The mosque of Brynhild is the tallest cathedral I found. I'm playing with a self imposed rule to use as little number of pitons and ropes as possible, I also shoot pitons only as last resort and only horizontaly not upwards (I had to break this rule three times to reach the top).
Now I'll have to get down collecting my gear, in the middle is a small crawl passage that I will follow.
Thanks for your kind words. I am glad to hear that you're really enjoying the game!
It's true that development of Lone Spelunker has slowed down quite a bit. Things like having a day job and participating in the #7DRL take their toll.
The "current build" of the game is the one that's up on the site, actually. There is no active "beta team" any more since the site has pretty much gone live. I'm still throttling the number of player accounts because of bandwidth costs; I give the game away for free and all, so I need to defend against a skyrocketing bandwidth bill, even if it would be in the realm of "nice problems to have". But it's essentially feature complete at this stage.
I would like to revisit the game someday and delve a little deeper into the mechanics, if you'll pardon the pun. At this stage, though, I'd need to come up with some kind of compelling addition to the core game loop that makes that not a waste of everyone's time. I've had lots of ideas, but few of them seem very feasible.
I've thought about a new version of the game that actually models the water flow through the limestone to create the caves, but short of being an interesting simulation programming exercise, I'm not sure whether it would do anything to actually improve the gameplay. It would let you do a few new things like release dye into water and see where it comes out, but it would also likely reduce the "storytelling" of the cave generator, and I'm not sure that's a great tradeoff for anyone except a hard-core geology student.
I've tinkered with having it generate a 3D cave instead of a 2D cave, which I thought sounded awesome, but frankly, the experiments I have done have not felt as compelling as the 2D version. Maybe I'll come up with a brilliant way to solve those problems, but exploring the caves in 3D just felt tedious and confusing, and it would certainly drive the game into even more of a niche status than it already is, so it feels like that's kind of a dead end, development-wise.
Another idea I've had is to try to make a more "console-like" version of the game that is game controller friendly and would appeal to more casual gamers. That would require graphics, though, and while I can make some passable art, it would be a pretty huge endeavor since I'd be struggling the entire time. I'm not even sure I could do justice to the caves I'd be constructing. When you walk through Carlsbad Caverns and see the actual speleothems, and think about drawing tiles that could capture that impression even remotely, it just seems like a pretty herculean task.
A final idea I had was to try to make multiplayer caves, where you could explore them as a team. This could re-use a lot of the existing structure and gameplay, which is good, but multiplayer stuff is notoriously hard, and it would require hosting those servers, both of which are solidly outside my bailiwick. Again, like with art, I'm not sure I could do that properly.
Regardless, thanks for taking the time to say you enjoy the game. If anything gets me back into strident development of Lone Spelunker, it will be knowing there are fans out there actually enjoying it.
Happy caving!
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Topic: Lone Spelunker - roguelike speleologist simulator (Read 2734 times)