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Dance of Death v0.6.136 Released!

Dance of Death v0.6.136 Released!

Today, on the first Annual Roguelike Release Party, I am honored to bring you the latest update to Dance of Death, version 0.6. This has been one of the longest iterations to date, implementing a number of major features focusing on world and wilderness generation. I am extremely pleased with the outcome of this version, and though I have my work cut out for me moving forward, feedback is, as always, very much appreciated!

The following goal items have been completed:

  1. World generator.
  2. Wilderness area generator.
  3. Ability to move between wilderness areas.
  4. Entering a dungeon from a wilderness area.
  5. Exiting from a dungeon onto a wilderness area.
  6. Improved name generator.
  7. Gender bonuses tweak.
  8. New playable races.
  9. Reworked main quest to include the wilderness.
  10. Saving the world map.
  11. When the game loses focus, added a “Paused, click to continue.” overlay to ensure the keyboard focus is always correctly active.

#5, the improved name generator, now uses statistically-sequenced weighted random letters to create names based on a list of seed names, then runs a Damerau-Levenshtein check among other post-processing to ensure that the name fits. Gender bonuses (#6) have been modified to differ across races, paving the road for a surprise feature involving races and gender (no spoilers!). As far as playable races (#7) go, I decided to make good on my goal and add Dwarves, but held off on further adding races until they can be more clearly defined; this definition is a large part of the skill/item/combat/interface (roughly in that order) redesign that the next few versions will feature.

The following items were also completed:

  1. A basic hunger (sustenance) system.
  2. Monsters now drop corpses that must be used as sustenance.
  3. Eating now restores health, health no longer regenerates automatically.
  4. The dungeon is placed on the highest peak, and the player is guaranteed to start in the wilderness within roughly a 9-area distance.
  5. Walking through rough terrain, such as bushes, unstable ground (hills), and cliffs (mountains), takes more time for both the player and monsters.
  6. Characters are now equipped with their starting items when the game starts.
  7. Ranged attacks now properly resolve at the end of their animation.
  8. New status messages “Starving!” and “Revitalized!” now appear when Sustenance reaches 0, and when health is regenerating, respectively.
  9. Attribute bars updated.
  10. FOV is doubled in wilderness areas.
  11. User input now forces animations to complete.
  12. Added new/missing ASCII tiles to character map.
  13. Added functionality for tiles that are visible but not passable, such as water.
  14. Continue screen now centers vertically and displays characters in descending order from last created.
  15. Bug fix: Monsters now accurately check whether the player can see them, eliminating extraneous messages from out-of-sight.
  16. Bug fix: Examining items that are near the bottom of the screen in the inventory should now bump up the examine box properly.
  17. Bug fix: Monster turns are now correctly resolved when ranged combat completes.

The following items were scaled back largely to ensure a timely release, and partly to keep the feature iterations tighter to avoid unnecessary feature creep:

  1. Ability to move between a wilderness area and the world map.
  2. Moving at the world map level.
  3. Entering a wilderness area from the world map.

Once again, happy ARRP, and please, do not hesitate to send your questions and comments this way!