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[Curseman]

I like that lightning effect.

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.

This is a good ideal to shoot for.

[ITS_Mike]

It runs a lot faster!  I actually had fun playing it, since I was able to kill the monsters(?) without horrendous lag.

[st33d]

I'm debating whether to modify the decaptation effect.

Originally I was going to have the opponent's body carry on running past you like a headless chicken with blood shooting out of his neck. Or flop to the ground and rocket along on a jet of neck blood like a coke bottle that's had mentos put in it and tossed to the ground.

I thought this may be technically difficult, but there's a marker on each frame of a character's clip that tells the code where to cut the head off. All I would have to do is mask the clip up to that point.

Hrmmm....

[st33d]

Well, hotkeys are fucked. As soon as I coded the bow item I discovered just how lazily I've implemented them. All I did was store the keyed selections, and now that items can stack (you get 3 x dagger instead of dagger, dagger, dagger), the menu options tend to move about quite a lot. Hot keys need to be context aware; if I've got a button set up for eating hearts I want it set up for that permanently.

At least I've got bows and treasure chests now. Mimics should be easy to put in, but really this is all procrastination caused by approaching the magic system.

Can't figure out how to do the runes. At work I've been making an RPG and for the spells I just had Effect objects running that applied a behaviour to characters. I'm not sure I can do it that way in this game, I mean how is the Undead Effect going to reach into a Character object and affect its death? How am I going to do this in a straightforward way without shitting up all my code with a billion if statments in case of possible magic effects?

 

[nihilocrat]

I think you can improve the lightning effect in straight directions by simply adding some random jitter that will attempt to push the main "branch" around one tile to the left or right without trying to create a new branch. I wrote a lightning-generation algorithm awhile back (it uses L-systems, which to me is just a fancy term for "pushing stuff left or right in relation to a straight line") meant to simulate the way a plasma lamp looks, and I basically used this kind of "jitter"-based lightning but didn't allow it to create new branches. It worked out pretty well.

[st33d]

Yeah, it already does that, but it keeps returning to the shortest route to the target. It only deviates for one step. This is due to it being targeted lightning - I want it to definitely hit the target.

I guess I could turn off targeting for a few steps every now and then when we're far from the target. That would allow for a more wobbly path.

[nihilocrat]

My algorithm didn't take in to account any possibility of obstructions being in the way so it was pretty easy for it to return to the centerline and get to the target. Unless you want the lightning bolt to be spanning a vast distance across the level, like if you restrict the bolt's begin and end to line-of-sight, you could probably just cheat. Don't worry about obstructions and draw the lightning on the layer beneath the black blocks that make up the level.

Keeping to a small number of buttons sounds great, it's a good trend I've seen in 'new-school' roguelikes.

[st33d]

Whoo!

Worked on what the webpage will be like today.

Decided I didn't fancy buffering the console log in Flash and making a scroll bar for it (means I can use that space to display help in the menu). Instead I'm outputting to a div below the Flash object.

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

PS: No bug reports unless it's about the javascript or html please, I'm aware how broken this version is.

[mokesmoe]

Bug report! Just kidding.
Lightning looks neat. Navigating is hard with complete invisibility, although I assume thats just part of this build's broken-ness.

[st33d]

yah, navigating is supposed to be hard with complete invisibility

it's invisibility!

[Doktor_Q]

It would help if you made the enemies wander a little bit. I ran into a few goblins that would just sit at the top of ladders, so I could never get up.

Other than that, awesome game!

[st33d]

cheers

will be working on AI again when I get to the minions

am focusing on magic at the moment

 

[mokesmoe]

yah, navigating is supposed to be hard with complete invisibility

it's invisibility!

It was the lack of the Predator blur that threw me off. Did you remove it intentionally?

[Doktor_Q]

Also, to reiterate, this game is friggin' awesome. Pretty nice art, cool visuals, and incredibly functional. I spent a good twenty minutes running around the level as a viking warrior, laughing every time the level-up lightning decapitated a foe.

Excellent work!

[st33d]

yah, navigating is supposed to be hard with complete invisibility

it's invisibility!

It was the lack of the Predator blur that threw me off. Did you remove it intentionally?

whoops!

thanks, I must have fucked up the buffer after sorting out the renderer

[st33d]

Right, fixed that bug.

Got rune eating and rune throwing working now. Plus I've got the "throw the rune at the mouse pointer" easter egg in. It's uploaded to the web-page version so folks are free to have a go at that if they want.

I've got enchantment to work on next and rebuilding the hot-key system so that it's context sensitive. After that, some more spells, minions, and build 4 - which comes before the penultimate build with traps and levels.

[Doktor_Q]

Try eating two or three runes of light. It does something really funky to the lighting engine when I try it.

[st33d]

So it does...

Well spotted. Thanks.

I should check what effects are running on a Character before I apply new ones. And I should take another look at the lighting engine.

[st33d]

Figured it out. The light "effect" just adds to your current light radius, and subtracts from it when removed. That way I don't have to track how many incremental light effects have been applied.

But of course there is a maximum radius because of look up tables and simply efficiency. I'd capped that radius when applying a light source but not whilst maintaining it. The odd effect was the code reaching for values in the look up table that were out of range.

Fixed version uploaded.

[mokesmoe]

Invisibility doesn't work properly in front of chests.
Also: lots of chests. I just had 20 runes after my latest run. (Although only 19 in my inventory cause I ate one.)
Might not be as much of a problem once there are more rune types though.
In the options menu you should add a option to generate a new map while keeping your stats and level.

What is "goblin killed by quickening"?