v1.1.66
New Skill - (D)ominate - Evil clerics can temporarily bend an evil creature to their will, causing it to turn on its allies for a short period of time. This skill is fairly expensive at 30 mana per cast, currently, though this may be rebalanced in the future. Also, it is currently tier 2.
BUG FIXES to Dominate: You can't dominate immobile enemies like flame turrets; fixed a message bug when you dominated an emeny and it reported the wrong name.
Slight changes to how heals are calculated.
v1.1.64
New skill - (F)ire Elemental - the tier 3 fire skill, summons a ranged fire attacker to help you out on your adventure. You can only have one elemental under your control at a time. Grows in power as the hero does, based primarily on Intelligence.
Worked on a MAJOR retooling of the combat system, though it will largely be invisible to the player. Originally, armor played a factor in whether you hit an enemy or not - meaning, your damage had to overcome the enemies armor rating to do meaningful damage (with a little bit of random fate added in as far as your damage and their damage reduction per hit.) A 'miss' simply occurred when your damage was less than their armor (and vice versa). I ended up disliking this for several reasons. First, weapons were far more important in landing a hit than they should be, and second, you get into sort of an 'arms race', where armor HAD to increase on a monster to make it more challenging, and monsters damage had to massively increase to hit the player at higher levels. As a result, low armor classes would take massive damage, and always get hit.
The new system has been reworked with the player and creatures actually having attack and defense(evade) rating. Now, whether you hit or miss is largely a matter of your level and your skill. You ALWAYS have a chance to hit, and there is ALWAYS a chance you will miss, the hit/miss ratio actually being a comparison of the attackers skill to the defenders skill. So while a creature may be 10 levels below you, there is always at least an infintessimal chance it will hit, or you will miss.
Armor, now actually serves it's intended purpose - damage reduction. If an attack hits, the damage it does is reduced in a linear fashion by your armor rating. However, a hit is always a hit, and will do a minimum of 1 point of damage.
Added a 'miss' animation to the graphics. When you hit a target, you'll see a red slash appear across them; now, you will also see a blue swipe appear when you miss the target. If you actually hit, but their armor absorbs all the damage, you will get a message, but no animation.
Removed 'Miss' messages from the message log. If you don't like this change, PLEASE let me know - it will take 2 secs to reinstate it.
On a different note, added more information to the player screen. Pets/summons were slightly tweaked due to the change in the combat system.
Please bear with me, as the difficulty due to the changes is still only a day old, and will take me a while to get it balanced, but on the whole I feel a lot better about it.
Sorry there wasn't more fun, transparent stuff added today, but this work had needed to be done for a while, and had always been sitting in the back of my head as I mulled over how I wanted to do it.
Thanks for your time and patience,
B
v1.1.61
In direct response to some nice feedback I got I have added the following changes:
More detail to the character screen. Weapons will list their damage range, and armor will list it's defense bonus. The basic combat stats should be fairly transparent now.
New skill - conjure (A)mmuntion - As the name implies, this skill, for a small cost in mana, will magically create more ammo for your equipped ranged weapon. This begins the new 'archer' line under the rogue skill tree, which will be followed with 2 more archer specific skills to follow.
The character select screen now display a new little bit of flavor text. You class and alignment selection will now display a title which should give the player a little bit a foresight into what skill they will start with. I will probably add an explicit list of starting skills somewhere, but this adds just a little bit of flavor to the character selection process.
Got a comment about how certain monsters acted. The AI was already in place, so I made a few changes to the monster tables. Mindless creatures will move and act randomly (eg, slimes), while undead (and other creatures) will now attack relentlessly, regardless of their wounds. Other creatures remain the same, and will flee when they are greatly wounded (the level at which they flee being based on the creatures 'courage').
Summon skeletons have been reworked a bit. Now your raised skeleton will attack mindlessly more in line with the above changes - they no longer flee at low hp. This, in addition to the fact that you can constantly summon more, helps to distinguish this and the wolf pet, which is a bit stronger and smarter. Reworked the summon skeleton stats so they scale a little better as you level.
Small change so game would show up in windows taskbar.
Reworked poison (again), both against friendlies and enemies.
Other bug-fixes.
More to come!!
v1.1.57
New monsters
New items
New skill - Chain (L)ightning - an upgraded lightning bolt which jumps from target to target, diminishing in power each jump. Tier 3 Mage Neutral
Yet another reshuffling of the skill trees. Quickness is now a tier 3 fighter skill, and has been buffed slightly. The cleric tree has been reshuffled - turn undead is obviously not an evil skill, and should be higher in the tree. The rogue tree is still not solid in the direction I want to go. Stealth is sort of ambiguous as to being good or evil; however poisoning a weapon is not. This tree is going to see more changes as I implement some of Mr Seckingtons skills, and fill in the gaps.
Changes to monster AI in regards to stealth. Previously, monsters that you had already attacked could still see you when you restealthed. I have made some changes to remedy this, though I'm not yet sure if this is exactly what I want. Nonetheless, it's a better implementation than before.
More refinements; more warning messages (eg, not having enough mana for a skill) so that you don't wonder why a skill isn't working.
Please note that the key mappings have (again) changed, hopefully a little more intuitively now. Please check the in game help file for commands. Also, the skill tree has the keypress indicated in parentheses.
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.
v1.1.23
In response to a very nice email from Pavel D. I have added a 'very' obvious flag whenever you get a status ailment, including hunger. Hope this helps with forgetting to eat!!
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