Dance of Death v0.3.60 Released!
It’s finally here! Dance of Death has officially entered into alpha territory, with version 0.3.60— playable and winnable.
This has been the largest iteration to date, and also the most feature-packed one, with a good number of engine, interface, and content updates.
Goal items completed:
- New monster types added.
- Monsters now drop loot.
- Endgame condition.
- You may now easily return to the main menu after death.
- Quest system implemented.
- You can now move diagonally without NumLock on.
- You may now E[x]amine inventory items.
- When stepping over a tile with items, the tile’s contents are output.
- Weapon skills have been added and are now used when equipping weapons.
- Armor now adds defense, and is wired to Armor, Light Armor, and Heavy Armor skills and techniques.
- Search and secret doors added.
- FOV now depends on Sight technique.
- The Dungeon Generator can now generate round rooms as well as rooms with cut corners.
- “Quick Character Creation” option added.
- Character Creation now validates that all stat and skill points are distributed, and that a name is typed in.
- Scrollbar added to output area.
- Bug fix: Messages addressed to the player are now properly output in second person.
Searching (#11) is done automatically when moving to all adjacent tiles to you, at a -5 penalty. To explicitly search, use the [s]earch command.
While item #14, the Quick Character Creation feature, uses the term “class”, do not be fooled, Dance of Death will remain a skill-based system. Classes are purely used to bucket sets of skills, and for aesthetic purposes.
To control the output scrollbar (#16), use [Tab] to put the focus on the output panel, then use [PgUp] and [PgDown].
Additional items completed:
- During Character Creation validation, if not all stats or skills points are used, the option to randomly use up the remaining points, or “fill in” has been added [Ctrl+f].
- Circle drawing algorithm switched from Bresenham to Manhattan.
- Menu screen look updated (randomly generated every time).
- Scrollbar added to skills in Character panel
- Scrollbar added to inventory in Inventory panel
- Bug fix: a missing << 1 in the line drawing algorithm was causing some artifacts.
- Bug fix: selecting gender and race now properly updates attributes in Character Creation.
- Minor improvements and balance tweaks.
Thanks to everyone for the feedback and motivation so far; please, do keep it coming!
wow you work very fast, great update!
I’m having problems going downstairs, I have a spanish keyboard layout and no matter how I press > it always gets <, I usually don't have this problem with RLs I hope you can fix it…
Hey Reaven,
I also had someone with a German keyboard report this problem, but I have been unable to track it down.
I’ll keep looking into it!
Do you have any other questions or comments?
Maybe you could make a temporally solution making other couple of keys work to go up / down in stairs ?
Nice demonstration of questing; the flavor text helped the victory feel more satisfying.
I’m quite intrigued by your idea of different weapon techniques – I’m envisioning the player being able to choose first to slash, then to sweep, and so on, with new techniques being unlocked as skill in the weapon increases… is that about right?
@Reaven,
For the next release, which should be a shorter development cycle, I have planned to include configurable keys.
@logos_phobos,
You have the right idea with new techniques being unlocked as the skill increases, but the way that the techniques themselves are executed will have a little twist!
I will be revealing more details on the combat system in about 2 or 3 releases, as I get closer to implementing it; especially since I’ll need to do some testing to see if the idea I have in mind works in practice!
Thanks to everyone for the great feedback.
Woohoo! Let’s go test!
(after a while)
Just bumped into a Great Ogre of DungeonExit and slain him by accident ^__^
Hehe, it’s nice to see the engine progressing very fast, so I wish you luck with all the new ideas and features!
By the way, why most roguelikes have 2 different commands for ascending/descending? Has anybody ever seen a staircase which leads up and down at the same time and you have to choose? 0_0
I’m sure some roguelike at some point had a simultainious “up/down” staircase. I may have played one with one, but I can’t recall.
There’s probably some technical reason but I think it’s more a “Just in case” scenario.
Traditionally, in roguelikes, you press [i] for your inventory, [e] to eat or [E]quip or [w]ear or [u]se something. In other words, the lack of contextual commands is actually a feature of traditional, by-the-book roguelikes.
However, since I have already provided a level of contextual item interaction in the inventory/equipment panels, and since contextual options are such a ubiquitous part of modern interface design, there is no obvious reason why [>], [<], or even a generic [u]se command that contextually uses whatever is on the current tile should not be implemented.
I will definitely be exploring this option for the next release.
Thanks again for the feedback!
Great work! I love the presentation! Will try to give it a longer shot soon 🙂
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To those of you having problems accending and decending, you may want to try pressing shift + dot/comma, that’s where the > < signs are located on the english keyboard.. I have the same problem, since i'm on a danish keyboard..
In any case, my reason for commenting is that i noticed that secret doors-walls does not get lid when the player comes near, like the normal walls does. I suppose this is a minor bug? 🙂
by the way, I LOVE the look system!
@Slash
Thanks for the feedback! The new iteration is in the works now, although it’s moving a bit slow as I start to once again build up momentum to it after the break.
@Ziggy
The weird thing about the whole international keyboard problem is that I am actually checking the character code, and not the key code (as you’d expect with a bug like this)! I will play around with my keyboard settings to see if I can replicate these problems, so I can finally hunt them down.
Regarding hidden walls, I implemented them like that on purpose, since I’m still working out the details of the Search skill. Also, I am randomly placing the secret doors without regard for dungeon connectivity, so I need to ensure that players can make their way through.
In the future, I plan to ensure only auxiliary paths (those not essential to traverse from staircase to staircase) are enclosed by secret doors.
I’ll also be fleshing out the look system a little bit more on this iteration, showing icons and such, and removing some of the debug information 😉
Regards and thanks for the feedback!