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[JMickle]

just posting to say i'm following this game avidly good luck with this i hope you finish it.

[st33d]

 

[st33d]

Blood armour and skull armour are now in, replacing the top hat and trilby. The skull looks a bit odd when ladder climbing but I'm going to handwave it by saying it's two skulls stuck together and leave it at that.

I've updated a lot of the items to make them bigger and more impressive, or just look more dungeony.

This is the last update before the next build. I need to knuckle down and add levelling up and runes to the game. Both will turn this game from mere platformer into a fully fledged RPG.

[mokesmoe]

I SHALL STAB EVERYONE WITH MY HAMMER!!!
I like the blood particles that come out of the blood armour.
Also: Duck on head. I wasn't kidding.

[st33d]

I need more reference material for this proposed duck armour. I'm oblivious as to what game it featured in before.

[mokesmoe]

Found it, It's actually is a chicken, not a duck.

It is in the game Munchkin: http://www.worldofmunchkin.com/
Here's the card: http://reinebold.com/munchkin2.JPG (Link for way too big image)

[st33d]

I'll see what I can do about a cursed chicken for the next build.

It occurred to me that I was either going to have to put in health potions or leave loads of health runes lying around - and both I wasn't keen on.

But then I figured out a way to get health potions in and make it a challenge for the player:

If you defeat a monster bare-handed, you get a chance of tearing out its heart when it dies. Eat that heart and you get health back equivalent to the starting health of said monster.

 

[JMickle]

I'll see what I can do about a cursed chicken for the next build.

It occurred to me that I was either going to have to put in health potions or leave loads of health runes lying around - and both I wasn't keen on.

But then I figured out a way to get health potions in and make it a challenge for the player:

If you defeat a monster bare-handed, you get a chance of tearing out its heart when it dies. Eat that heart and you get health back equivalent to the starting health of said monster.

 

clever. has the challenge of getting health that roguelikes usually have. i like it

[mokesmoe]

But if I use my bare hands, I can't stab things with my hammer!

On a more serious note: Good idea.

[Curseman]

So would that mean that you will never get healing while using a weapon?  Wouldn't that just lead to no one ever using a weapon (or at least, dropping it for the finishing blow)?

[mokesmoe]

You could still get healing from health runes.

[st33d]

You could set up a hot key through the menu to unequip a weapon at the last stroke and then re-equip it for the next monster.

But bear in mind that it would be one hell of a gamble if you were going up against a really tough monster, that sliver of health may equal many punches. Plus reaping a heart is random, you'd be risking your welfare for possibly nothing.

This is more for getting some value out of beating up the game's basic mooks. The chance of a heart drop I'm going to scale down through play-testing so the player is steered towards taking out shit monsters bare handed and not risking it with the big bastards.

[st33d]

God damn you lightning.

Why are you so hard to implement?

All I want is a woman shooting lightning bolts out of her fingers upon every landmark epiphany she achieves. Is that too much too ask?

[st33d]

Okay, got something working.

It's not very realistic on straight lines, but on diagonals it looks pretty realistic. The most important thing about it is that it's cheap and it can be targeted.

Also needs debugging, but I'll probably play with it a bit more before I finalise the effect.

[st33d]

Decided I agree with Vanguard and have changed tearing out hearts from being a bare handed excercise to just being a small chance when killing someone.

Seemed like I was steering towards more keys rather than less. I really enjoy being able to play a game one handed with my left hand on w,a,s,d,space and wield a mug of tea in my right. I'm aiming for a game with the massive depth of Rogue, but the simple controls of Mario.

[JMickle]

that lightening is very clever. and it looks great <3

[ITS_Mike]

Nice job!  I have always been interested in lighting effects, which you seem to have pulled off quite nicely.  The controls are intuitive so far as well (however I kept trying to jump with space).

The demos run a little slow for me though, especially during battles.  My specs are as follows:
CPU: Pentium 4 3.0GHz HT
RAM: 3.3GB
Graphics Card: ATI Radeon X1300 PRO

I'll be sure to keep checking back on this project

[st33d]

Yeah, I'm getting some slow down myself at times. I'm not sure what's causing it and it only seems to show up when running the game in a browser.

For the next build I'll put up downloadable projector versions, so people can play it offline. I'll also do some performance testing to see where this chug is coming from.

EDIT:

Figured it out. It was a combination of the new invisible armour and the amount of MovieClips on screen. At times there are 800! Flash I've found generally balks at the idea of even doing 400. All these clips are simply black wall graphics, so I can have the edge lighting. I'm going to look into a Flixel style renderer for the background and walls. The player and characters I'd like to keep as clips to make things easier.

I've also optimised the collision engine. When a character was moving it was scanning as far as the eye could see for walls to collide with. This has been reduced to scanning only as far as the character moves. Need to keep an eye peeled for possible falling through walls. 

[Maikel_Ortega]

I'm going to love this game,the idea is awesome.
And i never thought that u can make a lightning that way, its great :D

[st33d]

New renderer:

http://www.robotacid.com/flash/red_rogue/demo3.1/

I've left the old demo up for comparison.

I was previously rendering the level via a grid of MovieClips that got disposed of and added to as the level scrolled. This has worked well up until now.

Now the scrolling engine has an alternative mode for each rendering layer. It supports either a MovieClip layer or a Flixel style layer. This means that items and monsters can be easily maintained and updated as MovieClips, whilst the background can be rendered much faster via copyPixelling.

I had to give up the permanent bloodstains because they were sandwiched between the back wall and the walls. But the MovieClip count has gone from 800 down to 60!!

If it chugged for you before, have a go and tell me if it's better.