Update 1.32

Hello everyone! Didn't have enough time to finish this one to the extent that I had planned but since I'm going to be quite busy in the next week or two with holiday and family stuff I figured I'd upload what I've currently got and finish up the remaining bits in the new year.

The gist of this update is to clean up, rework and generally improve all aspects of character development and many of the core game mechanics. The project has now reached the point that I have enough of a mass of code and content that I feel like I can quite quickly and easily move stuff around and start trying to get everything into something at least vaguely resembling a finished form. This will be a continuing work in progress, likely with some missteps and experimentation along the way but generally speaking I'm feeling pretty good about many of the changes made with this update.

There's a ton of stuff I haven't gotten to yet which I'll try to note along with the updates and, as is generally the case, the balance continues to be in a constant state of flux which will be hammered out pretty much as one of the last things before the final full release. Based on my current estimates this should be approximately 6 months from now. But as mentioned above, there's enough stuff I am happy about with this update, and enough solid improvements that should hopefully make up for the lack of final polish and refinement. So, on to the update!

UPDATE 1.32

I'll do my best to explain the big changes in some kind of logical order but since they all sort of rely on, and are balanced against, each other it will probably be more clear by just jumping into the game and trying it out.

Major Updates:

Removal of Skills and Skill Points
Previously the game had 4 major systems of character development: attributes, skills, talents and equipment as well as a number of minor systems like enchantment scrolls, using potions to raise max stats etc. My thinking here is that I'd rather have less systems overall but have each individual system be deeper and more meaningful. So by removing skills we get:

• Just a generally more streamlined character development process. Tell me the values of your 3 attributes, your talent set and your equipment and I know exactly what sort of character you have.
• The power gain from skills has been shifted to attributes, talents, and equipment making the choices you make in each system much more meaningful. Simply put the raw 'power' of each attribute, talent point, and piece of equipment has been increased.
• You are no longer able to 'build around' the RNG of the dungeon by just stacking points in any stat your lacking. This was a unique issue with skills since all characters started with all skills. There are a bunch of changes described below that will mitigate this somewhat.

Attribute Arch-Type Concept:
While not mentioned explicitly in game, I'm basing a lot of my design around the concept of Attribute Arch-Types. Basically, at the highest level, a character is defined by their Strength, Dexterity and Intelligence. You can imagine these 3 attributes occupying the 3 points of a triangle. Characters will start somewhere on this 'graph' based on their starting class and race and will 'move around' on it over the course of the dungeon. Your exact talent set and equipment load out will have a huge effect on what sort of specific 'build' your running but at the highest level, characters that have similar Arch-Types should play somewhat similarly and there should be a lot of cohesiveness between the talents and equipment that fall into that Arch-Type. Generally speaking:

• Strength based characters are very tanky with high hit points, melee damage and the ability to wear the heaviest armor.
• Dexterity based characters are very mobile and are able to setup fights from advantageous positions (stealth), move around and re-position themselves easily (movement points), and attack from range (range power).
• Intelligence based characters are spell casters with access to the most powerful abilities in the game.

Of course, every character is going to end up as some mixture of these so its possible to talk generally about characters falling into a STR/DEX arch-type (likely some kind of mobile melee fighter), DEX/INT arch-type (some kind of fast moving, kite heavy spell caster), or STR/INT (a walking fridge that hurls flaming balls of death). My main design goal here (likely not quite achieved yet), is that if you tell me just your characters STR, DEX, and INT I'll have at least a general idea of what sort of build your running. Just to be clear, none of this is explicit inside the game itself, this is more like a 'meta' design idea underlying a lot of the specific elements of character building.

Movement Points:
So following along from the attribute arch-types above, I was looking for some kind of concept that would help to unify DEX based characters and eventually settled on movement speed as a good candidate (actually a lot of this stuff has been simmering away in my notes for the better part of the last year). The idea is that a character with a focus in DEX should be highly mobile, able to move about the battle field easily, re-position to take out key targets like healers, quickly run away from dangerous melee enemies and just generally out maneuver everyone. In the extreme case of a pure DEX build a character should be squishy as hell, somewhat lacking in raw damage output but capable of simply avoiding the majority of damage, while taking out priority targets quickly.

My first attempt at this was to just handle speed the way that the majority of rogue-likes do it i.e. variable movement speed, fractional turn lengths etc. Basically if I'm 10% faster then an enemy then I'll take say 10 steps for every 9 he takes. This didn't work for me for a number of reasons:

• Its difficult if not impossible to predict and plan around.
• Since enemies tend to move towards you, even with a high speed you'd always just end up surrounded.
• You couldn't really position yourself to take out key targets like healers in the back line, since again, your still taking turns with the enemies who are going to swarm around.
• Its just generally the sort of arcane, obscure stat soup that I'm trying to avoid with Rogue Fable.

So the 2nd iteration, which I feel actually works incredibly well is the concept of Movement Points. Basically you gain movement points from DEX, from the new talent Athletics, and from any item or effect that would have previously given 'movement speed'. All characters now have the intrinsic ability to 'sprint' or 'fast move' by holding shift, which consumes movement points but does not end your turn. This does a very good job of handling what I envision a 'fast' character to play like:

• Priest standing in the back line and healing his allies? Sprint around his tanks and nail him in a single turn hopefully insta killing him.
• Poisonous snake or beefy ogre about to maul you in melee? Sprint away in a single turn to a point of safety.
• Bunch of enemies clumped together in such a way that a spell or ability could hit them all at once? Sprint to just the right tile which will let you pull off that perfect blast.
• Cloud of gas filling the room? Sprint through it to safety, since you don't end your turn, you won't take any damage.
• And of course lots more clever stuff like this.

I'm still working out exactly how to handle 'slow' both the effects of cold and the ogres intrinsic so this is one of those things that is still on the TODO list that I didn't have time to finish for this update. Generally though I'm quite pleased with how this one is working.

Something that's important to note here which plays into the Arch-Type concept, is that this makes movement speed specifically and DEX in general a universally useful stat, for all character builds. One of the things I'm trying really hard to do is to make all attributes, talents and equipment at least somewhat useful to all builds, so that there are actual choices to make rather than just ignoring half the stuff in the game since it has no effect on your build.

Charms and Wands Rework:
The issue here was:

• Wands were just behaving as a stack of scrolls, which isn't particularly interesting. I'm always looking for ways to try to get each 'system' in the game to be generally unique and orthogonal to all the others.
• Charms were just sort of an odd slot that was originally intended to be something you swapped around based on the situation but this never quite worked out.
• Mana points were basically useless to any character that wasn't intending to make use of magic talents.

So the new system is as follows: Wands and charms now both go onto the consumable hot bar but 'use' some amount of your max mana. Wands and charms now both recharge slowly over time giving you a decently strong ability on cooldown at the cost of your max mana.

This helps to completely differentiate them from actual consumables (which should generally be very powerful fight ending or escape options). It effectively gives you a bunch of 'slots' that you can juggle these items around based on the challenges your encountering. It makes mana points at least somewhat useful for all builds.

What I haven't finished yet is that charms should generally not be targetable abilities but rather powerful persistent effects likely filling the role that sustained abilities are currently filling. So rather than having to spend talent points on something like Flame Shield there would be a Charm of Flame Shield with the same effect at the cost of your max mana. Lots of interesting effects are possible here, and I'd generally like them to be more sophisticated then the simple stat bonuses on normal equipment.

Talent System:

• Talents now have attribute rather than level requirements. These are currently quite lenient and generally you should be able to get talents at roughly the same levels as before unless your doing something odd with your build but the idea here is really just to reinforce that idea of attribute arch-types. It should not be very difficult for a warrior to put a few points into say INT and take advantage of the lower level spells, but a pure STR build should not be able to pick up an end level spell and just instantly learn it due to his high character level.
• Talents are a lot stronger in general and scale much better with increasing rank.
• FUTURE TODO: given the new restrictions I'll be working in the future to make the higher tier talents even more powerful since their requirements are now more difficult to meet.
• Tomes now always drop in a mini-vault in which you can choose between 2 tomes.

Weapon Slots:
Yeah, the quick slot thing has being annoying me pretty much since its inception. It was originally just sort of a band aid over the previous wielding system and has had all sorts of oddities associate with it ever since. I mean you could do all sorts of nonsense like wield a two-handed sword in the quick slot and still make use of a shield if your actual primary weapon was one handed. Nonsense I tell you!

So the new system is pretty simple and streamlined:

• All characters have a melee slot and a range slot.
• Left clicking attacks with your melee, right clicking attacks with your range.
• The auto attack hotkeys work as expected.
• You can FINALLY use abilities with both melee and range without any inventory fiddling.
• Swapping weapons with your inventory uses 1 turn. In fact, swapping any piece of equipment now uses 1 turn.
• You can wield a shield as long as your melee weapon is 1 handed (ranged weapons no longer really have a 'handedness'). This is still a wee bit odd but is basically how most RPGs and MMORPGs handle it so I can live with this.

Simplified Encumbrance:
Just generally trying to make it clearer since the old system was not particularly obvious:

• Max ENC is determined by your strength
• Each piece of equipment has a weight which adds linearly.
• Exceeding the max incurs penalties to movement points and mana points

Scaling Health and Mana Regeneration:
HP and MP regen now scales as your maxes increase (though a little bit slower). So the issue here was actually a bit subtle since unless your paying attention to the number of turns you might not notice it. Basically resting to recover hp and mp was taking WAY more turns at higher levels since regen rates didn't scale. The dungeon had to compensate for this by dropping a ton of food so you didn't feel like you were running out. So despite resting taking hundreds of turns at high levels it generally didn't really pressure you any more than at the start due to all the food drops. The effect of this however was that abilities with long cooldowns, that are designed to only really be available once every floor or two, were suddenly always ready due to the massive rest time.

So simply put, HP and MP regen now scales up with your max HP and MP so that rest times are fairly uniform across the game. I'll be balancing food drops accordingly in the future, right now its likely that there's going to be way more food then necessary.

Dungeon Gating:
Some kind of gating has been in the plans pretty much since the start of the project, and so as a placeholder I've added a simple 'rune' system with 'runes' dropping in the branches and in the orc kings throne room (3 total) of which 2 are required to unlock the gate into Yendor. This is mostly just so that I can balance around the assumption that the player does in fact need to tackle at least some of these side levels and branches.

In the future this simple gating mechanic will be replaced by a number of more interesting situations with potentially multiple solutions. Just some examples:

• A massive wall of fire in Yendor jetting up from The Core which can be removed by dong 'something' in The Core. Alternatively a character could stack rFire and health and just face tank the damage. A super fast character might be able to sprint his way through most of it. A spell caster might be able to 'negate' the clouds by summoning other clouds on top of them.
• Some kind of massive clockwork construct sitting atop the down stairs in Yendor that can be disabled by destroying something in The Iron Fortress. Alternatively have a massive fight and burn some consumables and just brute force him down.
• Huge toxic pool in Yendor that must be crossed with the water pouring out from a pipe. Doing 'something' in The Sewers to put a stop to it. Alternatively: levitate, face tank w/ resistance, make a bridge of ice using cold magic etc.

So once again, runes are there just so I can balance around the future 'scope' of the game, but will be replaced with something more interesting in the near future.

Monsters:

• Some monsters are now flagged as 'armored' and will have protection based on their level.
• Golem Unification: all golems are now armored, slow, high damage melee units, capable of grabbing (constricting).
• Slime Unification: all slimes now split.
• FUTURE TODO: where it makes sense, I'd like to do this sort of unification with certain 'classes' of enemies that share some kind of predictable base set of properties and abilities + extra stuff for each particular type.

Items and Equipment:

• Significantly more item drops in general to take up some of the power lost from skill removal. There should be enough stuff dropping that the player has multiple choices in each equipment slot to make.
• Many of the simpler items (stuff that tends to just give some stats) are now roughly divided into 'tiers' so that you can actually get meaningful upgrades deeper in the dungeon. Of course many items remain 'special' in the sense that they do 'something' that isn't really comparable to any other item.
• Added a TON of new items, including armor sets to most of the deeper dungeon branches. Eventually I'd like to have whole sets of items that are unique to each zone so that the random selection of zones in each 'run' has a significant effect on what sort of equipment you'l have available. Of course this will remain balanced against the giant pool of general items that drop everywhere.
• Blunt weapons now ignore protection on enemies rather than doing knock back which should really be a more powerful magical effect on special weapons.

Specific Talents:
This is one area I didn't get nearly enough time to work on and so will have to wait for the next update. I'm currently working over the entire talent list trying to generally buff everything up, make it more generally useful, make each classes starting talents synergise better etc. So the exact starting talent sets of the classes and the talents that drop in each tome are definitely WORK IN PROGRESS.

• NEW_TALENT: Killing Strikes, passive, attacks will insta kills enemies below a certain % of HP.
• NEW_TALENT: Gather Mana, ability, replaces the various elemental infusion talents with the intention of being useful to a wider variety of characters.
• NEW_TALENT: Rage, replaces the barbarian intrinsic rage (he starts with it though). One of my goals is to have nothing be intrinsic to classes since they are intended to be a 'starting kit' rather than something that locks you into a role for the entire game. Races will be the place where these sort of intrinsic, game altering, effects will be placed.
• NEW_TALENT: Discord, ability, enchanter starts with this in his set now. Deals some light magic damage but makes the target take 200% damage from all sources for the duration. Combined with confusion this gives enchanters a nice way to focus down priority targets.
• NEW_TALENT: Inferno Orb, ability, summons a stationary, unkillable inferno orb which attacks nearby enemies every turn until poofing.
• NEW_TALENT: Flame Strike, ability, a smite targeted bolt spell allowing you to easily hit enemies hiding in the back line.
• NEW_TALENT: Dominate, ability, allows you to 'permanently' charm a monster but costs max mana to sustain the effect, similar to how necro skeletons currently work.
• NEW_TALENT: Cyclone Strike, ability, hits every enemy around you and knocks them back. Replaces powerstrike.

User Interface:
Generally the UI is another one of those things that will be a continuous rough work in progress until the last months of development since I don't want to spend a bunch of time making it pretty only to have some underlying mechanic or system change. That being said, this update also adds or improves:

• Better talent panel that more clearly shows the current stats of a talent vs the change in stats when you upgrade.
• Hovering over a talent upgrade button, attribute button, or holding a piece of equipment over a slot will now show the changes in stats that will occur.
• Attribute points are now spendable in the character menu so you don't have to stop mid fight and make a hard decision.
• Merchant window now displays your equipment and inventory as it appears on the character screen rather than one big unsorted list.
• The damage of your current melee weapon and range weapon are now prominently displayed. Also the damage of any ability or item you are currently targeting.

Conclusion:
Likely a bunch of other little bits and pieces I missed in my notes, but that should be most of it. As I mentioned at the top, a lot of this is still 'work in progressy' and there's a ton of stuff I intended to get done that will have to wait until next time but overall, based on my own play throughs, everything is working pretty solidly. As always I appreciate all your guys feedback, especially for an update like this with so many big mechanical changes. Thanks as always for all your support and of course Merry Christmas everyone! I hope you all have a fantastic holiday and I'll see you with the next update in the new year!