v1.2.92

New skill - Dual Wield - This skill replaces a skill I feel is redundant, and unwieldy to use - charge (up a) stun. The rest of the charge line will remain the same. Dual wield will be followed by charge attack (rush forward and stun a single target), and it by battle-cry(give the charge attack an area-of-effect component). The skill it fairly self explanatory and functions as you would expect. If you do not have a two-handed weapon equipped, or a shield, you gain an extra attack wielding the weapon in your back-up slot as a second weapon. The second attack has a slightly lower hit chance, and reduced damage.  Dual hand damage and attack bonus are listed on the character sheet.

Skill change - Toughness - Now that all the skills are in place, I am going back skill by skill and rebalancing and reevaluating them. Toughness provided a static armor bonus. This skill seems redundant to me now that Phalanx is a skill. As such, I have changed toughness slightly to provide a similar, but not identical bonus, as before. I still want the skill to provide a passive benefit, so instead, toughness now increases your total hitpoints, as well as the hitpoints you gain each level (so instead of a 1 time purchase for a set amount of hitpoints, toughness scales with your level and constitution.) In the end, the net change is that your survivability is improved, but also against status ailments and magic damage, unlike the old toughness which really only helped with melee attacks.

High Score List - It's a bit rudimentary at the moment, but the game will now record your high scores, including turns passed, name, class, score, and level died/max reached. I plan on adding the cause of death in the future, but the way I have player death coded at the moment does not pass the cause of death, and it looks like a considerable amount of work!

Skill point change - In order to give a little more character to the classes (no pun intended), but still allow you to customize your character, I have made a slight change to skill points. Buying a skill from your own tree costs 1 point, as before. However, buying a skill from another class tree will now cost 2 points. Eg, if you are a fighter, and you wish to learn to heal, or stealth, it will costs you 2 points, while toughness would still only be 1. Plan ahead!! Note that for the Adventurer class all skills cost 2 points - a significant drawback given their flexibility. However, they start with 4 skill points - enough to buy any 2 skills, giving them a little more early game flexibility in addition to their significant armor and weapon selection.

General UI Improvement - Help file updated with all the new info. Press ? in-game to get info on any commands, skills, or classes.

General UI Improvement - Destroying all the summoning obelisks is considered one of your primary goals as part of the stemming of the tide of monsters. As such , details of this objective (and others) are now tracked on the player screen. More info will follow.

General UI Improvement - The game will autoload your last saved game based on the name you enter at the start-up screen. You can still load games the traditional way if you change you mind about what you want to play later on.

General UI Improvment - Arrows and Bullets will consolidate in your inventory now, rather than having 3 stacks of Arrows (11), Arrows (5), Arrows (13), etc.

Graphics tweaked throughout - Slight spell animations and environment graphics improvements.

Balance change - Adventurers can no longer use 2 handed weapons; this is now exclusive to fighters.

Balance change - Evil clerics can summon a maximum of 3 skeletons at a time. In addition, the stats of these pets have been tweaked a bit. This leads to a general maximum of 5 pets at a time (1 Fire Elemental, 1 Wolf, 3 Skeletons). This is purely a balance issue, and, so far, it looks like it doesn't impact performance to increase the number of skeletons you can have. However, from a play perspective, my personal experience is than you can spam a huge army and roll through the game. Finally, the rate at which you gain the ability to summon these extra skeletons has been slowed a bit.

Balance change - Loot rates have been lowered a bit now that barrels can drop loot as well.

Balance change - The effect of Willpower as defense against magic has been increased.

New monster ability - Certain creatures are now covered in spikes, and you will hurt yourself trying to melee them. Pay attention, and fight safely from a distance!

Bug fix - Corrected a minor error with image compression as resolutions lower than maximum.

Bug fix - Some damage animations were showing up while blind - fixed.

Bug fix - Summoned skeletons were dropping loot - fixed. 

Bug fix - One of the puzzles was not revealing the stairs correctly - fixed.

Bug fix - Fixed a reload error with the malfunctioning puzzle.

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v1.2.35

New skill - Battle-cry - The final upgrade starting with charge stun, battle-cry turn the single target charge attack into an area-of-effect stun. Shouting a terrible battle-cry as you charge into a group of foes may stun most or all of them, allowing you time to dispatch them with ease. Like the new skill Terror, this skill allows you to deal with large groups of swarming foes. Some enemies (mindless, turrets, etc) are immune to this attack.

New skill - Terror - Evil clerics can now radiate pure horror in a considerable radius around themselves. All creatures, friend or foe, will run from the player in terror, not even stopping to defend themselves from attack. Certain creatures are immune to this, as you will discover.

New skill - Upgrade Wolf - The final skill in the good rogue line, this skill does exactly as you would think - your wolf becomes more powerful - meaning faster, stronger, and harder hitting. However, it's more than a simple stat bump. Your wolf gains some new abilities, including the ability to stun their opponents with a frenzied maul, and resistance to a certain element. Finally, the wolf actually is higher level than the player for purposes of landing attacks and special abilities. The wolf gain additional power dependent on your dexterity skill (counter-intuitive, I suppose, but it follows the general rule that a certain stat governs a set of skills.)

New Item Type - Wands - Self-explanatory for the most part, they are equipped in your ranged shot, and consume charges much like any other ranged weapon.

Skill Upgrade - Divine Armor - Now provides Holy resistance when active.

Balance change - Enemy ranged magic has been rebalanced. On one hand, their raw damage has been slightly increased (around 10-20%). On the other, the effect of willpower in reducing incoming magic damage has been MASSIVELY increased (more than doubled). Gangs of ranged magic users at the lower levels were simply far too lethal. A group ganging up on you is still a dangerous situation, its simply possibly managa 

Bug fix - Cleaned up dominate code a good bit. Dominate will now automatically give you a chance to continue controlling a creature, rather than the previous countdown to a guaranteed breaking-free. The higher your willpower, the longer you are likely to control a creature (modified by their level). You cannot dominate immobile creatures (such as a mechanical turret) or a boss creature.

Balance change - Boss creatures can no longer be generated flying. This is simply to reduce annoyance.

Screen Lock - I have set the game to run at a fixed resolution above a certain point, meaning a fix screen size. This improves the graphics, and removes some of the odd image compression that was occuring. However, some people may play at less than the recommended 1280x1024. In this case, the main screen will get shrunk down to a viewable size. The graphics may suffer a little compression, but the game will be unaffected and still totally playable.

Message log has been improved. More messages are stored, allowing you to review more than 3x as many messages as before. In addition, the message log is now an actual text file you can copy and paste, rather than the old version which was displayed on the screen in a similar manner to the graphics. Finally, a scroll bar has been added to facilitate the greater numbenr of displayed messages. Also, the message log has been changed so that repeated messages don't get entered over and over - instead, a single line is appended with a counter for how many times you've received the message.

Next version (assuming I can track down that nasty bug) - Offhand items.

Note (and plea for help!!) 2 players have reported Overflow errors occuring around level 5. I spent a huge chunk of my free time this weekend trying to track down the source of this bug, but so far I have been unable to replicate it. I have refined some code that 'might' be the cause, but it's really a shot in the dark, as, as I said before, I can't seem to recreate the overflow. If you have this error again, please shoot me a note with what level you were on, what you were doing, and anything interesting going on (like if you were dominating any creatures, or enchanting armor, etc).

Also note that the graphics are best at 1280x1024 or above, though playable at smaller dimensions.

Thanks a ton!

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