The good old days.

A recent post on rec.game.roguelike.development asked how long every has been posting on the newsgroup. While I haven't been active on that news group, I did have a quick look at my involvement on rec.games.roguelike.angband, where I have been posting for some time.

A quick search on google revealed two of my earliest posts: one of which is a statement of what I'd want Angband to become, dated June 23, 1995, and looking back looks almost like a manifesto for Unangband. I'll repost some of this here; it makes interesting reading:

Basically, I would like to see a bigger variety of rooms and corridors espec-
ially at deeper levels, including:
* big pits, rooms which are filled with a big pit, bridges over pits etc.
* huge rooms, natural caverns, corridors which are 2 or 3 wide, long hallways,
pillars scattered about big rooms, big doors (if possible)
* statues, fountains, thrones, pedestals, gates, and other dungeon furnishings
* trapped doors, trapped furnishings, traps which activate for a wider variety
of effects (create traps anyone), hidden compartments which are handled as
traps but when disarmed create a GOOD or EXCELLENT drop
* more varieties of rooms within rooms, pits within rooms, rooms within pits,
to the point where some rooms will start to resemble the town level with LOTS
of monsters swarming around
* floor coverings, water, fog, mud, lava, creatures which are invisible in water
(ie SWIM)
* when monsters are generated on pits, they come from deeper levels ("It crawls
out of the pit.") and are not restricted to 25+ distance away. This restriction
shoud also be lifted for teleporting monsters.

Basically, I want the thrill of exploring to be heightened.

The other was a feature request for Angband, dated June 2, 1995. I ended up coding this in Unangband: if I recall correctly, it involved changing a total of 2 variable assignments in one procedure and was adopted by Angband. The version that adopted it: Angband 3.0.5, released on the 23rd of May, 2004.