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Untrustedlife

Indie Horror Roguelikes

Month

August 2016

Progression is finally here!

So, I finally have full progression implemented. It took about a week (with a  couple days of playing stellaris, sorry) , but it is finally implemented.I still have some miscellaneous fun things I want to do, a name generator for items that is better than the current one , things like adding helmets, and boots , etc. and having those together defend you from 1 or 2 elements partially,. But the  basis (chest pieces, numerous types of weapons) are in. And you could theoretically play the game infinitely for infinite progression because all the items are dynamically generated based on how deep you are and their types.

Weapons can now be of 6 different types, with a rare variant for each type.

  • Swords

Metal Swords, Poison Swords, and Fire Swords are weapons that do a specific type of damage, for full power, but they are limited because they only do damage with one element.

  • Staffs

Staffs are a weapon that does both poison and fire damage (and magic, later), but they are limited because in comparison to a sword for example, they have the same amount of points possible, but they will assign it to both elements, so its like having two half damage elemental swords (with a  random element).

  • Poison Daggers

Poison Daggers are a weapon that does both poison and physical damage.

  • Fire Daggers

Fire Daggers are a weapon that does both fire and physical damage.

 

Both types of daggers are limited because they do only a small amount of physical damage, but also do an okay amount of elemental damage.

 

So now the players will be making a choice as to what kinds of weapons they wish to use.

  • Armor

I also have armor, and armor can (currently) be of 3 types, fire armor, poison armor, and metal armor, they work similar to how the swords worked in the previous section, but I plan to add smaller armor pieces like helmets and boots later on, that will allow the player to further customize their characters to do and be defended by specific elements.

 

All these items are dynamically generated based on how deep in the dungeon you are.

 

(EDIT: Note, after I published the blog post, I realized these gifs were very low quality, I am sorry about that, ll get better ones up tomorrow, so you might as well skip past them to the end)

The items are also procedural (eg, there is a random element)

testtest.gif

 

 

 

 

Me showing off a couple random samples of items in the arena, as you can see, the stats of these weapons varies quite a bit, and that is only for the first section and that is only a couple of them. Also you will notice I abandoned the idea of random/identifiable potions because there is enough randomness already!

test.gif

test.gif

 

That dagger, is special, it took all its points and assigned it to physical damage, that happens sometimes.

 

I also have special items, which are called “rare” a rare item will show up as blue in the players inventory, and they have a +1 to all relevant statistics, so you can get armor that is rare on the first level for example, and that armor may fully protect you from one element for the entire next section.

 

 

The Future Of The Game

After several days (had to have been at least 4, maybe more I didn’t look back at old blog posts) of programming/procrastination/code cleanup/random feature adding to aid in procrastination I finally have the procedural item generator, and item spawning based on frequencies  balance fixes, health tooltips, and  lots of other things done. It took alot of work, but now I can generate and spawn items on the fly, and by name,  and  can also generate premade items all from the same generalized  list (which also includes all the item frequencies!).

My first fully procedural item is skeletons and skulls, they act as a way of helping the player come up with a  story in his/her head, and there is a chance they will reference a creature in the dungeon (only vermin right now, because I don’t have progression fully implemented yet)  the player may not have seen yet. They have a frequency of 25/100.Capture.JPG

All other items (which are all mostly premade right now, except the players starting weapon (which is a random elemental dagger) have a frequency of 10/100. But there are alot of them.

Food (which right now is this one fruit called an epel (because I want to make  a fruit generator eventually, because why not, so I might as well use a name I hope will pop up when I do get to that)  also has a frequency of  10/100.

Capture.JPG

Now that that is done, I will get monster progression in -> then set up the weapon generation code for creating balanced procedural weapons based on your depth. (its there, but it doesn’t progress yet), It probably wont be difficult to balance since the monsters already have some idea about how powerful they are supposed to be based on a “level” which is not really a level but just an abstract “use this number to assign points to creature that the AI can use to choose stats” concept. I can use the same for weapons.

Since the item gen code is completely done, this will probably take me less then a day, it may even be in by tonight (I just need to make an algorithm for weapon progression)

 

After that is done, I will proceed to work on this xml based “GameSet” system which I described in the recent sharing Saturday.

(Quote from sharing Saturday)

  • I will use my new xml parsing/writing code to create these things i’m calling “Game Sets” A “Game set” will allow players to (optionally) play through a game repeatably with the same “Set” of procedurally generated creatures so that they can play the game like any other standard roguelike (Until I get to the point that I start working on proper “world” saving and overworlds and such, at which point you will play in the same world over several characters) , it will also ask you when you die if you want to play with the previous game set, which is handy.

 

Game sets will be the way that a player can play with the same set of creatures and by extension (since items are based on creatures), items. Until the game has progressed to the point where I feel comfortable having a world generator. (and then allowing saving the world)

 

After this I might just release the first publicly available version or I may not, depends on what happens in the next few weeks.

 

Now Gifs!

 

(Note, it cut out the bottom part of the log and the tooltips about monster health, but if you look closely you can see text at the top right of the screen that is cut off when I mouse over a creature)

 

I might just replace that with an “everything you can see” type tooltip like what brogue has.

Imgur Link

 

Another One:

 

hehe, I tried to use a fire sword of a fire resistant creature and died, of course I did.

But that death was my fault, not the generator’s Hopefully thats how all deaths feel in this game.

 

I also show off the log in this one.

imgur link

 

 

What have I been up to?

I added an arena mode to make testing easier today, and that enabled me to fix a new bug that popped up. I am still working on the item gen code, I don’t have a tremendous amount of freetime, but I think Ill finish the item generation code by tomorrow.Though I do have some things I need to get done tomorrow that might delay that another day.

A screenshot of the arena:

arena

 

I also got rid of miss chances on normal creatures entirely in order to make combat completely deterministic ( the dodge chance was the only random element), and then added a new “ability” that a creature can have that enables it to dodge.

 

I also picked up a gif making tool (Courtesy of reddit) , so I can now make gifs of my game, to show it off.

Like this one:

A gif from the game.

 

(Note, some of the UI, like the mouse over/monster health/bottom of the log are partially off the gif so you cant see them, I am unable to record the entire window for some reason)

Spoiler, This was actually a YASD, I should have ran left.

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