As you can see on this page, it has been a long while since an update has come about development on Dune 2 – The Maker. The latest news is from a multi-os version, written in Java, which basically only has some viewports and scrolling.

And then it was quiet.

I think the real challenge with writing software in your spare time, is to find a motivation that lasts longer than a few days. And back then I think the motivation quickly ran out when real features needed to be built, as they require time and they are huge. Roughly said you’re chewing more then you can handle in one evening and basically get no results from some nights of coding (other than some refactoring, which is only satisfying to some level).

So before I wanted to take another attempt, I wanted to know how I could get myself more motivated so I can keep doing this. Well, I believe I have found a way which is very simple and yet very hard to do: Keep it small. Every night I try to deliver something of value to this project. It is a finished task, or feature and if you would get it, compile it, and run it then it should be working software. (it may not be a full game, but it won’t be a broken version either).

In order to keep the source code stable, I consider the master branch as stable and use so called ‘feature branching’ to work on new features. Once a feature is complete it is being merged back into master.

I’ve been working on a new version of D2TM since a little while now (if you follow twitter, you already saw some messages). And I am glad to say we are working on a version, steadily but surely.

If you want to know what is possible already, and how things are going, just follow us on twitter or check out the source code yourself. It is very easy to contribute!

Oh btw, it is in C++ now, it uses SDL and works on Windows, Mac OS X and Ubuntu and it looks a bit like this:

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