next »

[JasonPickering]

excellent. will we be able to unlock weaker characters that make the game harder by number of wins?

[Gimym TILBERT]

If you make all items on one tile becoming a chest it may help the player understand there is more than one item. Also chest should be different if they are dungeon chest or drop chest. Or maybe another container icon like a bag for drop.

[Oddball]

excellent. will we be able to unlock weaker characters that make the game harder by number of wins?

Unlocking harder quests would seem the more logical reward for completing quests, but not got any plans for that. I'd prefer to allows players to take the quests at any pace they want. If someone wants to jump straight in at the harder quests then more power to them. Having said all that I can always put up some bonus characters for download after release if there is a big demand for weaker characters. The character roster is fully mod-able and expandable.

If you make all items on one tile becoming a chest it may help the player understand there is more than one item. Also chest should be different if they are dungeon chest or drop chest. Or maybe another container icon like a bag for drop.

This is a good suggestion. A universal sack or backpack icon for multiple items might work a treat. Think I'll try it out and see what happens. Thanks.

[Del_Duio]

I am also contemplating having monsters drop there entire inventory instead of just the one item as it now.

Dude, this would be awesome! The gold box D&D games did this same thing- every fire knife thief you killed gave you his little stack of arrows, short bow, leather armor or whatever, and some money possibly. Sure, you'd potentially have 500,000 goblin thongs floating around in your inventory but it'd make for good realism.

Do you plan on having encumbrance too? Might make a big difference if you plan on enemies giving you their full inventories when killed.

[Oddball]

No encumbrance is needed as the player only has eight equipment slots available to him. That is why I was a little concerned about having to juggle items back and forth if monsters drop everything. There's technically a ninth slot for 'one use' items, but only monsters make use of it, players automatically use 'one use' items when they pick them up. Some testers did questioned the auto-use aspect of potions, but as there is no benefit to saving potions or scrolls it seems like the sensible way to do it.

[Oddball]

It's been a slow week for HSL. Been busy with other stuff and feeling a little burned out.

An enchantment by any other name
Added the enchantment name generator. Before all enchanted items were simply labeled enchanted, but this addition gives enchanted items a richer set of names. This is only superficial and has no real game effect. It's also a little sparse at the moment, but there'll be plenty of time to flesh it out later. I only wanted to get the code in and working for now.

I finally succumbed and added keyboard controls. Standard roguelike keys(yuck!) are supported as well as numpad and cursor keys. The only things that don't have keybindings yet are the game options and title screen. If I was making this game just for myself I wouldn't have bothered with keyboard controls as HSL is designed to be played with the mouse, but I understand that others prefer keys. Also some of the testers wanted to use a mix of keys for movement, and mouse for targeting.

[tametick]

I finally succumbed and added keyboard controls. Standard roguelike keys(yuck!) are supported as well as numpad and cursor keys. The only things that don't have keybindings yet are the game options and title screen. If I was making this game just for myself I wouldn't have bothered with keyboard controls as HSL is designed to be played with the mouse, but I understand that others prefer keys. Also some of the testers wanted to use a mix of keys for movement, and mouse for targeting.

Arg, you capitulated! The mouse is clearly the way to go

[Oddball]

I'm locking the Devlog whilst I gather feedback on the beta. If you wish to try it yourself then head over to the feedback thread.

[Oddball]

Ok, after ploughing through all the feedback and compiling it I've started working on this again in earnest. The biggest news is that I've managed to rope the talented Jack Menhorn in to do the music. Surprisingly there was a lot of interest from composers wanting to add their talents to the game, but as soon as Jack showed an interest I signed him up. Anyway, this all means it's time for another devlog entry.

Savings at last
The biggest addition, and also the most requested feature in testing, is that the game now saves on exit. Testers would press escape thinking it had a function other than instant quit and would as a result lose their game Now the game is saved exactly as you left it and no matter how you exited the game. The code for this is a little unrefined at the moment as I just dump the whole game memory to file and restore it when the app is restarted, but I'll clean it all up after I'm satisfied it's working properly in all situations.

With Jack on board I thought it was time to finalise the music player. It was pretty much complete, but it needed better transitions when one track interrupts another and other minor changes. It's all around a more solid piece of code now.

One issue flagged up in testing was that players were still sometimes accidentally clicking the wrong tile when trying to attack monsters. This popped up last time as well, and I thought I'd solved it by making spaces with monsters in 'attract' the cursor. This obviously wasn't enough so I decided to finally put this problem to bed with a couple of major additions. The first is a floor grid. You can now, if you wish, have a grid overlaid on to the floor to show you beyond all doubt where each tile is. The second is a magnifier. You can now zoom the gameplay area in or out so everything is much easier to click and see. You can also use it to zoom out and see the whole level on the screen all at once. And finally I made it easier to find and use the full screen option. Some of the testers didn't understand that increasing the window size would eventually make the game go into full screen so now you can also use the shortcuts [cmd+F] or [F11].

There have also been plenty of more minor additions. Dungeon shapes are now implemented. These are the overall shape of the dungeon, its outline if you will. This means dungeon levels can be massive and sprawling or small and compact, as well as different shapes such as a round wizard's tower or skull shaped castle. The item preview now shows if the item is raising or lowering stats by colouring them green or red. I've nerfed swift items. originally items with swiftness just wouldn't have any other bonuses and so the thinking was that taking up a slot was their downside. It seems like that wasn't enough so now all items with swiftness will also contain some form of curse/penalty. Hopefully that will balance it. And finally I've added level feelings when something special or unusual is present on the level. I may also add a level difficulty indicator to this as well, but I just need a reliable way to calculate a level's difficulty.

Until next week

[Gainsworthy]

Will give a longer post later, but for now?

This is beautiful, elegant, and a little unexpected. Bravo. 

[RotateMe]

[...] as I just dump the whole game memory to file and restore it when the app is restarted [...]

Is there an easy way to do this in BlitzMax!? Would help me a lot.

[Oddball]

Is there an easy way to do this in BlitzMax!? Would help me a lot.

Yes. It's just one simple function call using Brucey's Persistence mod.
http://code.google.com/p/maxmods/wiki/PersistenceModule

[Oddball]

I'm not going to post a devlog this week. I've done loads of work on HSL, but it's nearly all spoiler-ish. The only non-spoiler news I can give is that I've finished up all the keybindings. Now everything can be done using the keyboard, if you wish. I also added an option to swap the functionality of [Numpad5] so now you can choose whether it is for wait or pick up. And that's about all I can say this week. Rest assured though everything is advancing well and hopefully I'll have a lot more to say next week.

[Oddball]

Another small devlog post this week.

Game on
I'm calling the game feature complete now. There's still quite a bit of coding to do, but none of it adds any new features to the game. The only coding left now is cleaning and optimising, and making sure files are all saved correctly on all platforms.

There are a couple of features still on the 'to do' list, but they weren't doing it for me so they've been dropped. The biggest dropped feature is synergy items. They were going to be items that when a whole set is carried they became even more powerful. Something like an ancient heros helmet, breastplate, and shield. Each on their own would be fairly mundane, but when all of them were carried together they would grant greater bonuses and abilities. I dropped it because they didn't sit well with the procedural nature of item generation.

I've also turned my attention towards content. I'm currently cleaning up/balancing the 'Journey to the Kimon' quest and then I can start adding new ones. I'm hoping for seven quests in total, but I'm going to wait and see how they play/look before committing to them all.

[eobet]

Mac version, yay!

I'm leaving a reply in here so I remember to check it in the future, because I get a nostalgia-gasm by looking at those screenshots (memories of Gateway to Apshai on the Atari 800 and Rogue on the Atari ST flies past).