Hi and welcome,

after a long summer break, I have the honor to present the Player character of our game project Endless Dungeon. This is the second of several blog post of the ongoing series Meet the Game Characters. For more info check out this blog post.

Designer: Daniel

Finally the day of my graduation from the wizard school of Remingdell had come, the day I had been waiting for so long! Today I was going to receive my wizard degree and from there on I was free to explore the wonders of the world and become a great mage. Excitement filled my chest, when thinking about the future.

But for my dream to become true, I had one last mission to complete: getting the signature of the archmage Xidius Razam, headmaster of the wizard school of Remingdell and high wizard of the circle of Baal, for my graduation letter. Honestly, I was surprised to hear that I had to bring the letter to him in person, it seems so much easier to send an owl...

According to what I had heard about the archmage, he was a brilliant man, but had his idiosyncrasies. One of which was that he wanted to meet every graduate from the wizard school personally, but he was usually too busy to attend the graduation ceremonies. Frankly, I had hoped he might show up for mine, but I hadn’t been so lucky... Therefore I had to go on a journey to his residence close to a small village called Bellwick.

Slightly annoyed and with a heavy heart when thinking about leaving all my friends and the small room which I had called home over the last years, I started to pack my stuff. At least I would have my closest friend, my wizard animal Krumbein, at my side.

After an emotional farewell and a promise to my best friend Samarah to get in touch as soon as possible, I started to walk north, with a clear goal in mind.

Our currently ongoing team project is a pixel art RPG game called Endless Dungeon, which we develop during group coding sessions, usually taking place once per month (find more information here). Besides writing code, design and story telling are two major factors contributing to a fun and engaging gameplay.

Therefore this ongoing "Meet the ..."-series centeres around these two building blocks, no technical talk included ;)

I decided on a short story format that describes a small panning from the life of each character, together with the presentation of the character's avatar, designed by our awesome designer Daniel. For more great Pixel Art, check out his Twitter account or get a taste of gameplay music and visit his band Furious Feedback on Facebook.

And if you are interested in Endless Dungeon's current state of the story telling, check out our constantly changing story doc.

For the last few months, we have held what we call a Deep Dive most Thursday evenings. With "Deep Dive" we mean an approximately 60 min presentation and discussion on a fairly narrow technical subject, that often includes a short coding session as well.

We hold these sessions in the Vector Monkeys Coding Dojo Discord server, they are free of charge and open to anyone.

In the currently running series of topics, we have been looking closely at some of the answers to a Quora question labeled "What are the basics you want all your software developers to know?".

I'm especially fond of the answer by Martin Thoma, who lists 11 points of background knowledge and skills that are most useful to a Software Engineer, no matter what tech stack, framework and programming language they are working with.

In general, I have been using the format of covering one point per week, though I have split up some of the points into multiple Deep Dives.

We are currently getting close to the end of this block, with only a few points still left undiscussed.

If you are interested in joining us on the next Deep Dive, just say "Hi" via Discord Link next Thursday, 20:15 CET.