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[killozapit]

I found this a little while ago and I am having lots of fun with it. There are a few things I noticed though:

The menu tends to glitch up and become unresponsive after a while. At first I thought it was related to the throwing object problems you were working on, but I had it happen when dropping a bunch of stuff too. Maybe a "reset menu" hotkey can be made until you work it out?

The first few levels are a bit bland, mostly because the objects in them are way too predictable. In fact light, heal, and poison runes are way to easy to identify because of this. Introducing a new rune ever floor sounds like a good idea for new players but after a while it just makes the first few floors a bit more tedious then fun, at least in my opinion. Actually it might be nice to keep track of how many times you cleared a floor and change stuff around in future plays.

Speaking of cleared floors, it might be interesting if on a cleared floor, or floors with all the monsters defeated, the music would stop and the display would become colorized like the overworld. I like the grey-scale and red style, but I love the color art you did there, and it would be nice to see it a bit more.

One particular side effect of the way weapon and armor work I have noticed is that I personally tend to try and make nice custom equipment, and tend to stick with lower level and worse gear for longer. It reminds me of Japanese roguelikes like the 'mystery dungeon' series and especially the 'Izuna' series, which usually let you store your weapons and armor if you die. This along with lores and such makes me wonder if there is any inter-game continuity planned, or like nethack and other hardcore roguelikes you have each game a blank slate. A good compromise might be to have something like nethack's bones files where sometimes you can randomly stumble upon stuff you left behind on a failed attempt.

Speaking of 'mystery dungeon' games, I kind of think item fusion alters or such might be neat, to transfer runes form one weapon to another or level up weapons/armor, but that might be too game breaking or something. I just notice I often have tons of weapons/armor that I never use because I dump most of my runes on one set. It might be nice to add some dungeon gimmicks anyway, like shops maybe or special rooms with some sort of different function. I don't know. I will say already the addition of ladders and rails already make the dungeon a heck of a lot less boring then some other random dungeons. It's amazing how little details like that really add to things.

[st33d]

Items between games is yet to go in. Level design isn't finished, coming soon. I'm not drawing colour versions of all the races and their animations.

Update 350

Forgot about the kobold special ability. It is now: chaotic learning. The kobold levelled stats are now calculated level + per level + random x per level. So the kobold is randomly crap or good at high levels.
Added debug equipment option.
Nerfed werewolf speed.
Cog versions of rats, bats and spiders are now in Chaos.
Cogs have a chance of 1:20 to carry chaos missiles, which they shoot according to their behaviour. Monsters can also be hit by chaos missiles. Cogs have a maximum of 5 chaos missiles.

Fixed many bugs. More to track down.

[killozapit]

I'm not drawing colour versions of all the races and their animations.

Really didn't expect you to, given most are black shapes or naturally colored in grey or red. Though I wondered if the ones that were not were drawn in color and palette swapped or otherwise desaturated. Though it does make me wonder what it looks like if your poly-morphed to say, a nymph on the overworld.

And yeah sorry If I sounded like an ass saying "WHY AREN'T THESE THINGS IN NOW!" I know a lot of the stuff I mentioned was "do later" stuff, or possibly even "If you want that, the program IS opensource" stuff. I just thought I would comment on it in case by any chance my comments were things you didn't really think about.

I guess I just got all sorts of interesting ideas form playing this game. Another example of that is, a long time ago I was wondering if a roguelike could have unlockable roles or starting skill sets. If I was making a game like this, I might make it so if you use the special skill of a race/form enough you 'master' it, and can use it for that game regardless of form, and if you master the right combinations you can unlock different starting roles besides "thief", like "treasure hunter" (with a gnoll's extra chest items and a thief's search skill). Just an idle thought I had... I really should make my own rogue like someday, I am just not really sure how to get started, though I did hear there was a free library for common stuff...

Edit: Hmm I guess the overworld loads it's own race graphic set and forces you human. On a slightly unrelated note, playing around in debug mode is fun!

Edit edit: On an even more unrelated note, I totally can't wait till someone makes fanart for this game, because seriously, Red+@=OTP.

[st33d]

Keys and locks, keys and locks.

Should I tackle the bastard hard problem of creating a gate you have to find a pressure pad for?

[killozapit]

Would it really be that hard? You already seem to make trees for pathfinding, so it seems to me like you could make a locked door thing which blocks off a branch and place a key/pressure plate by doing a random walk through the pathfinding nodes from the stairs up, unless I misunderstood how it works.

[st33d]

Altering an existing graph is fraught with peril.

Small Update 351

Fixed editor rendering crashing the game when going to a new level.
Added level skip to editor menu (why the fuck did I not do this sooner?)
Added death light to player death. You can now watch where you died fade slowly from view.

[killozapit]

Altering an existing graph is fraught with peril.

Don't you recalculate the whole thing when placing blocks in the editor, or do you mean as a function of searching though the graph? I actually have been looking at the code a bit. You don't know of a free utility for compiling it do you? I have seen a few free flash compilers in the past. It sounds like it would be fun to fiddle with, with permission of course.

Edit: Also thinking about it a bit more, you could always give the node class another connection vector, using one to remember the original open state and one for the locked state. Not sure if that would be useful.

[Franklin's Ghost]

You could download and use Flash Develop.

[killozapit]

You could download and use Flash Develop.

Hey thanks, It looks like a nice little IDE. I always wanted to try getting into flash, since I already know a bit of java.

[st33d]

Heh heh, Java will help. If you don't know any Javascript the going will be rough as I use XML for content data (E4X notation) and JSON for settings.

Traversing the AI graph isn't elegant enough. And it's more modular if it doesn't inform the map generator on how to do a job it should be better equipped to do.

The possible separation of dungeon connectivity needs to be done during the connectivity test, so we can ensure the player can get to the key from the entrance to the level.

I'm thinking that carrying a key is the only way to do it. Stepping on a pressure pad that is out of view of the gate will result in a console print out that you'll miss during combat. Although I do like the idea of pressure pads you have to weight down with an item to keep a portcullis open - at late levels it would be guaranteed you'd have an item to spare because the content generator has a minimum quota to meet.

[st33d]

Already come up with 5 types of gate. Breakable, punch to raise, key and lock, pressure pad and crazy ones that just open and close all the time. Graphics done, gate code done, and now trying out methods for cutting into the connectivity.

Quite looking forward to this. It's not so I can play with a portcullis whilst I wait for a Grimrock port for OSX. Oh no.

[killozapit]

Heh heh, Java will help. If you don't know any Javascript the going will be rough as I use XML for content data (E4X notation) and JSON for settings.

I do know a bit of javascript, though maybe not as much about those particular aspects of it.

I'm thinking that carrying a key is the only way to do it. Stepping on a pressure pad that is out of view of the gate will result in a console print out that you'll miss during combat. Although I do like the idea of pressure pads you have to weight down with an item to keep a portcullis open - at late levels it would be guaranteed you'd have an item to spare because the content generator has a minimum quota to meet.

As long as no phantos chase you. Those things freak me out.

Quite looking forward to this. It's not so I can play with a portcullis whilst I wait for a Grimrock port for OSX. Oh no.

So your saying you want a Grimrock port-cullis? Huck huck huck

[st33d]

Small Update 355

Many bug fixes.
Added raise-gates (punch to open) and chaos-gates.
Nerfed monster portal.
Chaos walls updated to be able to move into one another.
Chaos zone now has beams of chaos walls cutting through it. The result of which is that as you wall through chaos, the level unfolds before you.
Chaos walls and gates now create-able via the editor menu.

[mokesmoe]

I wall-walked into a wall that a chaos wall was sliding into, and it bumped into me and stopped. When I moved out of the way it just flew across the whole level.

[killozapit]

Still running into some bugs related to picking up items enemies have thrown. I think it auto equips it or duplicates it... all I am sure of is messing with them causes the menu to stop responding after a bit.

Edit: Strangely this crashed unresponsive menu state is the only way I can get keyboard shortcuts to work in dogmatic mode.

Edit 2: While I am posting, I was wondering if you knew about cellular automata cavern generation. Might be a interesting way to make levels with a slightly different feel to them if your interested in that sort of thing.

[Erinock]

Looking cool. It will be good to see this develop 

[st33d]

 

Small Update 356

Chaos walls are now set to ignore all other objects, meaning that if they try to move into you they'll pass through but not the other way round.

Bug with monsters duplicating items they've thrown is now fixed.

Edit: Strangely this crashed unresponsive menu state is the only way I can get keyboard shortcuts to work in dogmatic mode.

Edit 2: While I am posting, I was wondering if you knew about cellular automata cavern generation. Might be a interesting way to make levels with a slightly different feel to them if your interested in that sort of thing.

Dogmatic mode keyboard shortcuts work fine for me, so it must be an unrelated bug.

CA caverns will give far too many annoying surfaces to cope with. I also need room definitions because the way the content is currently distributed through the level is temporary.

I've recently altered the room generation code for the zones anyway. The caves look much more like caves now and the chaos zone works much better as a squarish space that unfolds as opposed to a craggy one.

[killozapit]

Dogmatic mode keyboard shortcuts work fine for me, so it must be an unrelated bug.

Yeah, it might be a browser incompatibility issue. For reference I am using firefox on windows XP. Also the debug editor dosn't work in dogmatic mode right either, the mouse only updates when the game does a tick, though this is so minor and unimportant to the game it's hardly worth mentioning.

CA caverns will give far too many annoying surfaces to cope with. I also need room definitions because the way the content is currently distributed through the level is temporary.

I've recently altered the room generation code for the zones anyway. The caves look much more like caves now and the chaos zone works much better as a squarish space that unfolds as opposed to a craggy one.

I figured CA caverns might be hard to work with, but I thought I would see if you were aware of the technique. I look forward to seeing how the new rooms look, if I ever manage to get past the sewers.

[st33d]

Dogmatic mode keyboard shortcuts work fine for me, so it must be an unrelated bug.

Yeah, it might be a browser incompatibility issue. For reference I am using firefox on windows XP. Also the debug editor dosn't work in dogmatic mode right either, the mouse only updates when the game does a tick, though this is so minor and unimportant to the game it's hardly worth mentioning.

This is actually impossible. The same Flash Player operates in Firefox as in Chrome. If the keys work outside of dogmatic mode and not inside of dogmatic mode, then it must be another issue.

Are you running the game fullscreen?

[killozapit]

Dogmatic mode keyboard shortcuts work fine for me, so it must be an unrelated bug.

Yeah, it might be a browser incompatibility issue. For reference I am using firefox on windows XP. Also the debug editor dosn't work in dogmatic mode right either, the mouse only updates when the game does a tick, though this is so minor and unimportant to the game it's hardly worth mentioning.

This is actually impossible. The same Flash Player operates in Firefox as in Chrome. If the keys work outside of dogmatic mode and not inside of dogmatic mode, then it must be another issue.

Are you running the game fullscreen?

Actually yes.