From Julian Cochran's memoir, which he has kept since he was a boy. In 1991 he called this game MAGE; it is named here by its present name. His friend Terry is the mathematician Terence Tao.
5 March 1991
I should be at school now, but it's raining heavily and I decided to wait for it to settle before I ride. My programming on Xalaria is going very well. My close friend Terry Tao completed the shadow system last year. We had two-hour programming sessions at his house after school, about twice a week through nearly the whole year, often followed by dinner. Terry wrote the routine that hides blocks out of view, in a similar way to Ultima III. The rest I felt I could do alone.
I've done most of the combat system, besides spells. I had to re-design and re-program it three times, and even now there are a few strange things happening. Perhaps I'm putting too much thought into this program.
The main thing on my mind lately is the programming. I'm always planning new ideas. Even on the way to school I sort out problems, such as unexpected looping in the combat sequence (that one took ages to work out).
8 March 1991
I'm feeling good because I got rid of a major bug. I'm starting to write the detail now, like special abilities with classes. I've still got towns, shops, spells, creature abilities and the whole scenario to do, not to mention all the glossy bits such as support for sound cards.
I think I'll slowly move towards C, bit by bit, until Basic becomes the more foreign. I remember the first large program I wrote, Dungeons of Doom. As a program it was terrible, although it was okay as a simple game. Unfortunately I somehow lost all the copies.
8 May 1991
I'm adding four spell groups: Magic-user with 50 spells, Cleric with 40, Druid with 20 and Illusionist with 20, and also an Alchemist class whose potion-making goes up with level. Magic-users start to create potions at level 8. Potions provide a way for fighter classes to use magic, and raise the strategy.
Each character has about 10 standard attributes and over 30 more, such as resistance, natural healing and curing powers, extra abilities with certain weapons, construction abilities, marksmanship, many thief attributes, infra-red and ultraviolet vision, climbing, and others that give the characters greater individuality. Almost every monster has its own special attack, or more, and they are seldom repeated from one monster to another. I'll have about 500 monsters.
Missions will be simple in structure but will appear more complicated to the player. Four random positions trigger a mission; once the square is entered the mission text appears, and depending on which other squares were entered earlier in the game, organised fights may begin or items may be received. Creating missions will be built into the MAP program I wrote to create the terrain. Perhaps I should restrict my programming to planning. That's the best part anyway.
10 May 1991
I'm surprised at how much interest some of my friends have given to Xalaria. One invited me over to help work out a scenario, as did someone from my Physics class.
I think all the errors in the battle system have gone, but I'm not sure. I hate sketchy errors. They pop up later, when you don't know what caused them. I'm going to make sure the system has no bugs at all before going on.
17 November 1991
From the 1st of June to the 17th of November I couldn't make entries, because the 386 was stolen.
The most annoying thing about it was that I lost all the work I had done on Xalaria. I had no backups at all, which was a terrible mistake. Anyway, once I've been taught some things at university I'll be able to create a much better version, written in C this time, I hope.
The next year he released D-Zone instead. Thirty years later, when the present Xalaria was first released, he wrote that it could even be thought of as a completion
of this one.