made my first commit to a new repo for a new engine attempting (for the fourth time) to make a game with the title “Chronicles IV: Ebonheim“

Past Attempts

I thought it might be fun to talk about some pre-2022 project history and show some never-before-seen development gifs!

sEGA

Back in 2015, I started a new game engine with the constraints of being

In the end I think the most powerful result of that endeavor was reshaping my brain around C. It forced me to learn so much about how code actually works and what is going on and completely revolutionized my coding style and ability.

The EGA emulation came as an idea of trying to create a cool arbitrary limitation on the graphical capabilities because old EGA games is some of the first games I ever played as a kid.

You can access that old engine here!

sEGA Games

The original idea for the engine was a point-and-click adventure title called Borrowed Time (BT) in the repo. I have nothing to show for this except for some scattered design documents but the general premise involved using a pocket watch to traverse over a clockwork Majora's Mask -style slice of time and solve a murder (still waiting for my check from the Obra Dinn devs).

By the time the engine was up and running and the graphics all worked I had “shifted” my idea to a turn-based tactical RPG called Shift which involved going on runs by diving into other planes of existence via D&D-style color pools. This project didn't get a lot further but it was influenced a lot by me being into DotA at the time and attempting to come up with new ways to accomplish complex deterministic combat resolution which was a constant pain point in BladeQuest.

BOMBILLAS.BAS

I used sEGA a little later to make a clone of the old QBASIC game GORILLAS.BAS for the Giant Bomb Game Jam!

You can download and play it here and see it being played by the Giant Bomb staff here!!

Chronicles IV (1)

After taking a break, moving apartments, losing a lot of weight, and getting exceptionally into a tabletop game called Burning Wheel, I had the idea of using sEGA to try and make some kind of Burning Wheel, Morrowind, Ultima, completely unrealistic game.

A big part of the pitch was that the whole game world would have (hundreds of) years worth of history mapped out in scripts. You create a starting character whose background would determine their age and starting location. You would then pick and poke and interact with the world to try and cause the course of history to change to accomplish your goals. It was this incredibly ambitious idea of having an RPG character who could literally grow too old and die of natural causes, where learning new skills took months or years of training.

Despite this idea never really coming together or having much hope of turning into anything, it's something I tinkered and played with for three years. It had no ImGui or in-engine edit UI but I still wanted to do all asset editing in-engine. This lead to creating a Lua console and building the map editor into the running instance. It had very tight lua integration for all of the actors. It's honestly wild to me just how much stuff this tech demo did in the end.

Here's some gifs from that project!

Thank you!

To everyone who has been following this project, it has been a joy to share my game's development with you!

Here's to a great third year!!

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