Rogue Fable III 
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Rogue Fable IV AlphaAug 21, 2023 - Community AnnouncementsHello everyone! After the first month of testing I feel Rogue Fable IV is now ready for open alpha testing. Everyone is welcome to join in at the following links: Game: https://justin-wang123.itch.io/rogue-fable-iv Discord: https://discord.gg/dsKHHuFqkN Overview: https://sites.google.com/view/roguefableiv/home Rogue Fable is a traditional roguelike you might ever actually finishJan 2, 2022 - PC GamerHello! Do you love the idea of traditional roguelikes such as Nethack, ADOM, Caves of Qud, or Cogmind?.. Read more.Post Release Hot-FixesDec 28, 2021 - Community AnnouncementsWill be logging hot-fixes here for the next few weeks as I deal with any remaining bugs, crashes or issues. If you find any new issues please let me know either here on Steam or on the Discord. Hot-Fix 2.0.1: Fixed victory achievements (derped out hard on this one and never even called the function on victory :P Fixed a bug in the main menu where the random scrolling backgrounds would eventually go black. Corrosive slimes now have a description of their weapon corroding attribute. Added descriptions to runes. Added descriptions to all unstable and slipper terrain. Hot-Fix 2.0.2: Looking at the code regarding achievements, I swear I must have suffered some sort of dropbox sync error at some point. A bunch of these problems have been literally missing function calls on stuff I know I tested at some point. Either that or I was drunk AF one night and carefully deleted a bunch of stuff for some reason... Fixed untouchable achievement being granted on win no matter what. Hot-Fix 2.0.3: Disabled the middle click debug key which was destroying enemies. Discord will no long double the damage when falling down pits. Fixed a crash when a vine or web bow was used to kill Yendor and the vines/webs blocked the portal from spawning. Infusion-of-Fire and Burst-of-Flame will now work on flaming clouds. Added a max range to projectiles from Ice-Bombs and Bone-Bombs Ice and Bone-Bombs will now show their targeting when hovering over them with mouse. Ice and Bone-bombs will now show ticking text for their duration to explode. Clouds will now show their duration in the mouse over text window. Liches in Vault-of-Yendor have had their revive cooldown increased from 3CD => 4CD to reduce the absurdity of chain reviving somewhat. Hot-Fix 2.0.4: Fixed a crash when killing the final form of Yendor with charge (when not holding the goblet). The game timer now pauses when loading new levels. Racial stats are now shown as +/- on the character select screen. Ex. Gnome and Fairy show -3HP per STR. Aquatic and stationary enemies will no longer keep reagroing each other once you are out of their LoS and they are unable to reach you. Aquatic and stationary enemies will lose agro faster once you are out of their LoS and they are unable to reach you. Hot-Fix 2.0.5: Fixed: Dash-Attack against Damage-Shield or Riposte was halting the dash and crashing the game. Fixed: Enchantment menu was showing MAX DEX on melee weapons and staves when the player had high dexterity (just a UI bug). Potion of levitation was incorrectly listing 50T in the desc when the actual effect is 200T. Fixed a broken wall tile in one of the Dark-Temple vaults. Fixed: monsters in the sewers would occasionally spawn near gas vents and immediately agro the player from across the map when entering (due to taking damage). Fixed: Moving the keyboard cursor out of bounds was crashing the game. Fixed: Holding the move keys when moving the keyboard cursor was moving the player instead of the cursor. The seed of a game is n...Full Release!Dec 27, 2021 - Community AnnouncementsHello everyone! Well, we finally did it! On December 22, 2021, after 3 and a half long years of work, Rogue Fable III finally reached full release status! I want to take this opportunity to give a big, from the bottom of my heart, THANK YOU to all of you have supported and encouraged me over the years, this would never have been possible without you! Over the course of this project, I've gotten married, had my first child, and had to deal with all the stress and uncertainty of the last 2 years, but throughout all of this, the project, and the community built up around it has been a stable anchor in my life. The positive reviews, the comments and feedback, the banter on Discord, its really kept me going through all the ups and downs, so again thank you all! Moving forward, the past week and the next few days have been very busy. Releasing around the holidays was always going to be a bit challenging, and I've been quite busy with family, friends, and just generally resting, but I will be getting back to work this week and much more in the new year. I plan to spend at least the next month or two completely squashing every last bug and crash that still remains in the project and dealing with anything else questionable that managed to slip through to release. After that, I'm planning on a few months of dedicated art practice since this turned out to be the major bottleneck during this project, and some focused work in this area should make the next game go smoother. I already have a ton of ideas and design sitting around for the next project which will take the core combat loop of RFIII and really expand it out into a much larger, more expansive game and world. Those of you who were around for the experimental fork a few years ago will have some idea of what I'm planning. One of the hardest parts of developing RFIII was ignoring all these interesting, ambitious ideas. Setting them aside and focusing on really polishing and refining the core gameplay, mechanics and user interface. So the next project will be taking RFIII as the starting point and really going all out, in many directions from there. But that's all for the future, for now a bit more rest and then back to debugging! Please continue to report any bugs, crashes or other issues either here or in the Discord. I hope you've all been enjoyed your holidays and have a happy new year! JustinUpdate 1.41Nov 27, 2021 - Community AnnouncementsHello everyone! After nearly 3 years of development this is it, the final major update! Its been quite the journey and I'd like to thank everyone who has followed the game throughout its long and sometimes chaotic development. I can't fully express how much all of your continued feedback, support and just general enthusiasm has meant to me all these years. So thank you! I'll be hitting the final release button sometime in mid to late December at the start of the Steam Winter sales. Until then I'm going to be devoting my time to getting every last bug squashed and whatever final pieces of balance, polish or content I can fit in. I was planning adding achievements for this update but other things ended up taking more time than expected and I'd like a good month or so to just really focus on getting the game completely debugged before release. I will be continuing with the occasional update post release, especially getting any bugs that slip through or are reported later. Likely some additional bits of content, balance and polish as well, whatever seems appropriate. After that though, I'm eager to move onto the next project. Maybe a bit of a break in between as well, its been awhile since I had one of those :P. Anyways onto the update! GAME RECORDS: This was the bulk of the update which ate up the most time. For some reason I find UI and menu stuff always takes a lot of fiddling and tweaking time despite the actual coding being pretty straight forward. A new character select menu that properly integrates race selection. The previous setup felt like it had races tacked on as a side thought, which, until recently, they sort of were. The option to play a seeded game which should generate identically each time. These games will not count towards game records. A new Game Records menu which, as above, fully integrates race selection and provides a few more options for viewing game stats. A new Records Table menu that allows for quick comparisons of best times, wins/losses etc. between races and classes. CONTENT: New Clockwork-War-Train major boss for the Iron-Forge (finally). Was getting a bit tired of 1/3 of all games having the same boss and item drop. New Mind-Flayer mini boss for the Dark-Temple. The lack of a second mini boss here was causing the Crystal Archer to spawn in a high percentage of games. New vaults and levels in a number of zones. Trying out Flaming-Battle-Sphere as a replacement talent for Sticky-Flame which was pretty useless in the Fire-Mage kit. Feedback appreciated here, there are a few more suggestions and ideas that I've got to work with for this talent slot. BALANCE: After some discussion, testing, and watching Random595 clear most of the game with just E and Fire Balling the nearest enemies, Fire Ball has had its damage and range reduced. I think this talent is an interesting balance case study in that it wasn't really overpowered so much that its just so generally usable. It makes the rest of the Fire-Mages kit unnecessary sinc...Update 1.40Oct 30, 2021 - Community AnnouncementsHello everyone! Getting close to the end of development and I’m pleased to say that everything is going according to schedule. The main theme of this update is a complete overhaul of the player races along with some final balancing and tuning. I was a bit nervous going into this update as I had not touched races since they were very hastily added way back in alpha. Until now I’ve almost exclusively done all my playtesting with human and so this felt like less of a rework and more like starting completely from scratch. I’m happy to say that it went very smoothly and I’m quite pleased with the results, so much so that now I find myself wondering why I’d ever play human when there is so much more interesting complexity with the various race/class combinations. I think this should really add a nice additional layer of depth to the game. Going forward the next update which should be done by the end of November will focus mainly on getting a bunch of achievements implemented and redesigning the character selection and records screens to reflect the choice of class/race. Also there are still some holes in content that I’d like to fill and a bunch more Yendor levels wouldn’t hurt either. Then its just lots of debugging and final balancing with a planned final release sometime in mid-late December in time for the Steam Winter Sale. So with all that said, onto the update! Player Races: As mentioned above, this was the bulk of the update. The primary goal of races in my mind is to add a whole new layer of variation and depth to character development, to expand the scope and complexity of the game. The races are NOT balanced with each other by design, in fact they can probably be sorted into normal, hard and very hard difficulties. Human should be the default choice for new players and should be the easiest race to play. All other races should be harder, or at least trickier to build and play characters with. I tried to avoid really obvious race/class synergies where certain races are just better at certain classes and worse at all others as I don’t think this really adds anything interesting to the game, though of course this can not be completely avoided. So regardless of the race/class combination, all non-humans should be harder or trickier to play than their human counterparts. This took me awhile to fully wrap my head around and commit to fully but as an example an Ogre Warrior should actually be harder to win the game with than a Human Warrior. Now, in skilled hands, this Ogre Warrior is going to be an absolute monster of a tank that should feel stronger, or at least ‘tankier’ than the human but the key here is that it should take a bit more skill and game knowledge to actually get this to work. I was kind of hesitant about doing unique race/class sprites for every combination as art can be pretty hit or miss for me as far as quality and time but I think they actually turned out quite nice and it encouraged me to clean up the human sprites as well whi...Update 1.39Sep 18, 2021 - Community AnnouncementsHello everyone! It’s finally here! The last major zone rework in what's ended up being a nearly 2 year long journey. This time its The Vault of Yendor so for the first time, the game actually has a proper end game that doesn't make me wince every time I reach it! I'm quite excited :) The next few months will be a lot of clean-up and polish as well as lots of additional content filling in obvious holes. A complete race rework is the first major priority and I’d also like to add an additional class or two. Achievements are definitely also on my ‘must have’ list and I'm sure there's some other important stuff. The current plan is to have the game totally finished with an official end to Early Access by mid December in time for the Steam winter sale. I'd love to hear from you all what sort of things you'd like to see in these next updates that you think should really be in the final game. So now onto the update! The Vault of Yendor: The main bulk of the update is a complete overhaul of The Vault of Yendor, its monsters and the final goblet level. I’m calling this a first draft which I’m releasing ‘early’ since I’d like to get feedback on the difficulty level here. I think getting the right balance in this last section of the game is pretty critical. In contrast to the rest of the dungeon, The Vault of Yendor is composed entirely of hand-made levels, each with a carefully planned theme and challenge. There are over 30 of these already and I’m planning on quite a few more. The 4 main levels of the zone are selected so as to avoid repetition. So for example there will never be two fire themed levels. The idea here is to have the widest possible set of challenges to really test the players build. These levels are intentionally pretty tough and during testing I’ve often found myself just searching desperately for the exit in order to save consumables for the last level. The final level is now a proper boss fight with the Wizard Yendor himself. Several fights in fact due to his ‘immortality’. There's a pretty simple ‘trick’ to actually finally killing him which should be pretty obvious by design. I’m trying to strike a fine balance here between providing an interesting and challenging last fight, while not totally screwing over the player at this final moment. With a good character build, a decent stock of consumables and no silly mistakes he should be pretty straightforward. As amusing as it would be to make this into some sort of elaborate death trap, I’d really rather not see a ton of character deaths at this late stage of the game. The fight should sort of be won or lost long before arriving here i.e. build a good character, don’t blow all your consumables, play the fight carefully and he should be ‘easy’. So please let me know how it goes, feedback here is very appreciated. Yendor Taunts and Messages: With the addition of The Wizard Yendor as an actual character in the game, I’ve added some dialog taunts as the player progresses through the dungeon as...Update 1.38Aug 6, 2021 - Community AnnouncementsHello everyone! Another big update today. Last time I mentioned I was ready to start working on completely reworking The Vault of Yendor and I figured that I'd spend the first week or two cleaning up some bits and pieces across the rest of the game. Well those bits and pieces sort of grew, as they always seem to do, and as the weeks turned into months I figured it would be better to just make this a big clean up and all around content update. I had a bunch of help this time from a friend who's worked with me before (Zellyna on the Discord server). He did a ton of new vaults and levels, vastly increasing the amount of dungeon content in the game. So big shout out to him, we'll be continuing to work together for future updates as we wrap this project up. I also want to give a big shout out to Random595 (also on Discord) who has recently posted some quite frankly insane challenge runs to YouTube. His 1HP challenge runs pretty much confirmed in my mind that he understands this game far better then I do, so be sure to check him out! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4zVFdgPe_3gJUCoW5-YP-Q Now onto the update: Dungeon and Levels: As with the previous updates a ton of new vaults and levels across all zones in the dungeon. Roughly half the time on this update was spent in this area so there's a lot to see here. In particular Colten added a lot of new unique special levels filling out a lot of zones that were previously missing anything of this sort. Attribute Shrines: An attribute shrine (STR, DEX or INT) will now always spawn somewhere in the lower parts of the dungeon allowing the player to buy attribute points. This provides another place to spend gold and gives the option of either maxing out your builds primary attribute or else quickly building up a secondary attribute. This may later be expanded to a larger set of shrines to various gods each granting different bonuses. Merchant: The merchant will now often spawn in little side rooms. Mostly just looks neat. At least 2 merchants are now guaranteed to spawn in every game. When the merchant spawns in the wilderness zones, he will no longer spawn on the first level. This gives the player a bit more time to collect guild, and increases the chance that you can actually afford something when you meet him. Portal Spawners: The Dark Temple now has triggered spawners that teleport in monsters. This lets us setup more ambush type vaults with enemies coming from multiple directions. I'm always looking for more ways to setup fights where the enemies are not just coming from one direction. Misc: Steam Vent no longer push the player (its just confusing) Library (with the free talent/talent point) should not spawn on Wilderness:1 (give the player more time to establish his base character). Drop-Walls and Monster-Zoos will never spawn on the first dungeon level reducing the chance of a level 1 death. Items dropping in later dungeon levels have a much higher chance of being enchanted. I'm trying to make sure that ...Update 1.37May 7, 2021 - Community AnnouncementsHello everyone! Update 1.37 is finally here after a long development cycle but I'm very pleased with this one. The main thrust of this update is a complete rework of the Branch-II zones (Forge, Arcane, Crypt) and the addition of new end zone bosses. Along the way I added an absurd number of new vaults and special levels throughout the game and generally fine tuned the balance in many places. After this, I'm planning a final major update for The-Vault-Of-Yendor which is looking pretty lame now in comparison to all the levels that come before it and then its just a number of final clean-up updates before I'm calling the project complete. Dungeon Generation and Content: Zone Expansion: Due to the new boss levels generally consisting of a single large room, I've expanded the length of the two branch zones (Sewer/Core/Ice and Arcane/Forge/Arcane) to 5 levels. So there are now 4 standard levels and the special boss level at the end. These special boss levels now have unique level names reflecting the boss so for example The Crypt levels now display as "Crypt:1/4" - "Crypt:4/4" followed by "The Tomb of the Lich King". Zone Partition: The zones in the later half of the dungeon (the two branch zones + Orc/Temple) have had their difficulty and spawn tables more distinctly partitioned. There is now a more pronounced jump in difficulty at the halfway point and of course the boss level is another noticeable jump. I tend to prefer these kinds of discrete 'breaks' in content which as opposed to just smooth gradients. During my testing I found that this encourages a much less linear path through the dungeon where, depending on my build, I may do the first half of a zone then return later when I feel better prepared for the second half. For reference the following levels are roughly equivalent in difficulty: Orc:1-3 and Ice:1-2 Orc:4-6 and Ice:3-4 and Crypt:1-2 Crypt:3-4 and Yendor:1-2 Yendor:3-4 Branch-II Zone Rework: This is the bulk of the update with complete reworks on the generation and content for The-Iron-Forge, The-Arcane-Tower, and The-Crypt. Pretty much rewrote all the generators from the ground up and added a ton of new vaults, layouts and levels. Also added new end zone bosses to these 3 zones which I'll leave as an exercise for the player to discover. Some specifics: Reworked all the tiles in The-Iron-Forge as the old ones were pretty crusty. Added conveyor belts to The-Iron-Forge that push the player and monsters along. Special armor sets with attributes have been moved to Branch-II so Wizardry, Shadow-Silk, and Heavy-Brass Armor now drop in Arcane, Crypt and Iron-Forge respectively. Vaults in Other Zones: During the Branch-II rework I significantly improved the system I use for creating, storing and tagging vaults and so I ended up adding a quite frankly ridiculous number of new vaults, layouts and special levels throughout the rest of the dungeon. I'll be continuing to do this for the remainder of development as ideas and inspiration strike. Just...Update 1.36Sep 25, 2020 - Community AnnouncementsHello everyone! Big update today with lots of new content, talent reworks, balance tweaks and general improvements. The big focus of this update was to finish the bosses for The Core, The Ice Caves, and The Sewers, continuing my slow march through the dungeon, finalizing all the content for the finished game. Along the way I did a bunch of balancing and tweaking to player attributes and talents, trying to get everything pretty close to how I'd like it for the final version. Of course lots of bug fixes, interface improvements and general clean up. NEW-BOSSES: All bosses have been given unique drops and at least 3 variations of their boss levels. The old end-levels have either been removed or have been reworked to be standard static levels that can generate anywhere. The Sewers - The Krakken: has a bunch of tentacles that act as independent monsters but move alongside the main body. The Sewers - The Slime King: has reworked mechanics where he will split himself repeatedly until killed. The Ice Caves – The Ice Giant King: basically just a massive melee/tank battle. The Ice Caves – The High Shaman: another massive fight but this time with Grax healing and hasting his allies. The Core – The Efreeti Lord: summons clouds of flames all around himself, launches powerful fire attacks and blinks away when threatened. The Core – The Lava Eel Queen: devastating ranged fire attacks. USER-INTERFACE: Cleaned up the HUD a bit so that everything fits better. Flattened the ability bar by reducing to 7 slots so that it fits evenly above the consumable bar. Since we lose an ability slot with this and there has been a longstanding issue of running out of ability slots, you can now remove abilities from your bar by picking them up and dropping them on the screen. You can add abilities to the bar by clicking on the associated talent to create a new icon. Though personally I never have an issue with the ability bar filling up, this at least provides the option to shuffle things around for those who like to build characters with tons of abilities. Added cleaner looking slots for melee and ranged weapons w/ associated damage text. Again mostly just lining everything up more evenly. Cleaned up the HP, MP, SP, Food and EXP bars so that they sit nicely at the top of the screen. The mouse over description of HP, MP and SP bars will now show their regeneration rate. The mouse over description of attributes will now show their total stat contribution while mousing over the icon shows the incremental improvement. The Go-To menu now displays a * icon next to the name of a level to indicate the presence of some interesting feature ex. Merchant. The details of the feature will be listed in the mouse over description. This just makes it so you don’t have to remember where a merchant or locked treasure room was. ATTRIBUTES: There are a number of goals here. Each point in an attribute should be useful to all builds i.e. you should always get some sort of noticeable improvement. An attr...Update 1.35Jun 30, 2020 - Community AnnouncementsHello everyone! Another pretty big update with some new content and lots of bug fixes and general polishing. The main area I was focusing on with this update was The Orc Fortress and The Dark Temple, getting their bosses setup with appropriate new loot, adding a few additional enemies, vaults, special levels etc. This continues the work I've being doing in the past few updates, going down the dungeon from top to bottem and filling in any content 'holes'. At the same time I'm working hard to get the game as bug free as possible and trying to catch any little details that need polishing. As is always the case, I'll be spending the next week or so responding to any new bugs or issues that have cropped up with this update so please let me know if you spot anything, or something doesn't seem right. With that out of the way, onto the update! Dungeon Structure: A lot of this is just reintroducing some structure that existed before I did the big Level-Gen rewrite a few updates ago and had not yet being carried forward into the new system. Extended the length of The Orc Fortress and The Dark Temple from 4 levels back to 6 (like how it was in December). There are so many connections and special features in this branch of the dungeon that it was feeling very cramped with only 4 levels. Note, I refer to Orc/Temple as Tier-3 in my notes so will be doing the same throughout this update. Added some additional zone entrance vaults for the first branch: Core, Ice Caves, Sewers. Added new zone entrance vaults for the second branch: Arcane Tower, Forge, and Crypt. Reintroduced the library as a set feature on Tier-3 level 3. A lot of people were missing this feature and I think it gives a nice, known resource that the player can dive towards before heading into the first branch. Reintroduced the runes at the branch ends and Tier-3:6 and the locked gate to Yendor on Tier-3:6. Bosses: The Orc Fortress: Minotaur King w/ Hammer of Crushing The Orc Fortress: High Shaman w/ Totem of the Beasts The Dark Temple: High Priestess w/ Amulet of Healing The Dark Temple: Drachnid Queen w/ Drachind Web Bow The Dark Temple: Demonologist w/ Crown of Intellect New Monsters: The Dark Temple: Summoning Statues (trying to make summoning a bit of a sub-theme in this zone). The Dark Temple: Mind Flayer The Orc Fortress: Orc Berserker replacing the Axe thrower. I'm trying to have the set of enemies in Orc be more melee, tank and healer focused while Temple is more ranged, caster and summoner focused. Level Generation: The Dark Temple: new level generator w/ connected circular rooms. Another sub-theme of sorts I'm working on to differentiate orc and temple. Orc should have more square rooms and levels with lots of hallways and choke points. Temple should have lots of wide open spaces and circular rooms and structure. As mentioned above a bunch of new zone entrance vaults for the branches coming off of Tier-3. A bunch of new vaults and special levels. New Items: Scroll of Flash Freeze (an alt...Update 1.34May 23, 2020 - Community AnnouncementsHello everyone! Update 1.34 is here with a bunch of new content, bug fixes and some changes (reverts really) to character development. Thank you everyone who commented on the recent feedback request regarding which char-dev system we should use going forward. Much like my own thoughts on the issue, it looked like there were some mixed opinions with a reasonable bias towards the old attribute system. So that being said and since, after a bunch of playthroughs I think I prefer the old system as well myself, we'l be reverting to attributes and working with them going forward. Obviously there's a lot of kinks to work out and balancing to be done but I think the game definitely feels better overall with the attributes rather than the skills. I'll be continuing to release updates reasonably quickly I think going forward, each one with a bit more content, bug fixes, and polish. Since we're getting near to the end of development I'll also be posting a lot more feedback requests, maybe trying to hit one key aspect per update, just really trying to hammer everything into a nice final version. So thanks as always for everyones feedback and support, now onto the update! Character Development Reverted back to the previous system with: Attributes instead of skills. Encumbrance system based on strength. Attribute requirements for talents instead of levels. I believe the system is mostly the same as it was before, but I'll be continuing to balance the actual numbers here over the course of the next few updates. There were a lot of good suggestions in the feedback thread on how to improve the system so I'll be taking a lot of that into account. Bosses Really the major part of this update besides the char-dev. I'm working my way down the dungeon starting from the top and adding bosses wherever they seem to be missing. Also adding items wherever they were missing. The Upper Dungeon: Bojacks the Berserker, dropping a Bloodstained Axe. The Upper Dungeon: Argyl the Swift, dropping a Goblin Swiftbow. The Sunless Desert: Synax the Snake Charmer dropping the Serpent Fang Dagger. The Swamp: Fergus the Fungal King dropping a Mushroom Cap Shield. The King of Thieves now drops boots instead of the Serpent Fang Dagger. The Vampire Bat now drops the ring of vampirism. A bunch of vaults were added for the new bosses as well as new vaults for some of the existing ones. Balancing: A bunch of subtle balancing, changing enemy cooldowns, damage and hit points, generally making the end game a bit harder (it was getting to the point where surviving the first 8 levels or so made victory almost assured). Added restrictions to really weak items like (ex. short swords, short bows etc.) so they no longer drop in the deeper dungeon where they are pretty useless. Significantly reduced mana regen (back to where it was before) as part of the changes to character development. Added a ton of new tables for crystal chests, specifically for higher level items. Also added restrictions to crystal ch...Attribute Feedback RequestMay 20, 2020 - Community AnnouncementsHello everyone! Been reading through a lot of the comments on the latest update and many people have raised issues w/ the changes made to character development specifically with regards to the removal of attributes. Since this was already something that I was back and forth on myself I figured it'd be great to just get some specific feedback on this aspect of the game. There's definitely a balance I'm trying to hit here between having builds feel distinct and requiring a little bit of planning and strategy on the players part vs being able to adapt to and utilize whatever loot the RNG is throwing at you. I'm trying to avoid the situation where 50% of the equipment or talents that drop are just immediately useless if they don't fit within your build. So the main question is really just: Do you prefer the game w/ attributes, encumbrance, and talent requirements or do you prefer the new, looser system? Any other related feedback is also of course appreciated. I'm mostly done w/ my work on Fridays update so I'm gonna try the following reverts so that we can get a clearer comparison given all the other changes. #1 Attributes back in, instead of skills #2 Encumberance based off of strength (I think this one was actually quite important to making builds distinct, since it made heavy armor a pretty big investment w/ a big payoff). #3 Talents have attribute requirements Its actually getting surprisingly easy to swap things back and forth like this and try out different combinations (all that code refactoring is paying off). I'm confident that, together, we can figure out an ideal balance, so please let me know your thoughts! *EDIT* For those who don't want to type out a big response or analyses a simple Yay or Nay on the new char dev system is helpful as well. As I mentioned above this was one of those changes I was pretty on the fence about so even just a broad idea of what everyone thinks of the changes will be helpful.Update 1.33May 2, 2020 - Community AnnouncementsHello 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 wha...Update 1.33 NewsMar 7, 2020 - Community AnnouncementsHello everyone! Update 1.33 is taking quite a bit longer then expected so I figured I'd let everyone know what I've been working on and what the delay is! For those who are just interested in knowing when it will release, I'm aiming for Friday, March 27th. As I think I mentioned in the previous update notes, my plan for 1.33 was to do a big clean up, improvement and expansion of all the dungeon content, namely: level-generation, unique vaults, special levels, terrain features, monster types and bosses. Basically make the stuff we already have better and add lots new stuff. So this is what I was working on for the better part of January until I got fed up with a lot of the underlying code that controls level generation, vault placement, population of levels etc. Some of this code was really old and had just sort of accumulated over the years without any real structure. Generally speaking, the number of special cases and 'hacks' had grown to the point where adding anything or even changing anything was pretty damn difficult and required a lot of arcane knowledge that was never well documented. So I figured that, in order to make the sorts of improvements and additions I was planning, it would be a good idea to spend some time and clean up all this mess. Well suffice to say, "some time" turned into "a lot of time" and all of February was spent deep in the bowls of level-generation, slowly wrangling it into a more manageable and unified system. This has now been 'mostly' completed and the new system is a heck of a lot nicer. Its capable of producing much more interesting, and complex levels. The many different generators (there are a lot of them), now share a lot more common code so that improvements, fixes and new content are now applied everywhere at once. Finally, its waaay easier to add content which I've been taking advantage of for the last few weeks to build up a ton of new stuff. So basically, I spent a ton of time cleaning everything up, and am only now really getting to take advantage of all the cool new systems. Everything is now progressing very quickly and smoothing and its actually very exciting how easy it is to add and modify things. As mentioned at the top, I plan to get a pretty sizable update out by the end of the month so hopefully it will be worth the wait. Thanks everyone for all your patience and support! Justin *edit* I should also add that I've been using Twitter to post occasional screen shots and updates at @PixelForgeGames for anyone interested.Update 1.32.1Jan 2, 2020 - Community AnnouncementsJust a bunch of bug fixes, should have some more tomorrow. Thanks everyone who's been reporting these! The following is now all fixed: Fixed shield wall always activating and making you effectively immune to melee. Equipping a Charm of Fire was causing a hard crash. Strafe attack was attacking Crystal Golems (or other reflective enemies) with range attack. Crossbow sprite was missing. Tough and fast elites were not getting the appropriate bonuses. Merchant was not spawning in his little throne room vault. The chest that spawned in the ant hill vault was causing a hard crash when opened. Trying to sprint while constricted was causing a soft lock. Same idea w/ bear traps. There was a missing portal in one of the Arcane Tower end levels. Changed the description of Swiftness to indicate it adds movement points. Additional levels of swiftness add more movement points. Thurg the High Shaman will no longer blink your inferno orbs next to you (he was treating them as allies). Inferno orbs will no longer get pulled along w/ the player across portals and stairs. Dungeon Sense talent is no longer up-gradable as it provided no new bonuses. I'll likely be doing something with this in the future. Simply comparing items that causes a change in Max Mana Points was causing charms to lose their charges. Using Fire Strike was setting the player mana to NaN (not a number). Tomorrow I'll be adding command + click to range attack for macs (since they don't have a right click button by default). I'm curious to see if Fire Strike was the only thing causing NaN mana or if there is some other situation so keep an eye out for it and let me know please!Update 1.32Dec 24, 2019 - Community AnnouncementsHello 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 b...Update 1.31Nov 8, 2019 - Community AnnouncementsJust a big bunch of bug fixes with this one. Wanted to clear out some of these issues before moving onto the next major update. First major fix, that was seriously effecting a small number of people: There is some kind of issue that is causing save files to corrupt which made the game load to 99% then freeze. Console window would display something along the lines of 'failed to parse a token at '. Reinstalling would sometimes not fix this issue since depending on how the reinstall works, it might not clear the save files. So the game will now at least popup a window letting you know whats occurred and direct you to the directory where you can delete the offending file, and point you to the pinned bugs and crashes thread here in the forums where you can leave some information. I've never seen this occur myself so will need help tracking down the source of this issue from anyone who is effected. Bugs and Crashes: Disengage will now correctly show invalid targeting when an ally is behind you. Fixed the numbering on the text options after death (was previously 2, 3) Fixed an issue where it was possible to sprint through an enemy standing in a doorway. In fact, all pathfinding was apparently treating an open door + character as 'passable' so this likely fixed many other underlying issues. Lunging will no longer trigger traps in the path (assume the player is leaping over them). Items in the quick slot are now taken into account by the loot generator. It was previously possible to have say a +1 bow in the quick slot and then have the loot generator create a +0 bow. Fixed strafe attack attempting to trigger when reloading the game, teleporting, going up and down stairs or pits etc. This was causing a hard crash. Ring of storms now correctly adds storm focus. Fixed stairs spawning in the skeleton vault in the upper dungeon. Also falling into it from pit traps. Fixed: could not descend pits when levitating. Using a scroll of domination on a previously charmed enemy will now override the charm correctly (an old one!). Fixed energy shroom tea, potions of levitation, etc. not giving the status effect. Fixed the exploding walls trigger in one of the Yendor end levels. Items will no longer spawn on the portals in the Arcane Tower, rendering them unlootable. Charge crunch will now correctly crit the enemy. Fixed piranhas spawning on shock reeds in some Swamp vaults. Heavy brass boots now have a price (not 1gp). Targeting at max range of tunnel shot will now show the correct targets (was previously showing nothing, though it still worked as expected). Fixed targeting traps with projectiles weapons, consumable projectiles, spears, staves etc. Stopped vines from spreading onto lava (an old one) Guaranteed a path around the lava in one of The Core entrance vaults to stop your allies from getting stuck. Wishing well was reported as not spawning on OF:2. Apparently it was always spawning on OF:1, so I've now just set it to spawn with the library. Enemies will no longe...Hot Fix: 1.30.XNov 2, 2019 - Community AnnouncementsJust a quick hot fix to deal with a few critical crashing issues: 1.30.2 Switching to text based hit point display will no longer break the game i.e. crash on startup. Charm now works again Fixed crash with the Swamp Siren (she kept 'luring' the player onto occupied tiles) Fixed crash when mousing over hell portals 1.30.3 Fixed javelins (and other throwing weapons) consuming double ammo Fixed another crash regarding hp text (would occur when changing levels, also occurred on the main menu when the background would switch). Fear now working correctly on enchanter Fixed Elemental Magic Focus ex. Fire Focus, exceeding the III cap and displaying incorrectly. I'm thinking of devoting the next update (a quick 1-2 week one) to taking an axe to the overgrowth of bugs and crashes reported here on Steam and Discord. I figure its been awhile since I focused on 'stability' and I think its nice to take some time every few updates to consolidate our gains by cleaning everything up and getting it all working as smoothly as possible. Thanks for bearing with me while I work these issues out!Update 1.30Oct 28, 2019 - Community AnnouncementsHello everyone! Absolutely massive update today, probably the largest I've ever done in terms of sheer content. As is generally the case, some of this stuff falls into the "changes or additions in preparation for future changes or additions" so I'll try to make it clear when this is the case. Also, as always, a ton of bug fixes, quality of life improvements and general polish. With that out of the, on to the update! Dungeon Expansion: This is the biggest piece of the update and also the piece that falls most into the "preparation for future updates category". I'll be slowly increasing the size of the game in the next couple of updates so this is mostly just laying out the backbone for this expansion. Extended the length of tier III zones (Orc Fortress and Dark Temple) to 6 levels. This gives more room for the entrance vaults, special levels, special branch levels etc. described below. Temporarily removed The Dark Temple from the random rotation (it needs a whole set of content to bring it up to the level of The Orc Fortress, which will be coming next update). Added entrance vaults for The Sewers, The Core, and The Ice Caves into The Orc Fortress with appropriately themed terrain and monsters. (Entrance vaults for the 2nd set of branch zones coming next update. Added a special 'gate' level to Orc:5. Basically a big, challenging fight. There are only 2 of these right now in random rotation, but I'm planning on adding lots more including ones that are linked to the branches. These branch linked ones would be things like giant walls of fire that are disabled by destroying some Totem or Altar in The Core. Added new "special branch levels": The Ogre Caves and The Archery Range. Again, the plan here is many more of these in rotation, and many variations of each. Added new special branch level: The Orc Kings Hall. Same idea as above, will need more types and more variations within the type in the future. The idea with these special branch levels is to eventually have a whole set of these per zone that randomly select. I'll be using these special levels to insert highly specific, and highly challenging levels that will tend to require some additional consideration on the part of the player of what order to tackle them in. This could be stuff like bosses, environmental challenges, or just big fights with a specific enemy type. These will sort of merge with the existing concept of the "end levels" that the branches already have and will become the highest level areas outside of The Vaults of Yendor. In the future there will be some sort of gating mechanism requiring the player to clear say half of the special branches in order to gain access to Yendor. Looking forward, once I have enough of these special branch levels created, I'll be pulling some of the code over from the experimental test branch so that rather than a confusing mess of upstairs/downstairs, I can layout each zone on a flat plane with levels connected north, south, east west, while maintaini...
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