Links: Burnout, and Dungeons

I've spent the last week moving from Washington to California, so not much progress on any front. I do have some links of interest to post.

First, a nice post by Andrew Doull on burnout, and the avoidance thereof:

http://roguelikedeveloper.blogspot.com/2009/06/day-in-life-of-roguelike-developer.html

While he's talking specifically about roguelike development, I found it very applicable to indie game development. Hitting burnout is a reality for indie developers; it's just natural to feel some malaise when working on a project, in your spare time, for months if not years. My particular flavor is to want to move on to the next project with the current project incomplete, but there are certainly other types of burnout that I hit sometimes too. Andrew has a good set of tips (starting with "Burnout is a natural part of the creative cycle, and something you should take in your stride. It's not the end of the world, or coding, as you know it."); definitely a worthwhile read.

The next set of links are on dungeon/level design. I found all of these interesting an informative, and while I'm not in a level designing phase right now, I wanted to save them around for when I am.

A really nice post by Melan on the Enworld forums "Dungeon layout, map flow and old school game design":

http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/168563-dungeon-layout-map-flow-old-school-game-design.html

A good set of resources for developing urban levels, from Paul the Ink Knight:

http://inkknight.blogspot.com/2009/04/free-urban-adventure-resources.html

Last, a couple of posts by Coyote on dungeon design:

http://rampantgames.com/blog/2009/06/rpg-design-somebody-call-dungeon.html
http://rampantgames.com/blog/2009/06/dungeon-makeover-extreme-edition.html

That's all for now. I'm currently working on incorporating Lua as the scripting language for SENG, replacing my existing LISP-like language. It seems pretty easy to do, though the documentation is scattered enough that I may write up a quick tutorial on how I did things. Now, if I can just get some more boxes unpacked, maybe I can take a break and actually work on it...