I guess every Angband variant maintainer has their own reasons for making a variant. In my case, one of the chief things that attracted me to Angband in the first place was a deep and lifelong love of the entire Tolkien Middle-earth mythology. Given that, the main theme that I pursued - immersion in Middle-earth - was an easy choice. So I made my variant.
The thing I was unprepared for was the interaction with players. I already knew that Angband had a vibrant, interesting community; but the thing that has kept me maintaining is that other people have actually enjoyed the thing I do for my own enjoyment.
Two things stand out for me. One is the long developing collaboration I have had with Si Griffin - starting with the Windows CE port of FA, and including a release (v0.3.6) by Si rather than me.
The second one, which needs no further comment, is this.
I do this because I was alway going to be weird and creative and programming forces me to be weird and creative in a way that is correct about the way things (or at least C programming) really are...
ReplyDeleteI do it because... well, I always enjoyed roguelikes (though my first one was actually Nethack, I grew to prefer Angband, despite the first angband variant I came across being Mangband, and I didn't have an internet connection at the time, and I didn't understand it was a MULTIPLAYER variant :P)...
ReplyDeleteAnd also because Multiband reappeared recently, but its UI is so outdated I thought I'd see if I could add multiclassing to a more modern version of angband...
And also to relearn some C... it's not as bad as I'd thought! Maybe it was C++ that was the really ugly one... or maybe Angband code is just that well maintained! :D
@Ed - yes, it's C++ that's the ugly one :)
ReplyDelete