A Writer's journey into game development

Last august a good old friend passed away. Was a tough season for me, for many reasons, and receiving news of his death was another reason to feel sad. I decided to honor him playing a bit of Heroes of Might and Magic, a really old TBS game he liked a lot. I was a fan of it too, I even had a Linux version, created by Loki Games. HoMM is fun, but I have a serious complaint about it that makes me leave it for long seasons: its AI cheats. All game AI cheat in some way, but HoMM AI shameless throws you dozens of enemy heroes with insane armies, when you struggle to build two armies. You destroy two heroes and suddenly you have two more from the same AI player, with large armies, knocking at your door. The AI not only knows what castles are defenseless (Freeciv AI does that), but also gives computer controlled players unlimited supply of gold, I think. Annoying.

A brief post to let you know that I have updated my old project: The Key of the World , an open source isometric 3D RPG. Depending on how busy (or not) are the next days/months, I will fix some big mistakes I made during development. The source code can be found in Github , and can be used for learning purposes, forked, or whatever the license permits. Here is a short video of the game in action:

I have been working lately to add controller support to my both projects. I made some basic tests long time ago, using my joystick, but a week ago a friend kindly provided me an Xbox 360 controller. Then, the true work started. After a brief phase of "I have no idea about how to do it", and after that "probably there is something in youtube" (there was), I managed to put some basic support, first on character movement, you can see it in the Labyrinth gameplay video, which was recording while I played using the controller. As a side effect, Im thinking to change the gameplay mechanics of my 3rd person prototype to camera freelook, like Mass Effect/Witcher. Then, I began to extend controller support to the UI. Things are not so easy here, because I had to rethink the design of many interface elements. Also, moving through buttons requires to reinterpret  axis events as button events. I plan to finish all the tests this week, return the controller to its owner, ...