The Ebonheim Chronicle

It's been quiet here! In the spirit of the last post, I figured I would drop in and write down the current status of the game.

Where have you been?

As with the year prior, I burned myself out pretty hard from spring through summer right into autumn and was feeling very tired by the end of the year. My stated goal of having a new playtest milestone shipped before the end of the year became less and less likely as that date approached and I started to feel disillusioned with any potential timeframe I could set. I was feeling discouraged by this and suddenly all of the pending tasks felt arduous and tedious and I worked on it less and less.

By January, I had fully settled into a now-traditional winter gamedev break. In November of 2023 I got into Armored Core 7 and then Dwarf Fortress and allowed myself to take some time away from my game project and focus on other things. This then coincided with a lot of life troubles that ate up most of my bandwidth and so I didn't end up picking the game back up until the following April.

This year was very similar! I played a lot of the excellent Caves of Qud and then had a lot of life troubles that needed my focus. The political climate in the United States also ultimately resulted in my being completely absent from all social media for about 4 months, which I highly recommend if you get the chance.

Side Project: Dungeon Puzzle Sweeper

In mid-January I became obsessed with the very-good Dragonsweeper which ate up a lot of work hours. I really wanted a version I could easily play on mobile and I wanted high scores and time leaderboards, so I decided to make one!

I cloned the v1 of the game fairly faithfully in the chronicles EGA engine and got it running in web browsers using emscripten and wasm. I implemented a wave-form-collapse constraint propagation algorithm for generating the board which was a fairly huge improvement over the original game's method.

I kept updating the game for about a month and had quite a few people on Mastodon and Bluesky playing it and posting times! It was great fun and a nice distraction from my larger game project. I felt on-the-fence about publishing a game that just clones the 1.0 of Dragonsweeper and wasn't sure what to do. I also needed to create new art to really make the version complete and these two things together led me to drag my feet on the project.

Around this time, life troubles and political climate swept into full force and I retreated more fully into silence.

You can play my Dragonsweeper clone here on my website if you'd like! It's optimized for mobile, doesnt eat your battery, and you can compete with your friends for your best time! I dont know what, if anything, will ever come with this cool little thing.

Returning to Chronicles

On April 22, I returned to online and over the next few weeks started trying to make a plan for continuing development. There has been a lot of work that I would love to make some technical write-ups for but mostly I've been posting my progress as usual on Mastodon.

A lot of great new progress has been since then as I've built up more and more momentum:

1. Fixed-Point: I've needed a way to model non-integers in the game for a few things such that the game is still purely deterministic and not prone to floating point error so this was the first thing I did. I used this to fix some viewport/camera stuttering issues the game always had!
2. Smoke Wall: One of the nearly 30 new abilities I built using my asset editors in April.
3. Tile Target Animation Cascasding: An architecture change that lets me sync up ability actions better.
4. Tile Schema Elemental Interactions: This has been a big thorn in my side since last year. You need to be able to use water on torches to put them out and that works now along with a ton of other cool things this enables.
5. New Enemy Art
6. Single-Tile-Wide Wall Lighting Fix: Another forever bug that I was ignoring for a long time and finally have a good fix for
7. New Tree Art
8. Fixing Shadowcasting: This is maybe top of the list for a more detailed write-up. My lighting algorithm ahs had edge cases problems forever and I finally sacrificed a weekend to building an interactive editor and understanding the underlying math to finally fix it for good.

On the Future

When it comes to having a timeframe in mind for a next milestone release, it's fairly far from my thoughts at this point.

As I've settled back into the game I'm discovering that my mental model for how close I was to having something ready to hand off was completely delusional. Yes I had enough that I could comment out some unfinished things and throw some maps together like I did with the first playtest, but my original desire for what I wanted the next demo to be is still a ways off. I think I was really fooling myself about how much work was left in the “just make a dungeon” to-do item.

Being completely offline for such a long time has also really helped me to now see how much I had slid into some really self-destructive behavior. When I started the game, I had no timeframe in mind and it was just something to fiddle and tweak in my spare time. I mostly enjoyed having technical accomplishments to write up here for other developers to hopefully get something out of.

As time went on, however, I sank deeper into a hustle mindset for creating online content for showing the game off. I always needed to make some new screenshot or gif or get it out there into people's feeds and hashtags. And there's nothing necessarily wrong with this, but I also started to put more and more weight on the release schedule I was putting together so that I could get it out and selling. I think these are things that are important to do for selling your video game but it was also really turning the project into a very negative thing in my life.

Now coming back and seeing the broad broad broad field of titles being produced by countless people, the idea of finding any sort of audience for if Chronicles ever actually ships has started to feel futile.

But I think the thing I've noticed is that being away as long as I have has cured me somewhat of these realities as stressors.

I'm really just back to fixing engine issues, creating new architecture, and getting excited all over again about new enemies, new abilities, new content, new features.

It was very eye-opening to be fully back into the development saddle and then realize that I had at no point even thought about setting a new release date for myself.

I absolutely will be sending copies of the next milestone out when it is ready! I can't wait for everyone to see what I've been doing and let me know what they think. I just need to let the game itself tell me how much is left before it's ready 😊

Thank you!

If you read all of this, then you've probably been reading my stuff for a while and I really appreciate you! Stay safe out there and take care of yourselves!

| 🌐 | 🙋‍ | @britown@blog.brianna.town