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[Zireael]

For those not in the know, Veins of the Earth is a spiritual successor to Incursion. Development started in June 2013.

The goal is not to replicate either the SRD or Incursion faithfully - rather, it's using the openly available underlying mechanics to take our own spin on them. Full list of differencies to SRD and Incursion can be found in the wiki.

Grab the game from  GitHub or Bitbucket or from ModDB.

Documentation (WIP) available here.

The major differences to Incursion:
* random worldmap
* multiple dungeons
* dungeons can be persistent or not and finite or not
* death is not an end to your game... even though your character IS dead...
* the game supports tiles!
* the UI is better
* readily available documentation
* open source from the beginning

... Incursion has an upper hand, however, when it comes to content.

***

Some screens:














***

Key features:

Based on the OGL license
If you've ever played any of the games released on the Open Game Licence, whether computer or tabletop, you will find many things familiar. Same if you played any AD&D-derived games (Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Angband)...

Tiles
The game uses freely available tiles which have been used in several Angband variants, so they are tried and proven.

Tooltips
Don't know what that spell or ability or monster is? Just mouse over it. Lots of readily accessible info for the player.

Help
Still stuck? Press F1 or H.

Turn-based
You make your action and enemies take theirs.

Grid-based
In true roguelike spirit.


You can see more screenshots or download it from http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-veins-of-the-earth.

Alternate download, README, issue tracker and wiki available at GitHub.

Yet alternate download and README available at Bitbucket
Feedback and contributors welcome!

Bleeding edge stuff at GitHub, you need to unpack the contents of the zip to your T-Engine/modules/VotE folder.

[Mephansteras]

I'll have to give this a try when I get some free time.

[getter77]

This has tremendous potential folks---and has been acted on at a reasonable and good dev pace to actually come to realize said potential as it clawed through the mire from Alpha into Beta state.

Well worth one's time to keep tabs on at the absolute minimum as a bright future ahead is all but assured.   

[Retropunch]

Good to see you started a thread on this, VotE and advancing on incursion is a really great idea and you've made some great steps forward. I love the tooltips and tiles - they improve the experience immeasurably.

I have to say though that I'm not a massive fan of the T-Engine/TOME itself, and I'm not sure what parts are yours and what is built in (or editable). I don't want to sound too critical, but there are a few things that have gotten to me (and a few friends in my 'RL group' agree) and I think they should be easy fixes:

-I don't think there's any need to have the top info/message bar as well as the message log at the bottom. I found it distracting/annoying (especially with the blue glow) and it just means you're constantly looking around all the time. I'd suggest just keeping the message log and expanding it to the right further. As a side note, I think having the char. bar/skills/so on down one side with the message log at the bottom (like DCSS and many other RLs have) looks best in my opinion. Borders around each bit (message log, minimap, health/level) would look good as well.

-Character creation is kinda not intuitive. This is especially noticeable when selecting/rolling stats as it took me a while to figure out to click birth next. I'd suggest just having it really linear - you select something and then click next until you play the game. The welcome message could do with a 'click to close' prompt, and it seems weird choosing your name at that stage rather than the beginning. A death prompt/screen would be nice also.

-I have been killed a few times by relatively strong monsters next to where I spawn (like a large elementals and so forth) I always appreciate a challenge, but I feel that keeping the first level with things that are relatively easy to kill bar stupidity helps the player gain more confidence/work out what they're doing. Even the most tenacious player isn't going to enjoy constantly dying the first few steps.

These are all minor things, but I think they'd help a lot. Sorry to be critical, your work so far is excellent!

[Zireael]

1. I can kill the message bar at the top easily, thanks for the suggestion. Same goes for expanding the log.
2. The current char creation UI is a bit of a kludge. Ideally, it'd be all - stats, name, and all the rest - in a single screen like ToME's character creation screen. However, every time I tried this, the game either died, crashed, or the UI screen refused to work correctly.
E: Welcome message prompt - easily doable, thanks for the suggestion.
That said, last attempt at it was ~5 months ago, and maybe I can make it work now, with more coding experience under my belt.
3. Since beta 4.6, the relative power level of monsters has been scaled down according to player level. It seems that max CR = player level + 5 is still too punishing, I can definitely push it down to +4 or +3.

And thanks for the input, it's always valued, even more so when it's from new people.

[Retropunch]

Glad my suggestions were of some help, and sorry to sound so critical in my first response to the game - they were just issues that were nagging at me each time I played through.

If possible, artificially lowering the max CR for the first level would be good, as I think the range is fine once you get into the swing of it. Let me know if there are any specific bits you want me to test and I'll have a go, although I'm not a great player!

[Zireael]

Let me know if there are any specific bits you want me to test and I'll have a go, although I'm not a great player!

Nothing in particular - just keep playing and telling me what is there to improve or is there any specific spell, skill whatever you really miss.

[Zireael]

I made the first screen more readable, expanded the log and added the prompt to the welcome message. Also lowered the CR cap for dungeon level 1 to player level + 3.



However, axing the flasher (top message bar) caused weird bugs to pop up, like the map sometimes not updating and getting critters hanging around indefinitely, so I'll be more inclined to fix it's refreshing and try to remove the flashing blue effect instead of axing the thing altogether.


Thoughts?

[Retropunch]

Awesome!
A few things I'd suggest (nitpicking i'm afraid!), these are all personal preference as well.
-I'd call 'point buy' something else, as it sounds like you're somehow having to pay something for them (especially as some old rpg games had penalties for being able to actually select rather than random roll). Maybe something like 'Roll' and 'Manual selection' or something?
-I'd put load 'premade' left and Next at the far-right hand side (and keep that configuration throughout the pages) although that's kinda unimportant.
-Maybe expand on the Luck description? Even if it's vague ('it helps you subtly in all things') it would be a lot more useful, as currently it kinda suggests that you need to go and read up on Incursion or something.


For the flasher, getting rid of the blue flash would be a good start, and might it be possible just to have it for important announcements? Like it'd be more useful if it pointed status effects or something. Again, I'm not sure of the engine limitations so I'm not sure what can and can't be done. Have you asked around on the T-engine forums about it? It might be worth asking as I imagine others have been annoyed with it.

[Zireael]

I reduced the flasher to flashing green at start and flashing red for being poisoned. Nothing else uses it.

I wanted it to flash red whenever a monster critted you, too, but couldn't get it to work. Also, clearing it doesn't really work :/ More work tomorrow, I guess.

Whatever is causing the limbo critters really annoys me (it's not the flasher tweaking) and I've put safeguards everywhere, but they still rarely pop up. Usually when they're the most annoying - blocking a corridor, for example.

I spent three hours and managed to improve the character creation screen. Bear in mind that this is a WIP and not yet functional.

[Zireael]

If you happen to run into a mob which doesn't want to die even long below the death threshold (what I called limbo critters in earlier posts), it seems it's an engine bug.

The bleeding edge build is stuffed silly with safeguards to prevent it, but from time to time it happens again.

[Zireael]

Solved the unkillable critters hanging around thanks to Marson's Bosses AWOL addon code.

If not for the helpful guy himself on te4.org forums, I'd be stumped for a looong time.

[Zireael]

Working on refining the diplomacy and handle animal skills - the basic framework is already in - and added a new GUI feature. You can now tell at a glance whether the NPC is friendly, neutral or hostile.



Also, do you like the stone texture under the minimap?

[getter77]

Texture seems a bit incongruent versus the standard graphical style in the game proper---ideally it would either be stylized in line with the game world proper or I guess you could go for a classic crumpled paper texture for some thematic flavor instead.

[Cthulhu]

So is the game always going to be on the T-Engine?  Because ugh, blugh, blech, blleurhghgh.

It's just an irrational personal preference but I liked Incursion's UI.  I dunno, it made me feel immersed.