But I still haven't lost my urge to make a game. In fact, I did make one as a way to get back into the groove. I didn't mention it here because I actually coded it in C. Nothing to brag about, just a simple reimplementation of the A5teroids example that ships with Allegro 5. I wanted to get familiar with the API and get my chops back without the distractions my binding was causing. And that brings me to the topic of this post.
I really, really want to make this game that has been in my head forever. So, now I am. But without Allegro. Instead, I'm going with an ASCII-based approach using SDL2. This is an evolution of the text-based idea I was contemplating a while back. The big difference is that this time, I've got some code to show for it. Also, though it is still in the early stages, it's getting to the point where I'm ready to have a git repo to manage my changes. Rather than just working on a local repo, I decided to bite the bullet and just put everything on github as is. And so, I give you BorderWatch.
One of the reasons I wanted to put it up on github is to give myself a reference to talk about features of D on this blog. Dolce was supposed to fill that role, but I never really felt it was ready for the world. BorderWatch is different, though, and I hope it can serve as a starting point for anyone curious about using D for game development. I can seriously say that after working on even a simple little game like an asteroids clone in C (a language I've used and loved/hated for a very long time), putting one together in D is a much different, and better, world entirely.
Please read the project README before you bother with the code. I'm using my recently implemented SDL2 and SDL2_image bindings from Derelict 3, and no other external libraries. If you want to build the project, you'll have to get the SDL2 and SDL2_image source and compile it all yourself. Also, only DMD and Windows are currently supported.
I do hope to work on this over the coming months as often as I can. I have a lot of ideas for it and it is proving to be a lot of fun so far. It's licensed under the zlib license, so do what you want with it. There's not a whole lot there yet, but what is there allows you to open a 'console' window, print ASCII characters and text strings to the whole window area or specific regions, and there's an effect implemented that can display text strings as a slideshow. Nothing is optimized, nothing is stable. But it's a start.
