Hello everyone!
Update 1.33 is taking quite a bit longer then expected so I figured I'd let everyone know what I've been working on and what the delay is! For those who are just interested in knowing when it will release, I'm aiming for Friday, March 27th.
As I think I mentioned in the previous update notes, my plan for 1.33 was to do a big clean up, improvement and expansion of all the dungeon content, namely: level-generation, unique vaults, special levels, terrain features, monster types and bosses. Basically make the stuff we already have better and add lots new stuff.
So this is what I was working on for the better part of January until I got fed up with a lot of the underlying code that controls level generation, vault placement, population of levels etc. Some of this code was really old and had just sort of accumulated over the years without any real structure. Generally speaking, the number of special cases and 'hacks' had grown to the point where adding anything or even changing anything was pretty damn difficult and required a lot of arcane knowledge that was never well documented.
So I figured that, in order to make the sorts of improvements and additions I was planning, it would be a good idea to spend some time and clean up all this mess. Well suffice to say, "some time" turned into "a lot of time" and all of February was spent deep in the bowls of level-generation, slowly wrangling it into a more manageable and unified system.
This has now been 'mostly' completed and the new system is a heck of a lot nicer. Its capable of producing much more interesting, and complex levels. The many different generators (there are a lot of them), now share a lot more common code so that improvements, fixes and new content are now applied everywhere at once. Finally, its waaay easier to add content which I've been taking advantage of for the last few weeks to build up a ton of new stuff.
So basically, I spent a ton of time cleaning everything up, and am only now really getting to take advantage of all the cool new systems. Everything is now progressing very quickly and smoothing and its actually very exciting how easy it is to add and modify things. As mentioned at the top, I plan to get a pretty sizable update out by the end of the month so hopefully it will be worth the wait.
Thanks everyone for all your patience and support!
Justin
*edit* I should also add that I've been using Twitter to post occasional screen shots and updates at @PixelForgeGames for anyone interested.