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[JasonPickering]

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

[gimymblert]

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).

[RotateMe]

Haha, this just happened to me: I had a bug in my BlitzMax game, where wrong objects, sharing the same height, were getting removed from a list. I knew it had to be BlitzMax messing with me so I searched for TList.Remove() bug. Found out some guy was having the exact same problem and some other guy had the solution. It turned out the other guy was you: http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=87418 :D

The reason for the bug was that I sorted objects by their height and BlitzMax is a shitty language and just says: okay, those objects are the same by comparison, so just delete the first one, matching the compare method. F*** that. And thanks for your help :D

[Oddball]

Again not much I can say that isn't spoiler-ish so instead I'll post a screenshot this week. It shows some of the new content I've been working on.

First look at Kobolds and a baby Dragon.

[RotateMe]

Your 8x8 art is simply amazing. Love the dragon baby!

[eobet]

Not sure if my mail feedback got through, so I'll post it here as well:

The game is amazingly impressive. It appears as what you remember a classic 8-bit game to be, though with a very polished, modern point and click interface. Gameplay seems to hold up as well. Only general feedback would be that everything is 100% as what you'd expect. I haven't been "wowed" by any gameplay mechanic in particular, like the bow/bolt fire mechanic in BitWorld for example.

* A monster dropped 2 items, very nice and clearly marked, and they unstacked themselves with a lovely little "Pixar bounce" animation. Very clear and informative. However, when I left clicked the shield, boom, stack closes and nothing appears to happen. Bad default behavior, imo! It should say "move to pick-up", since the first time a user sees a stack, he probably isn't on top of it, and either way, if you think about it, using a mouse cursor it's unintuitive to have to block your view of the stack with your player icon before you can access the objects on that spot. Also, other distant objects do have the "move to manipulate" behavior, so it's a bit inconsistent that stacks don't.

* Would be nice if the hints were color coded or have some sort of symbol to indicate if it's better or worse (since the text is so small, I find myself constantly moving the cursor on and off target to see where and how it differs).

* Larger window size automatically goes full screen, even though it fits within my desktop at 3X pixel size.

* Since some monsters always "skips go" one tile away like you, so as to not have to be hit first, I hope that there is a profession beyond the first warrior that allows you to equip a ranged weapon as secondary one to fire at distant targets. Either that, or I might be missing a game mechanic, because the staring contests that sometimes happen are quite funny (perhaps you could give such mobs a "charge/pounce" attack that jumps you from one tile away?).

* Just a general note that the pseudo-3D height of objects is confusing as hell with the mouse cursor at first (since you have to aim at the base of each item, instead of in the middle like you do with an icon), but the hint popups and tile highlights makes it OK after a while. It's still confusing quite a lot, though, but bearable.

* Is it lazy to ask for indications (color or symbol) wether an effect as described in the log was positive or negative? (If you want to keep the log black and white, I'd suggest a skull for negative, and heart for positive.)

* Just noticed that if you click on a distant monster as someone with only a close combat weapon, again nothing happens. The default behavior should be "move to" here as well (unless I'm missing an option, as with the staring contests).

* There's XX/XX numbers for the top three stats, which feels overly complicated in this context, but at the same time, there's no XX/XX or XX(XX) by the health, so you have no idea how much damage you've taken (ideally, a small bar would be nice to see if you can squeeze it in there, for a quick glance at damage by percentage). If health actually only ever is an absolute number with no limit, then that in turn is a bit inconsistent with the complexity of the rest of the stats.

[Oddball]

Saracen with shadeform is attacked by headless zombie

Hack, Slash, Loot is now about six months past my intended release schedule due to various setbacks and real life issues. This has put a huge strain on the project financially. I have only been able to last so long past the intended release date because I made sure to over budget the project. This means I have started to seriously consider using pre-orders to fund the last stages of development. Whilst I have nothing against pre-orders, I have pre-ordered plenty of games myself, I'm wondering what other peoples views are on indie games and pre-orders. I've been receiving steady requests for pre-orders ever since I announced HSL, but I'd hate to foster any bad sentiments. What are everyones thought on pre-orders?