The Tavern

I'm a fairly proficient coder, and I've modded DF before, so I think I'll turn my inexpert hand to DCSS.

Some of the removals have saddened or frustrated me. Flavour appears to be ignored in favour of cut, cut, cut! In addition, summons seem micromanagey and the removal of some buff spells corrals casters even more into blaster types.

I plan on making a mod where every spell is castable, whether it's Summon Water Elementals (not previously available to players) or Condensation Shield (removed). I will bring back the wands! Bring back the species! To hell with balance! This is flavour! THIS IS FUN!

In addition, I will try to fix the current summoners state, as well as maybe put in my own spell school. Other random tweaks, like skill synergy or whatever between hexes and charms (to replicate roughly the similarities between them that allowed one to cast discord and haste with the same skill).

So does this sound good? Would anybody play it? Is there a "how to code this game" guide anywhere?

You should look into the nostalgia branch (which has some removed things) and the dcss-ca fork (which has several significant changes).

Something similar has been done at least twice before with the Nostalgia branch and the Extra Hearty mod.
nostalgia: http://s-z.org/neil/git/?p=crawl.git;a= ... =nostalgia
other: viewtopic.php?f=17&t=15487

Well, I guess I could at least try adding things like "summons actually work now" and "yay dorfs are back". Because deep dwarves are actually crystal things. Headcanon. As well as my own things like illusion magicks. That is, of course, if I can figure out Git.

Your join date makes this thread seem fishy.

But if you did code this up, I'd totally play it.

There are various development guide documents in the docs/develop directory, but these are not comprehensive by any means. In general, "if you code it...they will play" applies with respect to video games, and roguelikes are no real exception. It's a ton of work to even to just re-add a lot of removed features, let alone code new ones, but if you're motivated the sky is the limit.

If you get somewhere where you feel things are playable, you can consider getting it hosted on a server. It's not too hard to set up your own WebTiles server, and hosting one that supports modest numbers of players is not expensive. If it's a download-only fork, it will get less attention, but it will still get attention. See the WebTiles README for details on running a test server if you go that route.

My server (CPO) hosts dcss-ca, I would definitely consider hosting any other forks if they pass my internal thresholds for "sufficiently interesting" and "active".