v1.1.55
Hope everyone had a very nice Christmas! Mine went very well, though I didn't do much of the coding I had planned. But, Christmas dinners and family get togethers are a nice excuse for being slack!
New skill - poison (B)lade. Fairly self explanatory; applies a layer of poison to a weapon; the poison strength and duration increase with the player's level. Evil rogues start with this skill. (Note that I had to change the button for health bar toggle to (L)).
New skill - the promised (P)et heal is now in place. This applies only to the wolf pet at the moment, as my current rationale is to try and distinguish the 2 types of pets as an actual companion, and disposable cannon-fodder.
Along those same lines of thought, I have also made a few changes to pet AI - the most notable change being that the wolf pet will follow you between levels if he(she?) is summoned. Again, skeletons are simply too dumb to follow, and unsummon when you leave them behind.
Made some minor changes to how pet attacks were being calculated, as they were quickly FAR outdamaging the player.
A little bit of work on pet behavior and mechanics, (hopefully) making the pet a bit smarter.
Interface improvements and refinements, including a little bit of help text.
Alignment now determines your starting skill(s). Reflecting this change, and additional skills which are coming soon, some skills have been moved around. Generally speaking, the left path reflects "good" skills, the middle "neutral", and the right "evil". As the skills are not complete yet, there are a few compromises. For example, while divine armor seems to me to be obviously good, and controlling undead to be evil, I placed healing in the neutral category. This may seem counterintuitive to have a cleric start without heal, but fits the premise well. I may change this in the future as well, if I ultimately don't like the idea. A final note is that I am toying with the idea of having characters actually start with 2 skills rather than 1, and making additional skill obtained at a slower pace. I'll post more in the next set of notes.
More stuff to come shortly! Mr Seckington has also given me a few new ideas for rogue skills as well that I will be implementing.
v1.1.48
This version features(?!) a major increase in the number of monsters that can appear, as well as some changes to their AI. (In particular, just bumping up the monster count resulted in a neverending swarm, so I have slightly altered how 'perceptive' monsters are - some aggro closer, and some further away.) I am writing this on a computer less than a year old, so if you are seeing the game slowing down on your computer, let me know, and I'll adjust the rates.
Also in line with the item above, loot rates have been significantly turned down. This somewhat offsets the fact that more monsters killed = more loot, but I have gone even further than that, resulting in a net decrease in dropped loot.
Screen set in fixed aspect ratio for unstretched graphics when played on widescreen.
New monsters.
New graphics.
New play mechanics.
Completed work on a basic level editor that allows me to create static, non-randomized levels, allowing me to add more detail to permade levels. There are now static levels in the game, though they appear randomly. I may leave this in the current form, where you occasionally encounter special levels (a la Nethack), or I may add a second game mode, giving the player the option of a fully random experience, or a premade quest. Haven't begun work on the quest system yet, but it's in the works.
Some new items in this version.
Magic and melee damage balance altered (constantly undergoing change as balanced is being worked out.)
Little more fleshing out of the 2 boss levels currently in the game.
Tweaked the pet system a little to improve your allies.
'Flavor text', small refinements.
Increased character screen in order to accomodate jewelry (rings, amulet) slots in upcoming version.
Unequipping armor now also costs a turn; added the appropriate text on the main screen confirming these actions.
Mages can now wear gloves; resists currenty only come from equipment, so denying them too many slots didn't seem fair.
'Returning' ranged weapons bug fix.
v1.1.42
Bosses are in!! This is the first iteration, so please let me know if you find any bugs - I have already had one pop up once that I can't seem to duplicate. The bosses are rather barebones at the moment, but the code works, and will allow me to make them very complex in the future. Also, I am working on hardcoding the special levels, though it looks like I will need to make a rudimentary level designer to really do this right. But, everything looks like it works, and I will begin fleshing it out, and making the bosses and their levels much more complex in the next patch. (Boss AI tweaked.)
New items - items can now have the speed suffix (self explanatory), the returning suffix (for example, throwing weapons return to your hand), and some other new, undisclosed properties.
Bug fixes...ugh...
Changes to difficulty (I really seem to be swinging rather wildly on this...), changes to combat, etc.
Clerics can now use firearms - no ranged attacks was a little too strict. In addition, I think I am going to give them a ranged magic attack in the next patch, at tier 2 or 3.
New dungeon features (some not fully interactive yet).
New map type
More details over the next day or so. In the meantime, I'm off to the company Christmas party!
B.
v1.1.38
Graphical Updates - the first of many to come; I have started replacing some of my placeholder art with better images...still haven't found a decent water tile, however...
Lots of bug-fixes (things like incorrect level messages, blocked map edges, incorrect level status updates, and an over-looked, inexcusable wrong key-map for ice armor, etc).
Divine Armor is now a Tier 1 cleric skill; Summon Undead is now a tier 2 cleric skill. This should make Divine Armor a more attractive choice.
New hotkey - The \ key (backslash) will drink an antidote from your inventory automatically, without you having to open up the character screen.
New Skill - Char(g)e attack - You rush forward several spaces, charging your opponent and potentially stunning them briefly - an upgrade to stunning (b)low. (Thanks Theron!)
NOTE: The 'G' keypress was previously assigned to 'g'et item. G has been reassigned to char(g)e attack. The comma key is still used (unchanged) to pick up items.
Changes to mini-map function to remove the annoying 'white-out' when returning to previously mapped levels.
Equipping armor is no longer a free action, so keep this in mind when monsters are near.
Both ranks of heals have been buffed up a bit, and improve with the player's Willpower stat; previous iterations were simply too weak, and there wasn't enough benefit to starting with a cleric.
New monsters
Loot system has been revamped as one of the steps for the upcoming boss monster addition. Most monsters drop random loot; some, however, will be the only source of specific items.
Poison has been considerably toned down, both against the player/allies and enemies. Finding a low-level poisoned dagger was resulting in far too easy kills, and against players, it was just too lethal.
On that same note, stuns/confusion/blinding is now more effective against creatures and the player; partly an update due to the new charge skill, partly to make monsters more dangerous.
More flavor text through the game.
More of Mr. Seckingtons fighter ideas are being worked on, and should appear shortly in the next update; I also need to finish some work on the long overdue bosses and their static, non-random levels.
v1.1.24
Several new ideas for fighter skills have kindly been submitted by Mr. Theron Seckington, several of which were implemented in this current version, and several more in the works. Thank you, Theron!!
Cleaned up the code for the skill trees.
Added tooltips to the skill trees; now you can get a brief description of the skill before you buy it.
Status line color changes to red for the mroe serious status ailments, including hunger.
Several other new things to be discovered.