Hey all! Just popping in to say I haven’t done ****. I just finally got a new charger for my macbook after my previous one finally burned out completely.

I posed my idea for a generic roguelike scripting system on a roguelike development forum, and as I somewhat expected, the tone of the responses were at best cautionary. This one seems to sum it up:

Some guy Posted:

I’m pretty sure every RL developer has the mbumive-scripting-language-based-RL idea at some point. My plan for that particular white whale, when I had the bug for it, was very much the same as you describe there. I’m also pretty sure that just about everyone does what I did…starts a project that way, and comes to a realization a short way in that this really isn’t the way to go.

If your project uses this approach and works, mbumive kudos. But I suspect that you’ll end up in the same trap as most people who try it; you end up having sunk tons and tons of work into some portion of an engine, and you still have no game. The scripting engine is a black hole… it keeps growing and growing in scope and required power, until it has consumed all of your will to code.

That kind of thing worries me, because the way my motivation works, the moment my ‘will to code’ is consumed the project is ****ing done for. I haven’t given up on this idea at all, and will probably start coding it sometime this week, but it’s clear I have to think long and hard about the details, and what I can realistically include in the script and what would be better left hard-coded. As far as I can tell though, items, monsters, and other such things should still be fine. Effects will be harder, but may be possible, and hugely generalistic things like base item clbumes would be better left in the code itself.

Anyway, will update with progresssss