200th post

Well, this is the 200th post in Ascii Dreams. I never expected to make it this far.

(It's actually the 201st post, but that's because Blogspot doesn't quite have the flexibility of Moveable Type, so articles I'm still working on count towards the total).

I'd like to thank everyone who's provided feedback so far and who've been generous enough to link to me. I think I have the mix of original articles about roguelikes and game design / game mechanics about right, as well as the various 'link-to' posts that point out what other people in the world of game design, and specifically roguelikes, are writing about.

I'm a little worried that starting this blog has taken actual development time away from Unangband. This is undoubtedly true: but then I read a ladder post where someone discusses the difficulty of a particular level ecology, and I realise that maintaining this blog is as much value towards developing the game, as actually writing code.

(At least, you should always write code first, then write about it.)

I've got a large list of article ideas still: that fall into two camps - specific to rogue-likes and general game design. What will happen moving forward, is that the rogue-like and Unangband articles will continue on this blog, and the more general game-design articles will end up at my column 'The Amateur' on GameSetWatch.

Hopefully this will address a criticism that this blog is less of a roguelike developers diary and becoming more of a general chatting about games blog. I can see why that criticism is being made, but I'd argue that there is a huge potential for cross-pollination of ideas in games design and that writing a roguelike is a great way to learn about game design in general.

Thanks also for putting up with me learning when to place the apostrophe in it's, and watch me still making up my mind whether it's roguelikes or rogue-likes.

Now I'd like to hear from you about what you want from this blog. More polls, more game reviews, more articles about Unangband, or roguelikes in general? What were your favourite articles, and what did you find less than useful? Should I stop or keep going for another year?