I’m sorry.. I lied. My previous post dated back at the beginning of the year saying I should post more.. and here we are in October and nothing has been posted.

I have been busy though. I’ve been involved in an open source project called pioneer. It is a open ended space simulator set in the milky way in the 31st century. If you have played previous games such as Frontier: Elite II then it should be rather familiar.

What has my role been with the project? Well since my primary machine is running OSX, and at the time (back in April 2011) the project didn’t have an OSX port, I ported pioneer to OSX. I have also done some tinkering with the engine and testing with the dev team.

You can always download the latest version of pioneer (as of this post, alpha15 was just released) – If you want bleeding edge we also do a nightly dev build.

On a final note, I do intend to write more up on my blog.. not that my ‘promise’ means much.

It is an ASCII roguelike game that has a number of different modes. There is an adventurer mode, which is similar to the classic nethack games, but there is also a Dwarf Fortress mode, which allows you to build and design a fortress.

It is like the old dungeon keeper PC game, but with ASCII, and far more detailed (and addictive).

Ok, the graphics are pretty ordinary (it’s ASCII), but if you go to the wiki you will find heaps of information on how to customize your screen with graphics, as well as lots of hints and tips to play.

You start by first creating your own little world, creating mountains, rivers, lakes, forests, and then it populates the game with cities, heros, legends.. 200 years of history.

So far, I’ve lost many a fortress to those pesky goblins, but I’ll build up one to the likes of Moria without getting too deep for the lucrative adamantine.

Each time you lose a fortress, it saves the world state, so you can always go back to your existing fortresses as an adventurer and recover all your stuff.

It just proves that you don’t need fancy graphics or mass marketing to make an enjoyable game – it is all about the gameplay and replay.