Just logged a (last) long session of 5h+ of work

Unfortunately, due to unexpected IRL events, I wasn’t able to work on the game as much as I originally planned. Recently, I realized the full version of the game was not going to be finished before the event deadline, and I’m honestly not sure if it will ever reach the original scope I had in Rather than abandon the project or ship something unfinished in a bad way, I decided to restructure it into a playable demo.
This meant rewriting a large part of how the story, lore, and progression unfold, so the game could feel like a complete (altho short) experience on its own.

It’s not as far as I originally envisioned, but I think having a polished, playable demo is much better than leaving the project behind entirely.

The game is now fully playable via SSH, and more instructions will come soon on how to experience the demo. I hope that you, yes you, enjoy it and attached is one of the ASCII art pieces I was able to finish in time. The ASCII art took some of the longest work, alongside the general lore development.

I took development back on this project after a very long busy period combined with sickness. Today I worked on the rest of the main artistic elements that will be presented through ASCII art, as well as expanding and reworking the game lore and story. I’m really happy with how the ASCII system turned out, even if I doubt I’ll have time to make every art piece for everything in the game. For now, only the main character is there.

I’m very, very tired, but I know I need to at least make it playable, even if I need to ship it only as a demo release. For now, the fate of this game after I ship it is still unfortunately unknown. I’ll do what I can to get it out to the public, and until then, thank you for reading.
Farewell

I’m really not sure how i am supposed to be documenting something like this where most of the time spent is experimenting with ways to display colored text on a remote terminal with the least amount of issues with text forwarding, but i have experimented with some new ways to display certain elements in the game to make it more pleasant to look at plus i now have written down more of the story and lore in my notepad then translated to Golang code for specific interaction dialogs prompts, no spoilers on the gameplay here for now

Heyyy everyone, I’m back with some good news here. I’ve found a way to make some new effects for when you start the game, but you can of course just skip them by pressing any key on your keyboard in case you don’t want to wait every time you start or restart the game.

Attached is a preview of the game in its current state of development. I’m pretty proud of the advancements.

I have been prototyping different ways to make the SSH experience a little bit more, we’ll say, normie-friendly, so people testing to vote, whoever may review my project, or even anyone who just wants to play it won’t need to already live in the terminal to know how things work. So far it’s going great, it’s just taking a lot of time due to the nature of this project being a fully server-side app running through the SSH protocol, with the whole game logic and terminal UI handled in Go, which is honestly not something I’ve seen that many times by now or even worked with before this. Working with this kind of setup is really interesting, especially when mixing game flow, terminal styling, and SSH connections together, but it definitely comes with its own challenges and costs more time to make. No special screenshot for today, but I’m sure more will come soon enough.

I have now rewritten how the SSH server handles traffic for the Windows build because there was a discrepancy between native Linux and Windows functionality in the SSH text formatting pipeline. This took quite a lot of time. I also worked on the lore of the game to make it into more of a story-driven, RPG-ish experience, at least that’s what i think it’s called. Thank you for reading, and see you in the new devlog soon enough.

I have now expanded the available dialogs to add a bunch more possible options, fleshing out how players can interact and branch through different conversation paths depending on what they choose. I also added debugging logs on player actions so I can actually see what’s going on behind the scenes when people pick things up, move around, or trigger events, which makes testing a lot less painful. On top of that, I built out an inventory system and some sort of memory tracker for certain game events; it keeps a variable related to it in memory so I can do other things with it later along the story.
It’s basically just a copy of the inventory logic repurposed to track states instead of items, because who wouldn’t just take something that works and reuse it, right? Why reinvent the wheel when you can just slap a new label on it and “call it a day”. The full game is currently sitting at 645 lines for the dialog file and logic file not counting helper code ofc.

After getting the Go base for the SSH game to a solid enough state, I have jumped straight into building the very first room players will actually see when they connect. This is the real start of the game that moment where you finally get control after any intro and honestly ? It’s pretty cool to see it coming together as an actual playable space instead of just scaffolding.

I already wired up all the options you can see in the screenshot, including a full item interaction where you pick something up and then use it somewhere else later on. I’m not gonna spoil what the item is or where it goes, but seeing that core “find and use” loop work over a remote SSH session already feels pretty damn satisfying.