Vapourtek Theatre

Download

Current version: 1.1
http://sinoth.net/code/vapourtek_theatre_7drl.zip

Description

A steampunk themed multiplayer tactical RPG made during the 2010 7DRL competition. ( announce, success )

Postmortem

This is buub0nik and I's third 7DRL, and we yet again chose to use lib-tcod. It does what we want without too much fuss. We used a custom UI library for simple stuff like lists and message boxes. As far as the server is concerned, we used a socket class I made for CollabRL (sinsocket) and used mySQL as our database.

I enjoyed using mySQL/mysql++ much more than sqlite. sqlite is cute and all, but even for CollabRL I quickly outgrew it. sqlite simply cannot handle large databases efficiently. Granted, that is not it's intended use case, but my DBs were not THAT big... maybe ten-thousand rows. mySQL also has much better tools for monitoring memory/CPU usage of the DB.

Like always, we had to cut a bunch of features at the last minute and forgo extensive playtesting. As a result the game is imbalanced and well, not fun. For this reason we consider it a tech-demo rather than a game. I'm not very happy about this, but still glad we made the progress we did. The project was technically challenging and we achieved most of our major milestones. The multiplayer lobby works, as well as the game create/join system. We also understand better the intricacies involved in making a TRPG.

For future projects I'd like to have more time for polish. I'm comfortable with our technical skills and ability to design game engines, but we still have yet to properly balance and polish a game. Here's hoping our next few projects remedy this :)

Screenshots