The State of the Dragon (Game)

Since my very simple proof of concept of King Under the Mountain last weekend, I’ve been continuing to work on the game. I can’t promise a releasable version in the near future because this is still a side project of mine, but I’d like to have a playable alpha as soon as possible, so you can pick it up and give me your thoughts.

I am currently experimenting with Unicode support. I have a build option set up that currently toggles this behavior, and I’ve doubled the X width of each display character to accommodate. Surprisingly, this looks great in both modes! But, there’s a problem.

Certain fullwidth characters, such as Emoji, behave badly with my terminal software. Rendering Apple Color Emoji, for example, has a transparency channel that makes Terminal.app look like Swiss cheese, as each character cuts a transparent region out of the back of the window. I haven’t yet found a good way to reconcile this, though it does look substantially better in other terminal software that doesn’t use Apple’s full color equivalents.

That’s my current quandary. My next steps after this are to rewrite the UI and make characters able to interact with one another.

Are these dev posts interesting to you all? I’d love it if you let me know.