u/dannyheskett

Coming Soon.

I have been hard at work on the Open Bounty: The Glory of Rome gamepack; which is a complete re-imagining of the classic King's Bounty engine and artwork and gameplay but set at the height of the Roman empire, during the period of the Principate. As our hero you will track down Rome's enemies where ever they run - from Italia, to the Gallic provinces, to the African outposts or even the far reaches of the Oriens.

https://preview.redd.it/oqwlh5aw4jph1.png?width=800&format=png&auto=webp&s=abe433ab36082b4d322390ecbbb1a7a2b49d71bf

The Glory of Rome features all new troops, new enemies, and new game-engine features designed to test the limits of the Kings Bounty framework without making something totally new. Whether you are chasing Spartacus from Capua or pursuing Hannibal to Carthage all enemies are richly animated and built for fun and challenging game play.

New puzzles, enemies and artifacts to collect and unlock in-game features.

A completely reworked religious rites system brings new depth and complexity to the magic system and rebalances spells for maximum gameplay options and problem solving. Master the spells associated to the divine templates of each continent, and learn from the respected Augurs and Pontiffs of each land.

New religious rites system expands and improves magic from the legacy platform.

Open Bounty and The Glory of Rome are totally free, and open-source, and I am planning to release the completed game on Windows, Mac, Linux, as a web-game playable in browser, and in wide-screen on iOS and Android via the Apple store and Android store.

Final gameplay testing is underway. If you want to be a tester, especially to help me consider game balance, troop levels, etc - please feel free to DM for a testing link. I am hoping to have the initial release ready before the end of September, with future expansion games available in October and beyond.

I have become incredibly frustrated with increasingly bad mobile games (and desktop) that take away basic functionality, and then insert really obnoxious things. Like.. Windows doesn't come with a basic decent solitaire anymore (sol.exe).

I have created a set of basic games that are implemented with raylib in C, and distribute them on my personal website and also, in the iOS store (Google Play Store coming soon, I hope).

So far I have:

openblock - Tetris like falling block game

openklondike - Solitaire

openrackem - Rack-O style board game

These are all in iOS store for free with 100% zero obnoxious crap in it. Plus they are MIT-licensed on my github and free for all. The home page for the projects is here: https://danheskett.com/projects/. Each project has it's own link to the iOS store, or downloads via GitHub. You can also of course download them yourself and build them yourself. There are build-instructions plus a full CI/CD pipeline as GitHub Actions.

As time permits, I have Minesweeper, Blackjack, and Checkers underway. All games are available for Windows, Linux, MacOS, as well as WASM/Web, iOS, and Android.

Hopefully any of you might enjoy them, but if not, they live on for me to play on my phone when I'm flying or just want a few minutes of downtime.

I am looking for a very good and knowledgeable mortgage broker, for a 2nd mortgage/equity loan on my Florida primary residence.

Can anyone make recommendation or point me to a reputable place for recommendations? It's really fraught trying to find anyone. My last contact retired and didn't really have a continuity plan running so I am pretty clueless where to start short of Google.

I spent quite a bit of time of the last several months re-implementing my favorite early RPG from growing up. This game was one I played on a 286 with 16-colors, endlessly trying to get past it.

Project page: https://danheskett.com/projects/openbounty/

I've totally reverse-engineered it (with a lot of help from an early attempt, called OpenKB, which inspired my effort). I pulled all of the tables, characters, etc from the original binary. You can extract the artwork from an original copy of the game (that you have legally acquired), and then play a pixel perfect recreation of the original game.

The source is posted on GitHub, and I am happy to hear of any issues or problems with gameplay. Already lots of issues have been reported and closed.

The release includes Windows, Mac and Linux binaries plus a playable version hosted in WASM.

Along with the source, complete specs are included. The game pack format has been generalized and converted to JSON and modern file formats (i.e. PNG) so that game play can be tweaked, and I am working with some talented people to develop totally new game packs that utilize the engine and game mechanics in new settings.

I did my best to annotate the source code, and document it, and it's reasonable clean and well structured.

There are a few new functions/features that I added for my own interests: you can record gameplay to MP4 to get a replay of what happened; there's also an extensive and very complete autoplay solver, which can be used to validate that new game packs are winnable using a complex deterministic autoplay burndown model. I am really proud of that, it took a lot of work to make it gamepack inviolate and also fast.

Hope someone is interested in it, I put a lot into it!

openbounty in action recorded from the in-game recording tool

I've been working on this on and off for a while, but I finally feel like it's release-1 ready. Announcing openbounty.

openbounty is a from-scratch reimplementation of King's Bounty, the 1990 New World Computing strategy game that Heroes of Might and Magic grew out of. The rules, tables, combat formulas, and the 320x200 VGA look all follow the original. My intent was pixel-perfect recreation.

Play it in your browser, no install: https://danheskett.com/dist/openbounty/

Writeup, downloads, and how it works: https://danheskett.com/projects/openbounty/

Source: https://github.com/dannyheskett/openbounty

The browser build is ready to go. The desktop builds ship without game data, so you point them at your own KB.EXE to extract a pack. It also has a data-driven pack format, so the whole game can be retuned or re-skinned by editing JSON, no rebuild.

Happy to receive feedback. If you hit a bug, open an issue on GitHub. If you want to fix something or add to it, PRs are welcome. And if you have a feature or a mechanic you think it's missing, drop a recommendation, either on GitHub or in the comments here.

I especially would love to get some feedback from people who were originally good at the DOS (or Amiga, I suppose) version of the game. I was pretty young when it came out, and was never very good at it - I never beat it until emulated on DOS for example, many many years later.

The gamepack format is especially friendly for modding, and if there is interest, I have an in-progress gamepack editor I may release.

Enjoy!