Erebus version 0.2 is released!

This is the first release that's been advertised on Freecode and Sourceforge, and the first release to the Nokia Store. Most of the main basic gameplay elements are now present, though there's still lots of work and improvements to be made. There are two quests - a short one, and a longer one - so the length of gameplay is still fairly short, but more quests will be added in time. (Unfortunately generating content for new quests is probably the most time-consuming part of writing an RPG - even one hour of game time takes a lot of work.)

The Symbian version was downloaded from Nokia Store around 4600 times in the first week, with an average 4/5 star rating (I was a bit dismayed when the first 2 out of 3 reviews were 1 star, with comments like "boring"! But since then I've had lots of 5 star reviews, with an average of 4, so that's a relief...)

I began work on Erebus in March 2012. An RPG is a game I've wanted to write for a long while, but have had a few failed attempts over the years where the playability just didn't work out, or I otherwise had trouble bringing the project to completion. I chose Qt as the main API due to it being the official Symbian API, and having seen in early 2012 how large the downloads were on Nokia Store[1][2], and it seems to have been a good choice more generally. As well as providing a cross-platform graphics/windowing/input API like SDL, using it for the UI has made that aspect much faster to implement, QGraphicsScene works well for 2D graphics, there are lots of helper APIs for things like XML parsing, and it makes it easy to support many platforms (Erebus is also available on Windows, Linux, Android).

Version 0.3 will be available soon - no new quests, but featuring improvements to the graphics and user interface.