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.