Introduction

Since I was very small I've always loved role-playing games, computer games as well as tabletop games such as Dungeons & Dragons. I've been interested in game development for a very long time too, and done rather a lot of programming.

There's been one thing that's been preventing me from developing my very own game though, and that is motivation. As soon as I'd hit a climbable brick wall I would hide and put my project down, sometimes for a long time until spiders would spin webs on them and they're all covered in dust, ready for the trash can. Now I have decided to finally overcome this problem of mine and produce my own game. So I've set up, what I find, to be a pretty reasonable project for my self that I am pretty confident I can overcome, with some quite hefty problems to solve. I will set deadlines for myself at the end of each week and hopefully update this journal with what's been accomplished during the past week.

In lack of a better name, I've come up with a project name out of the blue: RPG4. To describe this blank canvas, here's a small list of features which I would like to implement into this game.

• Turn-based movement and combat with a lot of strategic planning and ingenious use of your resources.
• Randomly generated maps along with handmade maps and the ability to create your own maps.
• An extensive skill and ability system, allowing you to advance your character in a range of branches. Not just some arbitrary increase in a stat, but skills and abilities that actually do something unique and gives your character... well, character.
• Permanent death. Although the game will be quite hard, dying will not be the first escape you can take. I don't want to cater the game to just hardcore players, but casual players as well that might not think dying of unexpected and / or random causes is very fun. Being able to escape death with other penalties some times also allows me to include a more skills and items to equip your character to the teeth with.

These are some of the features that I think would fit good into the game. To give a more general overlook of the game, some perfect examples of games that I might find inspiration from would be Baldur's Gate, Morrowind and Dungeons of Dredmor.

My goals until next week

• Write a comprehensive design document of the fundamental inner workings of the game, such as how the maps and movement will work.
• Set up a loose plan for the following weeks on what should be done.
• Not start coding something that's not really thought through...

I hope this will be an interesting journey for both me and whoever might decide to follow this journal, and I hope I will be able to produce something that will bring joy to at least some people.