The 2.0 update has been a long time coming. A lot of work had to be done to lay the groundwork for future updates.
NEW IN THIS UPDATE:
• Completely new floor generation system
◇ maps are now about 4 times as large as before
◇ Large cave type rooms have been added
◇ Dungeon walls are higher
• Gameplay changed to accommodate the new dungeons
◇ Players light radius is now much larger
◇ Light from the player can now go between rooms
• Classic Mode - a mode reminiscent of this game when it first released, has its own leaderboards
• Optimizations
◇ Shader cache -this should prevent stuttering during gameplay
• Visuals
◇ Reworked the bloom for hybrid graphics mode
◇ Dungeon walls now have a shader to make them blend into the dark sky better
◇ Resolution options in the settings should now work far better for low resolution monitors
◇ Added ultrawide monitor support
• Fixes
◇ The wands of bolting now show their effect with the GLES2 renderer
◇ The aquator's ability can now be cancelled with a wand of cancelling
◇ The vampire's ability can now be cancelled with a wand of cancelling
◇ Many other small fixes that I failed to document while working and can't remember
REMOVED IN THIS UPDATE(for now):
- Mazes - I may bring them back but most likely very sparingly
- Hallways with dead ends - This is simply a side effect of how the new floor gen works
- Tombstones - I simply wanted to get this update out as soon as I could and ran out of time, they will be back in the next update
- Doors - monsters used to use these to navigate from room to room but since monsters have been rewritten they no longer need them
- The roof of the dungeon - I have plans for what will go up there
- Secret doors - With the new large rooms I figured it would take too long if you had to search the entire thing to find the door. If they return they
will mostly likely be used to hide treasure rooms.
The New Dungeon
The new floor generation system uses cellular automata for the new large cave-like rooms. This is a standard technique in traditional roguelikes and I think it works quite well in first person. To compensate for the rooms being so large, the player's light radius in all rooms and halls is now much larger than it was before. Also your light now travels between rooms and through walls. This is simply because the old light algorithm was never designed to work with large rooms and was starting to chug on my test machine so I put in a much simpler and faster one. This does mean that you can “see” into adjacent rooms while you're going down a hall if you look at your mini-map but in a way I kind of like the idea that you might find items in rooms that you don't know how to get to yet so I may keep this light algorithm for a while.
Along with that, rooms are now much more likely to connect and loop between each other so this should mean you spend more time exploring and less time backtracking. Halls are also much more straight, hopefully creating more opportunities to use ranged weapons.
One issue though is that while the game still runs on very low end hardware when you have the driver in the settings set to GLES2, the load times between these new dungeon levels can be longer than they used to. On my dev machine the load times are under a second but on my test machine, an old thinkpad from 2011 with 4 gigs of single channel ram, the load times can be 8-9 seconds. I apologize for that and I'm working on honing my c++ so I can rewrite performance critical parts of the game to be much faster.
Balancing Food
Before, and in classic mode now, a dungeon floor was 40x24 tiles big. Now a dungeon floor is 80x40 tiles big. This means that in general it will take more food to get to one floor to the next, however, there are now more rooms per floor and thus a greater chance for food to spawn. Mazes and dead ends were also removed so now you won't spend food navigating a maze or backtracking as much. But then again, it might take longer to find the stairs in a dark cave room. But then again Again the Amulet spawns sooner than before. And so on and so on.
Needless to say getting the balance right for food is pretty difficult. If you keep finding that you end up starving on the same levels over and over please let me know so I can tweak the balance more in the player's favour if it becomes clear that food is just too limited. Remember though that rings increase the rate that you go hungry, so take that into account.
Balancing Monsters:
Since each dungeon floor has more rooms that means that more monsters will spawn per floor. The thing is though is that by the time you kill all of the monsters only a few floors into the dungeon you're already around level 4 or 5 and you're quite a bit stronger than the monsters around you. So because of that I've adjusted the levels that some monsters appear on to hopefully keep things even between the player and the monsters. I didn't want to simply decrease the xp monsters give since I felt that would be a kind of boring way keep things balanced.
Balancing Gold
THIS IS IMPORTANT. There are more rooms per floor now and so more chances for gold to spawn, but the amulet shows up earlier now and so your average winner(I don't think there's been one yet although a few have come close) might end up with less gold than before the update. If you find that you're getting comparatively further into the dungeon than you did before the update but are having trouble beating your old high score please let me know so I can bump up the gold levels.
I don't want to make a change and have everyone's old high scores become impossible to beat. If that were the case then the leader-boards wouldn't reflect the current game and that's something I want to avoid.
The Future of the Dungeon
In the next update I'd like do a few things.
1. I think the rooms as they generate now are a bit spread out. I'll try to get them to generate in a more dense layout.
2. Add the tombstone back in
3. Start on flying monsters
4. Work on the room light algorithm. My goal is to have rooms be able to be lit from multiple sources and not just the player. I'd like it if it were possible to have a few hobgoblins around a bonfire be visible when you enter a dark room.
5. Add more music - this is something I've neglected and I'm sorry for that. I'm a programmer by trade so I always feel I can get more work done if I sit down in front of a keyboard for typing instead of the music kind.
Lastly, I tried as best as I could to make sure that the old highscore and settings files work with the new update. If your game crashes on startup(it really shouldn't), try going into your save directory and deleting the highscore and settings files.
On GNU/Linux this is:
home/.local/share/godot/app_userdata/ROGUE-FP
On Windows its:
AppData\Roaming\Godot\app_userdata\ROGUE-FP
As always, please let me know if you find any bugs or experience any crashes! Thanks for playing!