It’s been about a month or so since my rant about making a game, and I have some updates!

So, to recap, the decision was to make something multiplayer, tailored towards my friends, and also wanted to roll my own stack and have some opportunities for creative writing in there. Not all of those made it in to what’s being currently worked on, but that’s actually ok!

Instead, I took it back to my roots a bit: as mentioned in the previous blog, we have had many attempts to bring back this “wizard connect” game concept basically an arena shooter, but with additional resource management systems built on top. Well, it’s time to take another crack at it! But this time, and this is the first big compromise, I’m not rolling my own.

In developing through the project’s scope, I wanted to do my due diligence and see if it was worth building this in something like s&box instead of from scratch. Use an existing stack, be able to focus more on the game and less on the infrastructure. This ended up being a very good idea, given most of the game’s core features are already shaping up! Wow, only a month and pretty on and off, not too bad of a timeline. The general premise is something of the following:

Two teams of five wizards compete to collect magic and control sources of magic generation on the map. Magic is needed to cast spells, and there’s different colors for different types of spells, and as a wizard you can prepare your spells to fit your needs and what magic colors are available to you. You share a magic reserve with your teammates, so you must work together to make sure magic is available for everyone. First team to collect X units of magic wins.

What’s currently done is:

• Team Management (including resource management)

• Spell Casting

• Point Capturing

• Win Condition calculation

What still needs to be done is:

• Match management (including death + respawn)

• Map creation

• Little UI polish

The plan is to get all of these to a complete but unpolished version to be able to then test with friends. The game will be able to max at 10 people in a match, but we should be able to do with 4-6.

But yea, exciting stuff so far!

New Project: Buibui

Another project in the works lately is a Buibui (https://github.com/ChristopherJMiller/buibui) a Super Mario World ROM Hack Manager. Buibui is supposedly the Japanese name for Reznor, the Rino boss in SMW, but to be honest the only source I could find for it is from the hack Super Buibui World but I’m rolling with it. The source of inspiration for this is I want to get a steam deck soon, and wanted a better interface for managing hacks I wanted to play on it. So, building something that will handle the browsing, downloading, and ROM patching for me, and putting in the effort to make it pretty and effective to navigate on a controller! So far, I’m up to navigating and downloading being a pretty nice experience. A lot of the grunt work was dealing with the fact that the SMW hacking community’s main website, Super Mario World Central, runs on old forum software and has no actual API. So, I got to have a crash course in how hellish web scraping and general HTML querying is. But now that it’s working it’s been great, and definitely an upgrade to be able to hit “Add to Collection” and have the system handle the rest. On track to finish this before picking up a steam deck, waiting on a reburished one to appear at the right time 😃

The whole app is built with Tauri, which is modern frontend tied with a Rust backend in a web container of some sort (platform specific which one it uses). Perfect for me because I like web interface work best, and Rust gives me all the system manipulation and performance I’d ever want.

How am I doing burn out wise?

Juggling two projects can be a bit tricky sometimes, but so far it’s fun. I don’t have timelines or external pressure attached to either of them so I can keep things light. My main concern is day-job work having reasonable amounts of overlap with some of this, so I need to be careful not to double up and actually let myself chill. I’ve been playing a few games to help, curiously in a bit of a rotation (to also prevent burn out in any of them), so we got:

• EVE Online, which I’ve been enjoying mining and exploration

• Path of Exile, slowly playing through the current league with a friend running a Necromancer build

• Old School RuneScape, which is a really nice side monitor game to just fish or mine in while watching a show with my partner

• A little one off matches of games like Dead by Daylight

• And very recently, Baldur’s Gate 3! I played the early access back in university when it originally dropped but starting a new campaign with everything finally in has been lovely