Initial feedback
This week I picked up development again after a quite extensive summer break. Before summer, I felt the need to digest what I currently had, and to get some initial feedback. The main comment people had was that the difficulty level was too high, which I could somewhat agree on, especially early game so as a first step I increased the player starting level for each run from 1 to 3.
Though the vision I have in mind regarding difficulty for this game is that it should be dangerous most of the time, so you will need to use everything at your disposal as a counter-measure, and when applied right will give you an advantage. Tied to this is also the survival aspect, and limiting loss for situations where you cannot escape, to give you the best start for the next run etc. So being able to read risks and opportunities and playing smart will be key (and a learning experience).
More options will be added to give even more creative solutions, but in the end if that isn't enough, further general difficulty balancing will also be done.
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Populating the Coil
I had a few ideas during summer about how the variation of areas should be going down, and it landed in a kind of oscillating biome distribution where each biome is represented by an element. Each floor after level 5 will therefore have a biome type and strength. Strengths will start at 0, increment by a somewhat random value for each floor up to strength 100 and then reduce by random amounts until zero is reached where a new random biome type is chosen. This means that for each new run, the path down will most likely go through all various biomes in random order, which depending on how well you are equipped for each one will require you to adjust your tactics. Sometimes it will be best to just try to escape down to the next one if you are too ill equipped.
Each biome will have its own set of special NPCs, mobs, items and mechanics which can be learned and utilised, which will also affect the tactics you can apply there. The occurrence of these will be according to the biome strength set for that floor. For biome strength 100, special events can also happen.
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The plan forward
Now when the groundwork for biome distribution is done, the next part will be to decide what to populate each one with. The goal I think is to make each one unique enough to give the player a nice variation in playstyle without making them too impossible to get through with the wrong build. The scenario system is very extensive and there are lots of opportunities to do multiple branching, even between runs and biomes etc so that will be interesting to try out as well and will finalise each one binding them together.
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Changelog
Fix bug where discovered tiles were not set on init
Keep learned spells unless reincarnated
Unlock descent from floor 5
Add oscillating biome distributions between level 6-99
Show error dialog if trying to pick up item when inventory is full
Fix vertical misalignment in some menus
Move index sheet dump from mac target to tools
Add Digsons grave
Fix bug where conversational NPCs avoid exploding bombs
Do scenario update after performed action instead of completed move
Set demo toggle in compilation target
Make charm tome droppable
Remove drain and sacrifice magic and tomes
Modify build system to produce separate demo version for win and linux targets
