Back in 2011, I released my first game, Dwarven Depths, onto the Xbox Live Indie Games platform. I remember the excitement of uploading the game to Microsoft, and the Christmas-morning joy of seeing my first sale. I was riding high on life. I even promised myself that I'd go visit Sweden one day, since that's where that first sale happened. 

After the game was released, I kept working on it. I wanted to shore up some of the weaknesses and make the game even more fun. I added in new enemies, new items, and a whole lot more explosions. I submitted the update to Microsoft's Dream.Build.Play competition, which intended to highlight the best of the XNA ecosystem. I was going to submit the update to the official game servers as well, but I figured that I "might as well add in online multiplayer" before I did. How long could that take?

Ah, the naivety of youth. It turns out that proper multiplayer network code, with non-terrible prediction to account for lag, was not an easy thing to write. I made some good progress, but strange networking bugs kept popping up. It was a game of whack-a-mole that ended up whacking me. I burnt out and lost my motivation to keep working on the game.

I didn't have any source control set up in those days, because youth. Even though I wanted to release the explosions update, by this point the networking code was so interwoven in the basic code structure that I couldn't go back. So for years, the source code sat in a directory, gathering digital dust. XBLIG shut down, I collected my last royalty check, and I thought that was that.

Until last month, at least. I got the urge to put this game out there again. I buckled in, went through all the code, and pulled up the networking code by the roots. Using Monogame, the spiritual successor to XNA, I was able to get the game working again :) Monogame made the actual porting process painless.

I'm releasing the game for free, but donations are of course appreciated. Happy mining!

P.S. I also learned that I used to format my conditionals with the boolean operators at the end of each line, like this

    if (something && somthingElse &&
        (moreStuff.fooBar || moreStuff.fooBaz))

instead of the more proper

    if (something && somethingElse
        && (moreStuff.fooBar || moreStuff.fooBaz))

I feel like I need to apologize to someone for that.