From Julian Cochran's memoir.
13 January 2020Monaco
This last week I concentrated mostly on Xalaria during the day until quite late hours, often staying late at the Café de Paris, five minutes from my apartment, and then returning home to compose through the night. The game requires an extraordinary degree of creativity, and feels very rewarding to design and programme as each day passes.
14 March 2020
Already it is playable. The stars, planets and their life are described; there is navigation between worlds, planetary maps and star maps showing the player's path, robot players, communication between players, and asking for and sharing identification. There is conflict between robots and human players, shopping at space stations for weapons and vessels, and trading, with prices that fall as a commodity is traded and drift over time. There are the four alliances, with your standing with each earned by your actions, and conflict with space stations, which release their security vessels. There is the graveyard, with epitaphs and achievements when a game ends. You can log in on one device and continue on another, and the pictures of planets match their descriptions. Still to do are mining, interaction with life, and the alliance and cultural quests.
All of the programming is on the server, so each kind of device needs virtually no work of its own. Business applications take this approach all the time, but it would not surprise me if there is no other game in existence that has taken it to this extreme.
13 September 2020
My goal has been to define a finishing point at which the game is compelling, but without excessive detail. Details can be like the geometry of a fractal, so I have aimed to get the basic shape right without becoming lost in the edges. Over the last month I added recharging fuel from the stars; gifts of money between human and robot players to make peace, with your cultural experience affecting the outcome; cargo carried by robot players, and debris left by destroyed vessels that may contain it; demanding cargo, which is more likely to be granted when the other vessel is almost destroyed; and robot players of a more predatory character, who ask for your identification far more often and follow you from planet to planet.
8 October 2020
An inspiring milestone. I have finished the programming for a complete version of the game, with all the features present for a beginning, a middle and an end. I have not yet played it to refine the probabilities and proportions that make it balanced, which will take an enormous amount of time, but the programming itself is complete, at sixteen thousand lines.
24 October 2020
For the first time some balance is entering the game, so that it is becoming fun to play, which, obvious as it sounds, is the overriding goal. There are several hundred equations, each with no definitive optimum except to make the game balanced and fun.
For example, robots ask to identify each other, and if refused they can become aggressive, just as when a human asks a robot. But robots that started from the same station were all asking each other, and becoming far too aggressive, so in the last minute I added an exception. Or if a robot demands your cargo, you drop it, and it calms down and prepares to pick it up; but if you then pick up any of your own cargo, it becomes hostile every time. Such specific cases sometimes take a minute to programme, but I am constantly adding them as I play.
When I programmed D-Zone at eighteen, more than half of the time went into this pursuit. Xalaria has far greater depth, so I expect the same, but thankfully it is a case of changing the game from fun to more fun.
27 February 2021
Eleven quests are now in the game, and I plan three kinds of robot assistant to be found in junkyards, a nurse, a mechanic and a cleaner. Turned on, they reveal their idiosyncrasies. The nurse says, Do you know, it is time to check your blood pressure. Please show me your arm,
and answering "No" brings repeated moralising until she is turned off: How you need me to care for you. You are not always well behaved.
The robots also occasionally do something of great value, such as a mechanic asking to tinker with damaged weapons to repair them.
3 April 2021
Xalaria is now over 22 thousand lines. My 2004 D-Zone II, with far more sophisticated graphics than the original, was 60 thousand. Over many years Xalaria may well become longer than any other project of mine, because being text-based makes it future-proof.
3 September 2021
I have completed the first release of Xalaria. It is, in a sense, the culmination of my earlier efforts to write a deep and complex computer game, starting with the role-playing Xalaria of 1991, lost when my computer was stolen a year before I released D-Zone. It could even be thought of as a completion of that game, a large, highly original role-playing game requiring numerous years of attention.
I will keep it in the browser for now, so that anyone can play it, on a computer or a phone. Persistence will be far more important than intensity, and I designed the game to be text-based to be consistent with that. As with D-Zone in 1992, the game will initially be free.
3 February 2022
I am glad to have completed it, because it was a major goal from as early as the year 2000, more than two decades ago. I very much believe in eventually completing projects that are started, even if they are put on hold at various stages.