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[BrokenPegasus]

GrueQuest is an 8-bit roguelike parody RPG. You play a young man (or woman) fighting for their freedom, having been wrongfully thrown into the Grue's dungeon by the evil Mayor of Town and his slightly less evil secretary Cherri. The objective of GrueQuest is to travel downward through the dungeons and, well, fight the Grue (as would be implied by "Grue" Quest.)

What have I got working thus far?
-Random dungeon generator
-Minimap
-Actor class (for the Player only currently)
-Stats (there is currently no way to see them)
-Chests (currently all unlocked)
-Inventory
-World items
-Doors
-Room names
-Raycaster class
-Items (including bag items.)
-Item randomizer (adds better or worse stats at random; it's affected by the players Fortune stat.)
-Description box (for items only.)
-Animation/tilemap class
-Room XML maker (since my dungeon generator uses pre-made rooms instead of randomly making rooms, this speeds up the process of making xml files by taking images I give it, sorting them by size, turning them into int arrays and saving the int arrays to xml files.)
-Enemy actors
-Keys/lockpicks (for locked chests)
-Money
-Crafting

Planned features
-Skills/Skill sets
-Boss enemies
-Stairs
-Shrines/Temples
-Saving/Loading

Post-Alpha features
-Possibly Multi-player (I've never really worked with multiplayer stuff, but then again I've never worked with anything else I've added to the project either, so we'll see.)
-Other things I either can't think of right now or haven't decided on.

What else can you tell me?
Basically what I have planned is a humorous little game filled with odd abilities, enemies and deities. In the beginning of the game you'll choose 6 skill sets(with skill sets such as: Psychedelics, Gothomancy and Necrotical Science), 1 weapon proficiency (or 2 if you pick up the Ambidexterity skill set) and which two deities you want to support you (they just represent the six major stats: Brawn, Brains, Briskitude, Fortune, Vim and Ego.)

The deities of the game will have their own shrine(s) or temple(s) on each dungeon level (depending on the size of map the player chooses, a small map will only have shrines while a larger map may have temples as well) and these temples and shrines serve different purposes. Shrines will be a one off thing (use it once then never again) while temples will require payment. Shrines or temples of Morris (the God of Merchantry), however, are the game's shops so the size difference will only regulate how many items Morris has in stock at that shop.

On each level there will be one staircase going up and one staircase going down. The downward staircase will have a boss enemy guarding it. You will have to beat the boss in order to descend the staircase, but once that's done you can come and go as you please. Then when you reach a certain level you'll face the Grue.

Anyway, I'm horrible with descriptions, so onto screenshots.

Current Screenshots

Just the player character (girl) standing in a room. The dungeon looks like a psychedelic fever dream because I haven't gotten around to making the complete tileset yet.


As you can see, in my inventory I have a couple of bags (Miniature Bags of Holding) and a sword (A "Superior" quality sword, the quality of items is determined by the color of their outline.) Items can be hellish, cursed, bad, normal, good, superior, ultimate or legendary (I'm thinking about making legendary items change the player's appearance or add special affects to certain spells, just a thought.) Bags can be renamed for easy labeling via the name box. And yes, bags can currently be stored inside other bags, allowing for "BAGCEPTION." Also: Just me dicking around.


Chests work and the items they drop are determined by random chance, the dungeon level and the player's Fortune stat. There are currently three types of chests. This is a wood chest, they're the lowest rank chest and are extremely common. They're rarely locked.


A Fancy Chest, they're middle rank and uncommon. They increase the chance of getting a good item (but not by much) and are locked half the time.


A Steel Chest, they're the highest rank and rare. They always have a legendary item inside and are locked all the time. I wonder what's inside this one?


GASP!

Final thoughts
So, hopefully, I'll update this log as I go and feel free to ask questions or give me suggestions.

[Franklin's Ghost]

Sounding and looking good will definitely be following.

[BrokenPegasus]

I've done some work over the past couple of days and I've managed to fix a few things that were bugging me, worked a little on the tileset (not much, but it's a little more filled in), added the equipment/stat menu and began making the enemy portion of the actor class.


The first thing I fixed was the field of view. While I was working on the tileset I noticed that there was a clear divide between tiles that were being viewed (walkable tiles) and tiles that weren't (wall tiles.) It looked really awkward, so I made it so the field of view stops ON the first wall tile it hits, instead of stopping before it.

Enemies are still being worked on, but currently they can spot the player, give chase and (if they lose sight for too long) stop chasing and go back to just standing around. Right now they're a little too good at chasing though, so I'll have to make them trip up occasionally (possibly based on the player's Briskitude stat.)


The equipment/stat menu. It's a little too small right now so the stats are hard to read, but it works. The first picture is just the base stats before an item is added. The second one is the stats with the item added.

Speaking of stats and equipment:

I feel this is far too many stats for one item to have, even if most of them are horrible. So I'm going to tweak the item randomizer, limit the number of stats it can add to an item and maybe have it add names to items based on the quality of the item.

Anyway, back to work. Again, feel free to post any thoughts or suggestions you might have.

[happymonster]

Looks Awesome!

I think the stat icons are too small, I would double their size at least.

[Kurt]

This looks really, really nice. 

[tchassin]

I agree with happymonster, the icons are pretty hard to read right now. Also I think the interface would be slightly more readable without the stars in the miniature bags of holding.
Looks very good, though.

[BrokenPegasus]

I haven't had that much time to work on the game this week, but here's what I did manage to add.


I fixed the equipment/stat menu so that the stat icons and stat numbers are larger. I was originally going to have the player's resistances and damages display as they were added (anything above or below 0% would show up) but decided to have them display when the player hovers over an icon.

The nine resistance/damage types are: Combustive, Hypothermic, Jouleic, Gaiac, Venomous, Star, Necrotic, OtherWorldly and Emotional.

I didn't know what to do with the left over space (enlarging the stats made the menu enormous) so I added something new: Traits.


Traits are decided by which race you choose. There are currently only three races: humans (the "warrior" race), Woolen (Sheep people, the "mage" race) and Radonians (Lizard people, the "rogue" race.) Pictured is a Woolen female (still a work in progress.) The race you choose will give you additional points in a certain stat depending on your gender. A human character will have either more Brawn or more Vim, Woolen have more Brains/Ego and Radonians more Briskitude/Fortune. Additionally, each race have three positive traits and three negative traits. Traits can either increase or decrease the player's ability to use certain damages or resistances.

For example:

This trait makes it so any piece of armor the player equips that has Emotional Resistance will only add 70% of the armor's total Emotional Resistance. So if the armor has 10% Emotional Resistance, you only get 7% of it.

I'm not really sure I like how traits work right now, so I'm open to suggestions on how I can improve them.

[HarrisonJK]

The art in this is great! At the moment though it looks like the woolen girl is a human turned to stone. Also it looks like headphones are an equipment type (is it a necklace?). About traits: Getting only 70% of emotional resistance doesn't sound that game altering. If 1 in 15 enemies has an emotional attack (like "The Wolf used Scold! It was super effective!" I guess?) then this slight reduction of defense only comes into play fairly rarely. If these are the only things that differentiate the races I would make them more distinctive. I like the name "Glass Case of Emotion" though. Does it come into play especially while crying in a phone booth?

[BrokenPegasus]

Wow. Has it really been two weeks since I last updated? I need to pay attention to this more often.

I don't have a lot to show off right now, I've mostly been working on improving a few of the things I've already programmed. For instance: I've updated the corridor generator so it makes shorter paths.

Examples:

This was the old corridor generator. It separates the generated rooms into four clusters, picks random rooms in the clusters and connects them, then connects the clusters through random rooms in each cluster. I didn't like this algorithm because it made very, very long hallways and it just looked messy.


This is the new generator. It separates the rooms into four clusters, goes through the clusters and connects each room to the room closest to it and adds the first room to a list of already connected rooms (barring it from being connected again), then it connects the the clusters through random rooms. The hallways are now much shorter (except the rooms connected randomly), but it has created a whole new problem. Occasionally, the generator will create a diagonal gap in the walls of dungeon, allowing the player to peak through and see what's on the other side. Of course, it only does this with corridors, so I might end up ignoring it.

I also did some work on enemy behavior and the animation class. Specifically, I've added a stumble feature to enemies in chase mode to give the player a chance to get away. Basically, if the enemy is chasing the player (the player having been seen) a random number is rolled, the enemies agility is subtracted from it and if the end number is above a certain margin the enemy doesn't update that turn. I didn't want to go that way with it at first, but I couldn't get it to work any other way. It shouldn't affect health updating because that will all be handled through the dungeon class anyway.

For the animation class, I added a reset feature. That way, if an animation is set to only play once, it will have to be reset in order to play again. I've also made enemy animation updating separate from normal enemy updating (read: everything else enemies do.) I wanted to have the enemies animate, but the only way that could happen was if the enemy animation was cycled through the main loop and enemy updates are handled through a while loop in the main loop (it's the fastest way to handle updating all those enemies.) So I'm not sure if it's the best way to handle it, but it works for now.

I've made my Room XML Generator almost completely automatic. I updated it so I now only have to give it two keys (one for tile colors and one for room type colors) and the images I want to be turned into arrays. It separates the images being put into XML files by size, creates two color dictionaries from the keys, and then transcribes the images into different files based on size. All I have to do is make the images and give them to the program.

Anyway, most of what I've been doing for the past two weeks is planning. Going on Harrison's post, I decided that instead of being lazy and just making traits lower damages and resistances, I would make both negative and positive traits have one active trait (a buff), one passive trait (damages/resistances) and one random trait (also, I'm working on the Woolen sprite, I've fixed the necklace tile and I will be adding a legendary headphone helmet to the game.) In order for me to get the active trait working, I have to make the skill class early and I haven't really decided how I want skills to work yet. I need them to essentially be blank slates so I can load the actual skills in through an XML file (like everything else; I want this game to be fully moddable when it's done), but I'm not really sure where to start and I like to have a solid plan before I program so I have less problems to deal with down the road.

So I guess I'll just end this update with that. Sorry if anything I wrote doesn't make much sense, it's around 11am and I haven't gone to bed yet.

[BrokenPegasus]

I'm updating this again! Finally!

So I've continued working on this (not as much as I could have, some life stuff got in the way and I worked on and finished a MLP game), but I stopped updating this thread because I wanted to wait until I had a bunch of stuff to show off and eventually I fell into the habit of saying "No I need more in the game before I update again". Anyway, I'm forcing myself to update now, because I'd like to start getting feedback on what I'm working on again.

First off:


I've added gradients to the player's field of view. I haven't tested it extensively yet, but it should grow as the player's perception increases. In the future I may use it to add torches to the game. Maybe they'll stop monster spawning or maybe they'll be a way of seeing where monsters are as you won't be able to see any chests/monsters/items that aren't in your field of view. Also, the room in the picture is the start room.


Next up, if you look at the map you'll see a bunch of squiggly rooms scattered around (such as the one I've colored green.) Those are mazes. One of the things the MLP game I made gave me (besides a headache and a butt load of problems) was some random maze generation code (and some gui code.) So I added it to dungeon generation code. The mazes on this map are really small, however, because this map is made using the smallest room size available.


Shrines and temples. Right now I'm just using the player sprite on a pedestal, but eventually they'll each have their own sprite (except one that will have several.) Each level will generate at least one of each shrine/temple and then create a few more at random. I've also made (or at least have a general outline of) the six deities of the game and what their shrines/temples will do.

The deities of the game will be Morris god of Merchantry (connected to the ego stat, runs the shops), Aviana goddess of the Snipe Hunt (briskitude stat, enchantment), Berda goddess of Menial Tasks (vim stat, quests), Gorgoth Skullfeast the Blood-Rainer god of Ultra-Violence (brawn stat, arena), Lunette goddess of Positive Thinking (brains stat, random buffes) and Lord Smoops god of Randomness (fortune stat, slot machine.)


Thus far I only have shops more or less working. Items in the top three rows are items for sale, while the last row is for selling items.


Buying is pretty simple, you just click the item you want then hit the buy button.


When you buy items they go into the first available slot in your inventory. Items can be bought for the same price they're sold for right now, but in the future I'll add a formula based around the ego stat, so the more ego you have the better the prices in the shops.



To sell items you put them into the bottom row and then click the sell button.


Another thing I've added (I put it into the game a while ago, but modified it recently) is item piles. When I last updated, items would take up an entire tile and didn't stack. A few days after my last post, I made it so they pile up.


The problem with the old system was that it drew all the items once they were on the ground. It wasn't a problem at the time, but I started to worry that large numbers of items might cause some amount of lag. So I made it so if two or more items are in a pile they'll be drawn as a bag. The description box, instead of showing the top item's description, stats or whatever, will show a list of what's on the pile.



Items can then be picked up individually (from the bottom of the pile) or stepped on and all picked up at once (if there's space in the inventory.)

Finally, I'd like to post a little about somethings that I'm planning to add.
The first thing is the Trader.


The trader, a cat-person I've named Casper (after my cat that died recently), works very differently from the shops in that he actually trades items. The way it will work is: you give Casper an item (any kind will do) and he will trade you for an item of the same type (weapon for weapon, armor for armor) and rarity index value. Armor and weapons can only be traded once, but consumables (potions, keys, etc) and materials (a new item type) will be able to be traded infinitely. It's basically a free way to get items you need for some new mechanic I've started adding.

And that new mechanic is:

Crafting! I'm going to add three new objects to the game (the Swedish Crafting Cube, the Modded De-Crafting Cube and the Alcoholic's Shaving Kit) that will allow the player to craft, deconstruct and brew items. The crafting cube and shaving kit will have their own recipe books and require materials to make items. Materials can be found randomly throughout the dungeon or made by taking items apart using the de-crafting cube. The de-crafting cube, however, only has a 50% chance of returning each material used to make an item. So if an item is made using three materials, each of those materials has a 50% chance of being returned if the item is "de-crafted". I might toy with that formula later, maybe make the rarity index play into it somehow.

Anyway, that's all I've got currently (I think.) I'm going to try to update this thread at least once every two weeks from now on. So see you guys then, I guess.

[aftslash]

This is looking really cool! Following :]

[BrokenPegasus]

Update time!

I was going to post this on Saturday, but, well, that ended up not happening. Anyway, I've added item stacking and started work on the crafting system.

First up: item stacking. It works pretty much how you'd expect it to work (I hope.) Items stack up to 100, hovering over a stack tells you how many items are on the stack and their collective worth, shift left-click to divide a stack in half, shift right-click to take one and shift right-click with a stack on a stack of the same item to add one to the second stack. World item stacks work the same way as other stacks and other world items, they stack up to 100, stacks in the same tile are added to stacks of the same item until that stack reaches 100 then it makes a new stack (thus making a pile), they can be picked up individually or all at once.

I promised r/gamedev an in-depth description of how everything works, so if you don't care about how the inventory system works just skip this paragraph for the crafting system description. Basically, the way my inventory system works is this: every item has a private enumerator called ItemType. ItemType has all the vaguest item types in it (Armor, Weapon, Potion, Etc), but it also has a "null" item type called Empty. Any empty space in any inventory I make is actually just an "empty" item, an item with no name, image, aura (the outline) or any other values except having ItemType.Empty as it's item type. How I add items to the inventory by stepping on them or buying them is: I have a method called FirstEmpty search for the first item with the Empty value. That item then get's replaced by the item that was stepped on or bought. Buying or picking up items that stack go into FirstEmpty's new conditional branch that checks to see if there's a stack of the same item in the inventory. If it finds one it checks to see if the item's stack int is below 100. If it is, it then subtracts the stack's amount from 100, then checks to see if the stack being added is under that amount. If it is, the entire stack is added to the first stack and the item being added is turned into a Empty item. If it isn't, it searches for the next available stack and starts over until the stack to be added is empty. If it can't find a stack for any reason, it makes a new stack.

Anywho, Crafting: in my inventory I had an iron ingot (the gray brick.)


That iron ingot is a Material item used to craft certain items. You craft items by right-clicking the Swedish Crafting Cube.


That will open up the crafting UI which will allow you craft any item with a recipe.


However, it wouldn't be any fun if I just allowed the player to make any item right at the start, so I've added some upgrades. But first:


Above is the recipe for the Iron Spoord. You'll notice that the Iron Spoord isn't showing up in the output box. That's because I haven't added the Anvil upgrade to the Crafting Cube. To do that I just put the Crafting Cube inside itself and add the Anvil upgrade (represented by the iron ingot.)


Doing that will upgrade your Crafting Cube to a Modded Crafting Cube.


Now that the Cube has the anvil upgrade, I can make the Iron Spoord.


The only downside to making your own items is: they only have Normal quality and the base stats for that item.


In the future, however, upgrades will improve the base stats of weapons and armor, double ingot production, allow you to make alloys, necklaces and rings as well as set jewels into certain items. The trade-off is: you have to either build or find the upgrade for higher tier objects. The higher the tier of the item (and upgrade) the more items it will require to make and the more upgrades that will be needed.

Again, I promised a more detailed description of how the new updates work so skip this paragraph if you just want to read about possible future features. Crafting works pretty simply: I have a dictionary that uses strings as keys and a Recipe class as the values. I load the recipes in through an XML file, turn the grid in each recipe into a string and store the recipes in the recipe dictionary. How it works is: I get the names of the items in the input inventory (empty items names are put down as "#") and add them together into a string. The string updates every time an item is taken or placed and if the input string matches any recipe in the recipe dictionary then it takes the recipe's output item name and rarity index rating and returns the item the recipe makes. If that item is taken then all items in the input inventory are turned into empty items, resetting the whole thing.

Now some things I'd like to get working for the next update are a few more recipes, traders and maybe get the recipe book working. One of the things I'm still planning on is the amount of metals that will be in the game. Thus far there are 28 different metals (11 pure metals and 17 alloys.) Each of the pure metals fall into one of three categories: Melee, Magic or Support. Melee metals (Iron, Mithril, Cobalt and Unobtainium) are used to create weapons/armor with good attack/defense, Magic metals (Zinc, Tin, Silver and Gold) are used to create weapons/armor with good magic attack/defense and the support metals give various other stats (Copper gives mana recovery, Bismuth gives health recovery and Nickel gives fortune.) Mixing these metals will give you alloys to make armor with the combined stats of the metals.
Example:


I've also created a new trader, because my new item distribution system limits the rarity you're able to get on items according to your luck (and because my other cat died.)


This one is named Socks and he'll basically allow you to trade up or down on the rarity index with a certain amount of loss each time. For example, he'll allow you to trade one Uncommon item for two Common items or four Common items for one Uncommon. Also only one will spawn on each level and Casper will be slightly rarer then Socks.

Also, and this is just random silliness instead of actual content, I'm going to add a Legendary item to the game that can only be obtained through crafting called the "Lucky 7 Solid Gold Jewel Encrusted Pimp Hat". It will have the most complex recipe in the game, (6 levels of crafting for each of the 9 items use to make it, each level requiring 9 items) and it will be completely useless. You'll be able to wear it, but it won't raise any stats. Why? Because I have a stupid sense of humor.

So that's about it for updates. Feel free to post any suggestions or feedback.

[Xion]

how am I only just now seeing this? This looks excellent!

[Windybeard]

I want this game! 

It looks amazing, i like the look of the map generation, im trying to ome up with a similar system myself for another project but cant seem to get it to work properly so congrats on yours.

Keep up the work mate, this is looking spicy!

[Ishi]

I love the sprites in this!

The map generation is quite inspiring. Have you thought about varying the room sizes in the map? It might be more interesting if you occasionally come across 2x1, 1x2, 2x2 rooms etc instead of all rooms being a similar size. Especially for those maze style rooms. Also I read this yesterday, might have useful tips: http://gamasutra.com/view/news/181853/5_tips_for_using_procedurallygenerated_content_into_your_game.php#.UKt-7oa0fPw

And I laughed at the Spoord. 

[BrokenPegasus]

how am I only just now seeing this? This looks excellent!

Thank you.

I want this game! 

It looks amazing, i like the look of the map generation, im trying to ome up with a similar system myself for another project but cant seem to get it to work properly so congrats on yours.

Keep up the work mate, this is looking spicy!

The map generation is actually pretty simple. It just makes a grid of grids (in all of the maps I've used in the screen shots, a 10x10 of 10x10s), loads the rooms in through an XML file (the file contains an int map of the layout of each room, a list of door positions in each room and the middle position of each room), copies the rooms at random to the grid of grids, connects the middle points of the rooms with A* pathfinding, uses the point list from the pathfinder to carved out the corridors and then places doors where the corridors have been carved out.

And thanks.

I love the sprites in this!

The map generation is quite inspiring. Have you thought about varying the room sizes in the map? It might be more interesting if you occasionally come across 2x1, 1x2, 2x2 rooms etc instead of all rooms being a similar size. Especially for those maze style rooms. Also I read this yesterday, might have useful tips: http://gamasutra.com/view/news/181853/5_tips_for_using_procedurallygenerated_content_into_your_game.php#.UKt-7oa0fPw

And I laughed at the Spoord. 

Yes, actually I have! The problem is that I've been using the smallest map/roomsize to save time when testing it. 10 x 10 rooms can't get much smaller without getting so cramped they can't be played anymore. As soon as I add more rooms to the 15 x 15 and 20 x 20 XML files, I plan to add irregular rooms that will allow random smaller rooms to be added to them (like a room that's only a 10 x 20 taking up half of the box would allow two 10 x 10s to generate in the other half) and a way to generate clusters of smaller rooms inside the larger boxes. I could make it so it generates oddly shaped rooms that take up two grid spaces on the grid grid, but I kind of want to allow the player to customize the way the map generates. You know, let them choose the max size of the rooms and the map, how scattered the rooms are, etc, etc. So, yeah, that is planned.

And thank you.

[BrokenPegasus]

Update time again.

I took a week off for Thanksgiving and have been busy preparing for Christmas, but I have managed to work on a few things.

First off:



Shapeless recipes. Shapeless recipes are recipes that can go into the crafting cube in any pattern possible (as long as no shaped recipe with that pattern exists.) It works similarly to how shaped recipes work in that it uses a string as a key, but shapeless recipes have only the items in the recipe (in alphabetical order) not the blank spaces.



I got the recipe book working. You press the book button on the crafting cube (the green one) to toggle it on and off. Once it's on you click any of the items in the book and it creates a ghost image of the recipe on the crafting grid (similar to the NEI mod for Minecraft.)



The recipes are alphabetized for now, but I may add the ability to narrow the search later on. Anyway, some of the recipes in the book are faded because the crafting cube doesn't have the necessary add-ons to make them. If I upgrade the cube, then the recipes appear as normal.



It still needs some work. I have to get the scroll bar working, make the tabs at the top switch between shaped and shapeless recipes (and look good, right now they look plain and horrible) and add some indication of what's been selected or hovered over.

That's about it for what I've actually worked on (I've been really busy with the holidays), but I've also been planning out the next feature of the game: potion brewing.

Basically, how I want potion brewing to work is a combination of Minecraft's brewing system and Elder Scrolls alchemy system. My basic idea is this: it will take one brewing material and the Alcoholic's Shaving Kit (the brewing stand of the game) to brew one potion. The effects the potion has will be dependent on the item being used to brew the potion. Items such as carrots will increase perception, while pomegranates will heal and possibly increase health regeneration.

Now if you want to improve on a potion, then you can mix in new effects using new items. However, ever new item you mix in will decrease the old effects by half. So, going back to carrots and pomegranates, if you have a potion that gives you +10 perception and you add a pomegranate to it then the perception effect will decrease to +5, but the healing and regeneration effects will stay the same. If you add a carrot to a carrot potion it will do the same thing.

There will be three downsides to potion brewing though: you will only be able to have one potion buff on at a time, there are certain stats you can't mix together and you won't know what stats an item gives until you brew the potion. See instead of just showing what effects a brewing material gives it will only give you a vague reference: taste. The taste of the item will give you some idea of what stats the item will give you. Such as Sweet flavored items can increase Brains, Magic Attack, Reflect and Magic Resistance (as well as some elemental damages/resistances.) When I add skill sets, I may or may not add a skill that allows you to see the actual stats on brewing items.

Anyway, not all flavors work well together, so when certain flavors are mixed they'll have a chance to give the potion negative effects. For example: mixing opposite tastes (such as Salty and Bitter) will always give you a negative effect equal to the combined stats of the two effects, mixing slightly off tastes (Sweet and Salty) will have a 50/50 chance of giving you a negative effect and mixing complementary tastes (Sweet and Sour) will have no chance of negative effects.

But what about poisons? My plan for poisons involves a seventh flavor. There will usually only be six flavors (Sweet, Salty, Sour, Savory, Spicy and Bitter) on most brewing items, but occasionally you'll find one with a seventh: Metallic. Anything with a Metallic taste will invert any effects a potion has before the Metallic taste is added. So if you mix the Metallic taste in with a healing potion it will become a damaging poison. It will do the same for negative effects as well, so if you have a healing potion with blindness (negative perception) it will give you a damaging potion with perception. Additionally, only potions with a metallic taste will count as poisons and only poisons can be used on enemies.

So that's my idea for the brewing system. I would honestly love some feedback on it, because I'm not sure if I really want to implement it like this or not.

[DustyDrake]

Your shapeless recipes have an error in them:

The first and third have 3 of those tin ingots, and the second has 4

[BrokenPegasus]

Your shapeless recipes have an error in them:

The first and third have 3 of those tin ingots, and the second has 4

Oh sorry, I had a ghost recipe up while I was getting the screenshots (the real recipe is a copper ingot and the crafting cube.) At the time there was no way to get rid of the last ghost recipe you used (except to load another ghost recipe), so my only choices were to restart the game and then take the screenshot or be lazy and just take the screenshots. I chose to be lazy.

[BrokenPegasus]

It's been a while since I last updated (I was busy with the holidays and taking care of some health issues), but here's the latest news regarding GrueQuest.

I did some work on the UI. The recipe book UI has hover and selected images and no longer crashes when selecting a blank recipe. All of the UIs now have click control. Before now clicking and dragging certain UIs would lead to items being picked up or you would accidentally grab another UI, but now once you've clicked one (or picked up an item) you can't pick up anything else until you've dropped it. So moving the UIs is now much smoother.

I made it so right clicking armor or weapons equips them. It also unequips other weapons and armor (of the same type.)

At some point I finished choosing the color schemes for the metals of the game.


I started working on the message... System? Or whatever it's called.
This thing:

It's pretty simple code. I just have whatever action is being performed submit a string and it's added to the queue.

The biggest thing I've been working on is the dungeon generation algorithm. I've changed the room names from being grid cell oriented to room oriented. So it won't show the name of the room until you're actually inside the room. I've also made it so if the player chooses a larger max room size, they'll sometimes get clusters of smaller rooms.


I'm still working on getting irregular rooms sizes into the algorithm.

However, the thing I began noticing while working with the larger room size was that the walk between those rooms was HUGE. Sometimes it would take a good couple of minutes to get to the end of a single hallway. So to remedy that, I created an entirely new form of dungeon generation that I call "Cluster Mode".



Cluster mode basically removes the grid based system entirely and creates maps based on the room's rectangular outline. It starts at the center of the map and grows outward (room by room) in random directions, occasionally returning to the center to start over. If it reaches a point where it can't move outward anymore it randomly jumps between rooms until it finds one where it can move. It continues like that until it reaches a maximum and then it discards any rooms that leave the map area or overlap with rooms placed earlier. Then it connects one room to the room previously made or to the room closest to it. It makes for short, messy dungeons for the impatient (like me.)

There is one problem with the algorithm though. The way I've programmed it makes it so I can specify a minimum number of rooms, but the maximum is set by the map size. So cluster dungeons are actually much smaller than grid dungeons.

Case in point:

This grid dungeon has 90 rooms.


While this cluster dungeon of the same size has 50. So while cluster dungeons have shorter walks they also have a smaller number of rooms.