So… first post… what is this?

This is where I will be keeping myself and anyone who is interested up to date with the latest on my development of CALIBAN: The File System Survival Game.

Every so often, I will post a public download of the latest and greatest version for anyone to try and give feedback on. I do not plan to ship, sell or make myself famous with this project, I am only driven by the desire to see it done (as I do not know of any prior attempts by anybody).

So… What is a “file system survival game”? Great question… I’m not really sure either. Let’s find out together! But I do know this much:

• A vast desert of folders will be created at run-time on your machine.
• You must explore this desert while limited by either a timer, or a certain number of clicks, or any combination of similarly restrictive mechanics.
• Multiple pieces of supporting software will be involved, all running in their own windows/processes and will communicate with each other via TCP sockets.
• The main core will be written in C# with supporting softwares written in C++ and C.
• Any treasures you find along the way may be placed in your inventory folder and brought back to the market to sell and hopefully earn enough to buy some better folder navigation equipment to venture deeper into the file system desert.
• Some treasures will persist outside of the game as desktop trophies and music boxes and other permanent one-of-a-kind artdisks.
• Any attempt to cheat, hack or otherwise break the game will be severely punished (nothing actually destructive, probably the deletion of all progress).
• There will be a real-time combat system (I’ll explain my combat system in future posts).
• The game will be complete-able.
• There will be mystery, betrayal, intrigue and devastation.
• It will be cross-platform (I’ll finally make something for Mac users!)

In the coming days, I will give a preview into the systems I have written so far and some code snippets, and will post the very first demo at the end of the week.

Sound fun? Great.

My next post will be my inspirations and a kind of mood-board for looks, mechanics, themes and features.

Thanks for tuning in.

Till next time - M