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[pat]

New version has been released with the biggest changes being the introduction of all-new vaults with interactive features. Currently they are limited to pressure plates which open and shut secret doors, but it has the capacity to be expanded to all sorts of effects.

This is the way that I've decided to implement traps - rather than just a simple trap which causes damage without much other interaction, these traps cause the dungeon to shift around the player. Sometimes this will expose the player to unexpected danger, sometimes the player will find themselves having to survive without their allies for a while, or sometimes it'll just make exploration a bit more interesting.

The next biggest change was the implementation of a form of the cunning action trait for rogues. Thanks to some clever user feedback, the idea is to allow rogues to always withdraw from combat with provoking opportunity attacks through the use of this trait. What this means is that rogues don't have to be as careful when it comes to getting into melee range and it synergises really well with sneak attack. Now rogues can explore and scout without fear because they know that they'll be able to drop back without incurring too much damage to their allies where they can really dish out some damage!

Another important change for ease of use is the implementation of another premade character type - the tiefling druid. This will allow for quick starts for druids and will speed up play for those who just want to dive straight into the game.

Apart from that, here's the full change list:

* Changed the way that the game checked to see if player could see monsters doing certain actions resulting in messages. Hopefully will tidy up some issues to do with this.

* Added fog cloud as a level 1 druid spell.

* Began reworking field of vision calculations to take into account the necessity for some Effects to block sight.

* Added new pre-made character to help with testing - Tiefling Druid.

* Finished updating field of view calculations to take into account effects which block sight.

* Added new tiles for various magic effects.

* Added a non-diggable trait to tiles in special vaults so that set pieces can't be interrupted during mag gen.

* Fixed bug with using oil of sharpness on blunt weapon causing crash.

* Finished implementing special vaults with trigger squares causing walls to appear and disappear.

* Implemented possibility for multiple special vaults per floor.

* Put in a whole bunch of new special vaults including ones that mirror normal vaults to cause some surprises.

* Fixed a bug with healer pathfinding AI which caused a rare crash.

* Fixed aasimar racial charisma bonus to +2.

* Fixed potential bug with dying while in wild shape.

* Fixed potential bug with messy monster deaths.

* Implemented an always-on cunning action trait for rogues which allows them the unique class ability to withdraw from combat without drawing opportunity attacks.

* Reduced spawn rate of rare magic items.

[pat]

New version has just been released which allows for the player's allies to be controlled in terms of what weapons and armour they use.

This should let character builds who can't use heavy weapons and armour, for instance, to kit out their followers with these things so that they don't go to waste.

You can use this feature by 't'alking to your follower and choosing the inventory management option. This will give you the choice to give the follower items to equip or carry along with making them give them back or drop them on the ground. Hopefully it's fairly self-explanatory.

The 'l'ook command has also been expanded on so that you can use that to see creatures (which practically at this time is limited to player followers only) and what items they are carrying and have equipped. I might expand this system to giving a visual cue to the player as to when a monster has a special item equipped so that it's more obvious, but this will become more relevant once I introduce monsters using items, not just the player's allies.

Along with this, there's quite a few bug fixes in this release as well.

[Asin]

...I just realized you're the same dude/lady/person who made Mongrelmen!

[pat]

Haha yep, that's me. This game started as a short-term diversion from Mongrelmen but I soon realised that it had more potential (in my eyes anyway). Mongrelmen was fun but unfocused and this is a more serious attempt at getting a game finished.

[pat]

I've just released a new version and there's some really quite significant changes:

* Warlocks - a fair few players have requested this class be added to the game and the current build has them in there as an experimental option. You can quick-start as an aasimar warlock to try it out quickly. It required quite a bit of work behind the scenes to deal with the different way that warlock's spell slots worked - rather than having spell slots per level like wizards and clerics, they only have a single pool of spell slots to cast all spells from.

There's still quite a bit of work to do - there aren't any eldritch invocations in the game yet but there'll be a few options being implemented very shortly and there's plenty of room for more spells. I also need to properly implement low level spells being used with higher spell slots. It wasn't a big priority previously but it's an important aspect of the way which warlocks use magic so I'll be taking a look at that as well.

One of the big decisions to make was how to handle the warlock's pact boon. The Pact of Chains and the familiar that it grants felt like a bad fit for a game where fighting is most of the actions that you'll take. I'm still not sure how or if that'll work. Pact of the Blade is a possibility but I haven't implemented it yet, so all warlocks at this stage take the Pact of the Tome.

Any feedback or bug reports for the new warlock class would be greatly appreciated - there was a fair bit of work done on them which changed some long standing features of the game so there may very well be something unstable created as a result.

* A proper endgame along with balancing dungeon generation - previously the dungeon was of an infinite depth with ever-increasing difficulty the further you went down. That was always just a placeholder though and the intention was always to make a final level with a final encounter. So I decided to cap the dungeon generation at level 20 and implement that final boss, although that encounter will develop more as time goes on. The final boss on level 20 is an adult red dragon with a CR of 17. Considering that the level cap for players is 10, even with a few henchmen, you'll need a lot of luck to stand a chance.

Because I picked an end to the dungeon's depth, it made sense to rejig the way that monster generation worked so that players saw a lot more variety as they went deeper. That's been done, but the side effect of that is that the dungeon is now a hell of a lot more dangerous. You'll start seeing tougher monsters immediately and level 1 is no longer a risk-free zone. Hopefully it makes for a much more tense and challenging experience right from the get go.

Full change list:

* Implemented arcane recovery for wizards. Created a custom menu to deal with this and allocating spell levels up to half character level divided by two but rounded up.

* Added dungeon depth cap. Fixed issues with autoexplore and a lack of a downstairs when at max dungeon depth.

* Added end game encounter with an adult red dragon.

* Increased the possible CR of spawning monsters to make the dungeon a whole lot more dangerous.

* Fixed bug where druids were not using wisdom as their casting stat.

* Added different displays for warlocks and wizard spell slots. Removed spell slot displays for non-casters.

* Added in a whole bunch of special cases to deal with the unique way that warlock spell slots work.

* Implemented hellish rebuke as a level 1 warlock spell. It works as a reaction in the rules as written but that's a bit hard to translate so I made it a condition which lasts until the player rests and triggers automatically on taking damage against whoever that attacker is.

* Implemented eldritch blast. Cantrip which can target multiple enemies as levels go up.

* Implemented pact of the tome for level 3 warlocks. Reworked spell menu so that spells were always in ascending order of level due to the quirks that this new process created.

* Added chill touch as a wizard and warlock cantrip.

* Implemented infernal legacy abilities for tieflings - can cast hellish rebuke as an ability at level 3 and darkness as an ability at level 5.

[pikachu17]

Cool. I'll have to try this out.

[pat]

New version released: warlocks and other spell casters can now use higher level spell slots for extra spell power!

Here's a pretty big gif of warlock gameplay:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The user interface is still up for discussion but the way it works currently is that for non-warlock spellcasters when selecting a spell, you can also press a number between 0 and 9 as an override for the default spell slot level. If you have the corresponding spell slot available and it's higher than the default spell slot level, then you'll cast that spell at the higher level and potentially have it cause considerable more impact. Warlocks use the higher level spell slot by default so they don't have the same option in the menu.

Overall, it's a buff for spellcasters and allows for a fair bit more flexibility as well as letting spellcasters make full use of all of their spellslots rather than being stuck with unused higher level slots but needing to cast a low level spell like in previous versions.

Next step from here is to rewrite the speed system so that different races and monsters can have different move speeds along with allowing for different time for different actions to be performed. The idea will be that movement will become cheaper and attacking and casting, along with moving steathily, will become more expensive timewise and this will shift the game balance away from archers and spellcasters spamming cantrips at range and put melee fighters onto a level playing field.

[pikachu17]

Is there currently a way to choose short rest or long rest, and if not, will you be adding it anytime soon?

[pat]

At the moment, there isn't and that's because I fudge that part of the rules. It's a bit of an interesting problem in that I don't necessarily think that long rests are an easy thing to convey in a roguelike game just because of the enclosed nature of the surroundings and the frequency of encounters. I'm definitely not ruling out splitting short and long rests and letting the player choose, but at this stage I've gone for simplicity of just having a single rest option which gives the full benefits of a long rest.

I'm happy to hear any ideas that you have about how you think it could be implemented and what it would add (or take away) from the game. I'm trying to walk that fine line between being as faithful to the rules as written as possible but also to make the game fit into a roguelike, which isn't an entirely natural fit in all respects.

[pikachu17]

Well, in this game, a rest currently requires a ration, yes?
A short rest could not require rations, in return for the reduced benefits, which you could make more reduced than regular 5e if you wish.
If you need to balance rests one way or the other, you could lower the number of allowed short rests between long rests, or you could make a long rest have a small chance of summoning something nasty.
You could also have an NPC later in the game reward you for getting there in a short amount of time, which obviously would make taking short rests to your benefit.

Those are just some ideas off the top of my head.

[pat]

Things have been a bit slower for me in terms of putting out new releases. That's been because of a combination of real life commitments which needed to take priority over game dev work but also because there was some big ticket items which would need a fair bit of time to complete and to properly test.



The current new version is one of those big changes and the game now includes variable movement speeds for all creatures. While that might seem like a relatively small change, it required a lot of behind-the-scenes work to implement a kind of energy system for all entities and to translate that to work with each creature's speed.

The big reason for the change was the intent to rebalance the game more in favour of melee combat and against ranged combat and spellcasters who spam offensive cantrips. I've always worked on the theory that each on-screen tile represented ten feet in terms of distance. That worked quite well in most respects until you think about the normal PC movement speed being 30 feet per turn. Without that aspect of the rules being implemented, spellcasters and ranged combatants effectively got 3 times as many turns to attack while melee fighters slowly approached them. That's all changed now.

It's still a bit experimental because you'll see that when you're actively engaged in combat that other creatures can kinda jump towards you as they move multiple squares at once. That's deliberate and that's part of what I'm monitoring in terms of whether it's actually fun or not. From my own playtesting it feels pretty good, but I'm very open to ideas if someone thinks that movement speeds should be tweaked in any way.

Full change list:

* Fixed bug with opportunity attacks where a creature has died somehow (I think?)

* Implemented constants for time to take actions and movement. Add cooldown variable to all objects to record this. Added method to record this value whenever actions are movements are made.

* Finished implementing variable movement speed system - movement now takes 1/3 as long as other actions as base costs and these can be altered to reflect different speeds for each creature for each types of acts.

* Changed order of attribute display just to suit my cosmetic preference.

* Implemented movement delay of 50% times base value for hidden actors.

* Implemented movement delay of 50% times base for wearing heavy armour without requisite strength (apart from for dwarves).

* Updated movement speeds for all monsters.

* Implemented numpy instead of standard python lists to deal with a number of arrays for map storage to improve speed problems introduced by new speed system... and then removed it because my poor programming actually meant that it was slower!

* Did some tidying up of graphics routines to remove redundancies to improve speed.

* Added custom time costs for resting, opening and closing doors and talking.

* Fixed bug with heavy armour and movement speeds not calculating properly.

* Updated action surge to work with new speed system which is actually a lot simpler than the previous system.

* Removed an anomaly with the sidebar display when the player is affected by only invisible conditions and there shouldn't be any visible sign of this.

[sambojin]

Do you mind if I link this post and your basic sites for downloads etc on Giant in the Playground's 5e board? It would probably get it plenty of exposure and quite a bit of feedback and thoughts on the project (although, it might devolve into "this isn't *exactly* like 5e, or even a *proper* roguelike, how dare you!" stuff).

There's way more people that already like 5e there, but it might bring more critiscism and BS that you really don't need to deal with, at least until you've got The Red Prison closer to where you want it for general consumption purposes. Also might get the "that's not in the basic core rules" mafia onto you, but considering everything in your game is essentially homebrew, loosely "inspired by" 5e rules, you should be able to sidestep that with the swipe of a druid's paw.

(note: I like the basic premise of the changes. Another roguelike I love, Pathos: the Nethack Codex, has a tiny bit of "inverse squared firepower" law going on, and multiple attacks available with ranged weapons to the people doing them to really hit stat/equipment synergy, which makes it feel (in sometimes a cool feeling way) like DoomRL: Nethack Party Edition. Dual wielded crossbows, etc, with a charmed or party created friend for more dakka, can get silly. But at least it takes ammo to do it in Pathos, even if that ammo doesn't really break that often if enchanted. Cantrips in 5e really don't require anything at all. No crafting, no finds, no gear. Nothing. Just the stat you'd probably max asap anyway. Pew pew pew!
All rogue/hack-likes do have movement/action speed of enemies though, sometimes in comparison to your own, sometimes static amounts, so something moving multiple squares in a turn isn't exactly genre breaking. That kind of balancing is completely necessary in games like this)

[pat]

Of course that's OK, I'd always be appreciative of anyone doing something to promote the game. I'm not too stressed about that kind of scrutiny because that type of crowd is probably the target audience for the game and I'd like to think that discussion of how I've done things can only help to make the game better in the long run.

[sambojin]

Done.

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?603676-The-Red-Prison-a-5e-basic-rules-inspired-roguelike-computer-game&p=24284194#post24284194

[pat]

Thanks a lot of that, I'm pretty reluctant to sign up to forums just to advertise things but I'll keep an eye on that thread.