Hello! This week is pretty straightforward as I’ve been racing through tasks and don’t have too much time to blow hot air about my theories on Roguelikes. What’s been going on?
* Bartenders in towns can mark rumored new dungeons on your map that you have to seek out.
* Multiple town layouts.
* Town shops will pick from a wide list of specific shop tables. Find the greatest boot store in the land!
* Fixing some bugs with NPC chatter and idle movement that I introduced recently, whoops.
* Added some animation support for Containers like barrels, chests, bookstands, etc.
* Fixed some bugs blending background music between areas.
* Added fade in / fade out for area transitions.
* Added a new item shop UI
* SOUND EFFECTS zomg.
* Added a Soft-ID feature, will explain below.
* Got the Academy Library working!
The Library is another room in the Academy that grows with a player’s effort. You’ll find plenty of books in the wild, which are designed to give you an increase in skills. If you read the book, you’ll gain one point in a skill based on the book, and then the book is gone. You can also sell the book, if you’re hard up for coin, OR you could bring them back to the Academy and donate them. Donating to the Library means you can’t use the book on your current hero, however there are benefits!
Future heroes can start with knowledge of scrolls, and will be able to identify some of them on sight. The more impressive the library, the higher power this will be able to reach. Dungeonmens who take advantage of a fully stocked library will have knowledge of nearly every scroll in the game, right at level 1.
Finally, there’s Dungeon Sense, a sort of sixth sense about dangerous items and situations. The more books in a library, the better your odds of getting a proper gut feeling about the world’s surprises. You have no way of knowing if the water in that pool is safe to drink, but something tells you it will be of great benefit. You may not have this new wand fully identified, but you just have this feeling that it is quite powerful and probably dangerous. Knowledge is power, and even the sword-swinginest Fightermans is better off knowing more about the dangerous mysteries of the world at large.
Finally, here’s a large image showing various stages of Library development. Check out that last one! Very fancy carpets. Alright, enough jibba jabba, back to work!
Nice to see interesting variations on a roguelike staple with your take on item IDing.
Will you be doing something different (if you include them of course) with other roguelike staples such as religion and gaining pets/allies?
I’ve had this idea of a Junior Dungeonmans coming along with a higher level player, sort of like a summer internship. Imagine losing your main character, and suddenly control flips over to the intern, who is likely way underleveled and in serious trouble, and you’ve got to get him out. However, there’s a couple of big problems there, and one of which is that right now the AI isn’t smart enough to make a quality ally. That said, once you unlock Necromansy for the Academy, you can summon up some undead of various quality to roll with you. There’s a class in the works that I haven’t talked about who, on paper, is supposed to make use of allies. I just don’t have it together yet.
Religion isn’t going to be a part of Dungeonmans right now. Thematically, Dungeonmans is played in a world without gods, so as far as everyone knows, there’s no one worth praying to. Mechanically, what Religion usually does is set up an extra trade: follow these rules, receive these powers. They’re supposed to allow some flavor in the class you pick, though generally if a game has religion there’s an optimal god for each class. Given how Dungeonmans lets you pick and choose from a list of masteries, classes are more fluid and I don’t know if that extra step is necessary. Maybe it is! I look forward to finding out.