Dev Blog - October 2020

progress-updaterpgtoolkit October 03, 2020

Hello & welcome! Wow, this is my first blog on the RPGWizard, I regret not starting them much earlier, there is so much useful information to talk about!

Firstly, this site is the new home of the RPGWizard and its really nice, its all hosted as a Jekyll Blog on GitHub Pages , so publishing new content like this blog is so much easier than before, and its free! There is even an integration with GitHub comments, you’ll have to accept the cookies on this site to see them though.

Anyway, onto the meat of this blog, what is going to happen with the RPGWizard over the remainder of 2020?

Future Release v1.8.0

I expect work on the next version of the RPGWizard to begin later this month, as things stand there are 15 open issues to address. Most of these are expansion to the RPGCode API, tweaks to the engine, and a few bugs, here and there. My guesstimate on a release date would be December or January 2021, hopefully I’ll also release monthly dev blogs on my progress!

My plan is for v1.8.0 to be the last major update to RPGWizard 1.x, after that it will effectively go into maintenance mode. There will still be minor releases, mostly focused on bug fixes, and additions to the RPGCode API on a case-by-case basis.

I want to shift my attention to the next iteration of RPGWizard, which will take things in a slightly different direction, more on that in a future post.

Next I want to talk about a nostalgic research project I’m going to be working on.

RPGToolkit Museum

For anyone who has been following my dev activities since maybe… 2012, you’ll know that I spent a lot of time working with RPGToolkit. Back then I was a college student learning as much as I could about game engine dev, working on the TK4 editor on my lunch breaks. There is one last toolkit project I want to undertake which is to research and record its inception, rise, and gradual decline, as part of a RPGToolkit Museum on this site.

At the moment the idea is basically to look at each era of the RPGToolkit as part of a research project focused on studying the growth and decline of a community around a game engine. I plan to use publicly available information from the Internet Archive, GitHub, and other sources, within their Terms of Use.

As Data Science is another interest of mine, I hope to do it justice. I plan to look at the frequency of TK releases, number of active users, games released, etc., in order to establish how the community faired over the 18 years it existed on the WWW.

There is a lot of information trapped in the Internet Archive, so I hope to bring forward some really interesting nostalgic snippets too!

"File:Noun project - Museum Visit.svg" by Luis Prado is licensed under CC BY 3.0

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