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[sambojin]

This still sounds like it's shaping up to be an awesome rogue like. I'll continue to follow it closely, and will spend a bit of time on it this weekend (you had me at 5e and Druids).

[pat]

That's awesome to hear, it's always good to see people excited about the game and I appreciate any feedback you might have.

Development has been deliberately a bit slower over the last couple of weeks. I've been steadily fixing bugs and playing around with some small bits of new content but I'm trying to take some time away from full on development. When I was putting out a big new version on a weekly basis, I was probably working too hard on it - on the one hand my motivation levels were fantastic but on the other, it's all that I was doing with my free time. I'm still highly motivated about things but this is a small planned break before getting back into things aggressively.

[pat]

After a bit of a break from development, I've been back into the swing of things and have just released a new version.

The main features of this version are picking up a bunch of small big fixes and changes that I've been making slowly over the last few weeks (while notionally not working on the game) and a big development push into expanding the categories and variety of magic items available in the game.

These now include:

* wands of web, fireballs, lightning bolt and magic missiles;
* dwarven plate armour;
* dragon scale armour of all kinds;
* elven chain mail;
* mithral armour of all kinds
* oil of sharpness;
* rings of poison resistance, invisibility and protection;
* potion of giant strength (with different strengths for hill, frost, stone, fire, cloud and storm giants);
* potion of heroism;
* scimitar of speed.

There are two categories of magic items with common and rare having different chances of being placed in the dungeon. I still haven't finalised how items get distributed because there is new stuff being added all the time so you might find that magic items might prove too powerful and common in the current build and that'll be addressed in due course. Until then, it's probably a good chance to try things out!

One thing that I'm actively monitoring is the strength of wands - the rules say that you get 7 charges and they can recharge after a long rest. In game, this means that you might get, for instance, 7 fireballs each and every rest and this seems a bit too powerful to me. I'm thinking that I'll potentially turn off item recharging, maybe on a case by case basis because it's a poor fit for the game but I'm still undecided.

Next things on my list are to add more druid spells, add more magic items, expand on map generation, and maybe look at implementing barbarians and monks...

All feedback, bug reports or suggestions are more than welcome.

[pat]

Here's a gif demonstrating the new magic items with the spawn rate turned up to 100% so I have a whole bunch of toys to try out. An unfortunate NPC party found themselves the test subjects:

[Frumple]

Well... as long as you don't do the exploding dice UMD check thing for wands, they'll probably be better balanced than Incursion's are

Amusing as a wand-slinger default for "I want to blow the game up" is it can get excessive, ehehe. _{especially when the UMD check causes the wand's AoE to exceed its firing range :V}

That said, some other balance ideas... having a cross-wand cooldown between uses might be enough to offset recharging. Make it so you can't just spam out fireball for seven turns straight, but have to wait a turn or three before using the same effect again. Maybe outside of special wands that don't recharge but can be rattled off... or do it the other way around with more rare slow-firing rechargeable wands, perhaps with the default non-charge having fewer (only two or three) shots. Delayed fire could be interesting, too -- rechargeable, no CD, but it takes a turn or two for any particular shot to fire off.

Amusing but probably unpleasant could be a increasing chance of explosion on chain use* -- first shot is free, second has a 5-10% chance of exploding in your face, each turn after doubles the chance. Cools down a step each turn a wand isn't used. You'd still be able to use wands and even panic spam them, but it would have risks and wouldn't just be a more-or-less free hurl-fireballs-until-they-die thing.

Probably other stuff you could do, too. Have fun with it!

* Maybe feat-mitigated -- most fun there would be something not changing the odds (or maybe even increasing them), but reducing the self/ally damage and increasing the AoE, basically letting you suicide bomb your enemies via wand spam.

[pat]

Those are some great ideas. The simple one of making wands needing a few turns to recharge is a good one. Likewise, the one about common wands not recharging but rarer ones having that characteristic might be a sensible change - really easy to program and allows for special artifact wands.

[Rince Wind]

Another idea would be that the wand has to roll to regain the full charge, a bit like breath weapons work. 1-4 on a d6: everything is fine, 5 or 6: lower the maximum of charges by one.
It is no one use consumable, but it won't last forever either (and you tend to get more of those things in a game than in a table top adventure).

[pat]

That's not a bad idea either. The more I think about it though, turning off regeneration for everything but rare items is probably the best way to go.

The fact that you can find a wand of fireballs on level 1 and have 7 fireballs immediately to clear the level and you start with 5 food rations which means that you can rest 5 times giving you an extra 35 fireballs. I just think that a lucky loot drop on level 1 giving a player 42 fireballs for free just based off starting equipment is way too powerful.

[Persus13]

If you're worried about Level 1s getting lucky, you could also have wands be affected by the spell scroll rules where if you're not high enough level to cast the spell you need to roll an ability check to do successfully cast it.

[pat]

I would actually probably do something like that and tie the item strength to character level but I'm trying to follow the D&D rules as closely as possible so that players know what to expect. I don't always succeed at that but I try.

[pat]

New version with minimap:

[pat]

One of the things that RPG's and especially roguelikes seem to do badly is traps. It seems pretty boring to just inflict a certain amount of damage by way of dart trap, arrow trap, spear trap, etc. There's a few deviations from the boring path with rolling boulder traps in nethack, gas traps in brogue and things like that, but I wanted to go in a completely different direction.

So I implemented more of an environmental trap system where when the player steps on a pressure plate, certain doors shut and other doors open changing the shape of the dungeon. The hope is that this will create some tactically interesting situations where the player needs to reassess the path they need to take in an unfamiliar situation and perhaps with allies being unexpectedly stranded outside of the room. I don't want to make these things automatically lethal so they're all fairly benign at this stage but I'm going to add in some dangerous ones next I think. The plan is that they'll be clearly signposted though, ie. the player will see an artifact on a pedestal in a really obvious vault with warning runes on the door. In that scenario the player shouldn't be surprised that when they pick the artifact up, walls open to reveal a group of skeleton warriors or something like that.

Anyway, by doing all this, I created a heap of edge cases where the player might end up trapped forever in a part of the dungeon and I'm trying to avoid this by reworking the situations where these traps can take effect. And the way I'm testing it is by turning off monster generation and running my autoplay feature for as long as possible to hopefully identify any weird situations like that. So the above gif is what my work screensaver for the day looks like.

[sambojin]

Another alright way would be to include wall-type spells as the thing that gets triggered by a trap plate. Instead of permanently locking off a door, have it be covered by flames/ice/stone etc. Not as an instant damage thing, but as a "Well, you can go that way if you really want, but then you'll take damage or it will take some time to smash through (for stone). There's probably other ways through (teleports, elemental resists, dispels, etc), but you get to decide if you want to use those resources, or if you're happy to go around the long way".

Gives the player a choice, rather than constantly rerouting them. One  of the funnest parts of DoomRL was working out how to deal with the devastation your barrel popping caused on top of all the lava and acid pools already in place. This could work a bit like that (or maybe think Ultimate 4/5's energy fields or something, but in trap form). You could expand it to summon traps, raise dead traps, etc as well give if you wanted.

[pat]

All good ideas and definitely possible. The way it works now is that the map has invisible effects applied to certain squares and these could easily be something else, both visible to the player and with any other characteristic that I want. The only real complication is that I will need to write a way to parse the map layout files and identify those squares but it's not difficult at all.

Surprising the player with monsters through things like raise dead traps is also definitely possible although I want to make sure that it feels fair. It would definitely add more interesting aspects to the dungeon.

[Frumple]

I mean, stuff like raise dead traps have an obvious solution, so to speak, so far as fairness goes. Just make them need corpses and have the corpses laying around. Summoning stuff in general could have similar 'props' that give indication you're about to walk into something even if not specifically what it is. Maybe even offer a means to mitigate things -- seeing a room full of corpses you didn't put there and tossing in a fireball to clear it out (or gift yourself a passel of flaming undead, ether/or) would be a neat interaction. Smashing a glowing blue crystal to disarm the water elemental summoning trap (or maybe flood the room, who knows), stuff like that.

No-tell traps could be particularly high level (or low danger) junk, regulated to real nasty areas or somethin'.