Hello everyone!
Update 1.33 is finally here after nearly 4 months of work! This one is pretty massive so I won't be going into full details on all the changes and additions since this post would just turn into a wall of text. We're getting pretty close to the point where I'll be calling the game complete with a tentative final release date of August 30th 2020, so I'm working hard on cleaning everything up, adding lots of little bits of content and just generally balancing and finalizing things.
So there's a massive amount of new content, tweaks and improvements but generally speaking they fall into two categories:
Level Generation and Dungeon Content:
This is really the bulk of the update and what I spent the vast majority of time on. All of January and February were spent overhauling the mess of spaghetti code that level-gen had devolved into and I now have a pretty clean system in which adding new vaults, new generators, new bosses etc. is very easy.
The original plan was to release once this was complete but I held it off since, from the perspective of you guys, the players, not much would have changed. It was all just behind the scenes technical stuff. So I've spent the last 2 months building up the generators, adding new vaults, new special levels etc. This stage is not quite complete and I'm planning on the next update being sort of the final Dungeon Content update where I finalize all this stuff. Just to get a rough idea of what we're looking at here in terms of content:
- The total number of vaults has gone from around 100 in update 1.32 to nearly 800. Many of these are now classified as "challenge-vaults" or "boss-vaults" which the many different level generators will try to control (not to few and not to many per level). The main idea here is that every level should contain at least one hard room or area.
- A whole bunch of mess was consolidated into "reward-vaults" which now include crystal chest rooms, enchantment table rooms, wishing wells, those little closets w/ a bunch of potions, food, scrolls or gold etc. These can now be blocked by key doors, switch activated doors, or timed doors. The number of keys and locked doors is now controlled for globally, with the key appearing either on the same level or deeper in the dungeon. Finally, there are 'hooks' in challenge-vaults so that something like the switch that unlocks a reward-vault can generate inside of a guarded challenge-vault.
- There is now a bunch of technical, behind the scenes tagging that goes on so that vaults can be general (placed by any generator) or special (placed by some kind of special generator) while still respecting overall mins/maxes on number of challenge-vaults, reward-vaults, boss-vaults per level.
- These three points, plus a bunch of general cleanup means I can pretty much write new generators, and add new content very quickly and it all just sort of integrates together as long as I tag everything correctly. This update is really just scratching the surface of whats possible since so much of the time was spent just laying this foundation. Expect a lot more 'stuff' with the next update as I can now turn my attention 100% towards new content creation.
Character Dev and Stat Streamlining
As we approach the end of the project I'm generally just going over everything and trying to streamline and simplify. There are a ton of little systems, stats, properties etc. that have been added over the last year and a half of development that are obscure, have little impact, are confusing or just are not fleshed out enough to justify their existence.
One of my main goals is to make stats on items and talents as clear as possible in their effect i.e. you should be able to tell EXACTLY what sort of bonus your going to get without having to deal w/ odd rounding or derived stats. Some of the major changes in this area:
- Removed attributes (strength, intelligence, dexterity) replacing them, where they appeared, with just raw HP, MP, meleeDmg etc. Rather than looking at a ring of +3STR and having to remember how much HP/meleeDmg that translates to, you'l just get a ring w/ +HP and +meleeDmg.
- Melee Power and Range Power always annoyed me to no end since they acted as multipliers and due to rounding you'd get odd situations where say a ring w/ +2meleePow might not actually raise your damage at all due to subtle rounding. This is now replaced w/ just raw +DMG. So a ring of +2meleeDMG just adds.... +2 meleeDMG.
I've also decided to revert back to the original skill point system w/ simple level requirements on talents. Given the short length of the game and the randomness of the loot, I think it makes more sense to have character development be very 'open' and unrestricted so that you can easily adapt on the fly to whatever the dungeon throws at you.
Furthermore talents now have just two 'ranks' instead of three (you learn it with one point and can then upgrade it with a second). This second rank should be a much larger, more impactful improvement over the first.
Misc:
As mentioned at the top, there's really too much to list for this update in detail but some other major points are:
- The Dark Temple is now back in the game alternating w/ The Orc Fortress
- A bunch of new enemies and bosses
- A bunch of new items
- New talents or changes to existing talents.
So yeah... lots of stuff, you'l really have to just check it out to see the changes and additions. My notes for this update are quite literally 100+ pages long :P
The next few months should basically just be a massive push of content. I'd like to get at least one new zone added, a couple of new classes and finally figure out what to do w/ races and then after that its mostly just polish and cleanup.
Thanks as always for all the support! Looking forward to hearing all your feedback, any suggestions, and of course let me know of any crashes or bugs!
Post Release Updates:
Thanks for all the bug and crash reports everyone! Sorry its always so messy the week after updates, but I'll be getting these fixed pretty quickly now. Will be doing lots of little updates over the next few days trying to get rid of these hard crashes asap.
May-05-2020 - 1.33.3
- Beast Master Nyx was crashing when throwing nets.
- Wand of lightning was not working at all.
- Extra stairs on UD:4 that led to.... UD:4 are now fixed (removed)
- Fixed an infinite loop (wouldn't actually crash, just complete lockup) in Yendor that was occurring due to portals.
May-05-2020 - 1.33.4
- Fixed a crash that lots of people reported under different situations where mousing over certain items (ex. Ring of Learning) crashed the game. This was mostly reported in crystal chests but could occur anywhere the item was generated.
- The -HP mod on some rings was creating fractional HP like 20.2
May-06-2020 - 1.33.5
- Removed staves as an option in acquirement menu since they have been rolled into ranged weapons. I'm considering ways to differentiate staves a bit from bows at least stat wise (maybe they generally have +mana or +spell power or element specific focus effects), so these may get split out on the summon menu again to allow mages to specify staves.
- Fixed the tome summoning on the acquirement menu.
- Fixed a missing switch for a locked gate in one of The Sewers levels.
- Fixed a level generation crash in The Core (would just lock up the game when descending and have weird walls and no stairs if you tried to reload).
May-08-2020 - 1.33.6
- Pits on the last level of a zone (level 4) will not longer be treated as bottomless, instead dropping you to the next zone. Reported for example on Dark Temple:4.
- Wands are now enchantable, reducing their cooldown.
- Fixed descriptions on speed granting items to no longer say 'doubles movement speed' since this has been replaced by movement points.
- Fixed spike traps turning invisible when triggered.
- Projectiles from Storm Shot should now correctly travel and not just explode in front of the player. I assume this is what was being reported w/ "Storm shot is missing". From my testing it looked like it was working fine with arrows but staves were not behaving correctly. Please let me know if there is some other issue with this ability.
May-11-2020 - 1.33.7
- Fixed crash when shooting shrooms with a heartwood bow.
- Being 'lured' onto a trap will now trigger the trap (ex. fire shrooms)
- Focus effects will now effect the damage of elemental staves.
- Fixed a giant ant glyph room that was missing walls, allowing the enemies to leave before opening the door.
- Fixed a vault in The Ice Caves that would explode walls but there were no enemies inside.
- Fixed a few vaults in The Sunless Desert in which opening one glyph door would not open all of them.
- Reloading the game will no longer clear the cold bar
- Shield of Ice will no longer block damage from hunger, poison and cannibalise.
- Shield of Ice will no longer stack with itself, allowing mummys to build up massive shields. I've mentioned before that Race's will eventually be getting a complete overhaul, so I'll be considering other broken interactions with the mummys infinite rest.
- Summoned battle spheres will hide their hit points since they are not attackable.
- An enemy fire mage that is casting fire storm (the multi-turn spell) will now stop casting if he gets blinked, knocked back or otherwise moved from the initial position.
- Fixed NPC fire storm passing through glyph doors (possibly walls at some angles).
- Gold will no longer spawn on top of gas vents in the sewers.
- Fixed storm shot always missing. The issue here was the interaction with the Perfect Aim talent.
May-15-2020 - 1.33.8
Hello everyone! Unless something I just changed seriously breaks, this should be the last 'hot-fix' update under 1.33. The next month or two will be dedicated to finishing up all the dungeon content, adding new enemies, bosses, vaults, items, hopefully a new zone etc.
Since I don't have any major system overhauls or code rewrites planned I'll be trying to get smaller updates out once every week or two. Pure content type updates tend to be a lot easier to break into smaller chunks like this. I'll be keeping an eye out for any bug reports and pushing these fixes along with the updates, trying to keep the game as stable as possible as we approach final release.
So please let me know in the next few days if I've seriously broken something, otherwise I'll be getting back to actually pushing the project forward. Update 1.34 should be out next Friday with some new content.
So onto the bug fixes! Thanks again everyone for all the detailed reports.
Bugs and Crashes:
- Random teleportation (either trap or scroll) will now perform a 'flood search' from the players current position when finding the random destination. This should stop teleportation from dropping the player behind locked doors, glyph doors etc.
- Same idea w/ falling down pits except that the flood search starts at the down stairs, so you shouldn't fall into locked areas or behind glyph doors.
- Added switches to the insides of locked downstairs rooms in case you fall down to the next level before unlocking the door.
- Fixed some portals that had their destinations reversed in one of the Arcane Tower final levels.
- Fixed a crash w/ the mossy branch creating vines. (Can't remember now if this crashed or just didn't work).
- Fixed a crash when arcane arrows (or any charging enemy) hit you while levitating above a pit.
- Arcane arrows now save their orientation when exiting and reloading.
- Fixed a level-gen bug where rivers were crossing over pits.
- Added prices to a bunch of items that were missing them (previously just 1gp)
- Fixed an issue where stairs would generate in 'boss rooms' in The Under Grove and The Ice Caves. Boss rooms were already flagged to disallow stairs but there was some crazy nonsense going on with the generation in these two zones in which I literally spent 10+ hours a few days ago tearing everything apart only to find a = where there should have been a == deep down in the bowls of some level-gen code.... good times :P
- Fixed a crash when the 'Special Stat' panel has to many effects listed. It will now just not display the overflowed stats but I'll have to add some up/down arrows for the odd cases when you actually manage to get this many special effects. Note: how the hell is this even possible lol? I had to work pretty hard to actually add the exact mix of talents and items to even get that many effects all at once.
- A dominated enemy with the NPC version of charm will no longer always target the player with charm.
- Using a scroll of acquirement on 'Armor' will no longer give you a shield (they have their own category).
- The entire floor space of a timed treasure room will now trigger the 'click' that stops the door from closing and will also open the door if it is closed. I assume people were getting stuck inside w/ teleports that skipped the actual door tile.
- Static levels (the hand made ones, with consistent layouts) were not being flagged as 'unique' so it was possible to get the same level twice in one dungeon run.
- Burst of Wind now works inside sand clouds, steam, smoke, etc, things that were blocking LoS but were otherwise 'passable'.
- Removed one way stairs from the archery range level that used to be a special level. I'm actually planning on adding back these 'special' challenge levels with one way stairs to all zones at some point in this final content push.
- There was a bug where hitting an enemy that blinks with an ability or weapon that causes knockback would cause the knockback to occur after the blink. I tried a few ways to handle this that all ended up looking odd, so now any ability or attack that causes knockback will simply never trigger the blink.
May-19-2020 - 1.33.9
Quick fix to remove double stairs (that crash) from generating in OrcFortress:1 / DarkTemple:1.