draknorgame-blog

[draknorgame-blog]

Version 0.72 Release

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ce0mseb7qtax4b7/Draknorv0.72.zip?dl=0

COMPATIBILITY: 0.72 or later

 Bug Fixes

-Fixed a few minor text spacing errors

-Fixed blasphemy alteration from items not working after loading a game

Features

-Attributes and experience are now displayed on the UI, as I continue filling up the UI with more info.

-A list of enemies currently in the room is now displayed on the UI instead of in the main screen every trun. However, it only shows up to 5 enemies, to avoid encompassing the UI. If there are six or more enemies, it will only tell you how many more there are, and the command to see all enemies. (“look npcs”.)

Quality of Life

Labeled the minimap as a minimap because ascii can be confusing.

Balance

-There is now ALWAYS at least one mid-day shrine on every floor, except for floor 0.

Misc

nothing

With this update Draknor is in a very(?) stable state, and i’m quite happy with it, although there’s still no content past the first 5 floors. I’ve decided to wait a while and do a different, smaller project in the mean time, until I decide if there are any other features or major changes I want to make to Draknor.

If not, then when I come back to it, it’ll be time to make content! Either way, see you later!

[draknorgame-blog]

Version 0.71

https://www.dropbox.com/s/k8416nrh07qocbd/Draknorv0.71.zip?dl=0

Fixed a stupid mistake on my part causing the game to hard crash when your HP or MP hit exactly zero because I am a chungus.

[draknorgame-blog]

Draknor 0.7 Release

https://www.dropbox.com/s/68we7rauray39ti/Draknorv0.70.zip?dl=0

COMPATIBILITY: 7.0 or later

Bug Fixes

-Fixed enemies still granting renown and statistical kills if they are killed after reviving.

-Fixed a few misc. bugs with events continuing in the game even after you die.

-Fixed being able to leave sub-dungeons without making an escape roll when enemies are present.

-Fixed enemies being able to move between rooms if you tried to move, but failed.

-Fixed bug causing the guide not to appear if you died and started a new game

Features

Libtcod Console: New console, the library allows a variety of badly-needed features, such as:

-Colored text: Important lines are color-coded.

-Minimap: The upper-right now contains a 5x5 minimap displaying the area around you.

-Health and Mana display: This was already in the game, at the end of each line. However, now there are visual bars and they are always on the side.

-Continuous status effect list

-Continuous list of available moves, to make sure the player is aware of their abilities.

Quality of Life

-Enemies now have their health (or as much as you know about it) displayed next to their name in the room.

-The game will now ask you, specifically, which item you are referring to if you are vague enough to have possibly selected two items.

-“X” or “Ex” is now a shortcut for ‘look’ (as in ‘examine’)

-‘wield’ is now a shortcut for equipping items.

-Changed the phrasing on a few command-error messages to be more specific. Most notably:

-If you don’t enter a target name in a room with two or more enemies, you will now receive the message “You must specify a target (there is more than one creature here)” rather than just the normal “that is not a valid target”

-Trying to use or equip a spell tome now tells you more specifically that you have to cast the spell.

-Added a clarification for when enemies do not drop any items.

Balance

-There are now three new tomes: “Minor” tomes. Minor fire, minor mend, and minor arcane ray. These are similar but less effective versions of current spells. These have been distributed to starting classes who need more spells. Also, one of these tomes will always span in every library you find. This should allow you to always have access to some basic spell types, but still make normal tomes a valuable find.

-Maximum mana has been increased on items that grant is, generally in the range of a 30-50% increase. This is to increase the value of spellcasting items and spellcasting builds in general. To this end, mana vials and other mana restoring items now restore about 50% more mana as well.

-Mudman now has 1 physical DR and 7 health. (Previously 2 and 8)

-Crusaders have received a modest buff to accuracy and defense

Misc

nothing

[draknorgame-blog]

Status Update

THIS IS THE HARDEST QUARTER OF COLLEGE IVE HAD IN A REALLY LONG TIME

I HAVE GOTTEN NOTHING DONE

In other news, I am going to experiment with the libtcod library and see if it will help me add some better user interface to the game, such as colored text, a minimap, and if possible some graphics and menus.

[draknorgame-blog]

Version 0.61 Release

https://www.dropbox.com/s/mvbfl2bqtsn1bwk/Draknorv0.61.zip?dl=0

COMPATIBILITY: 6.0 or later

 Bug Fixes

-Fixed looking at sub-dungeon shrines not displaying their descriptions

-Fixed main-dungeon becoming a sub-dungeon if you died in a sub-dungeon.

Features

nothing

Quality of Life

-The “loot” command will now ask you to specify if you want to loot shrines, or chests.

Balance

nothing

Misc

nothing

lol

[draknorgame-blog]

Version 0.6 Release

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ybnkjguq6f6sop0/Draknorv0.6.zip?dl=0

COMPATIBILITY: Not compatible with previous versions

 Bug Fixes

-Fixed enemies getting a turn when you attempted to use an item you have in your inventory that cannot be used with the use command.

Features

-BLASPHEMY: You now have a blasphemy stat. THERES A LOT GOING ON.  I can’t even begin to list it.

 -SUPER DIPLOMACY. Enemies now have three separate diplomacy groupings: grouped with category, grouped with same name, or no group. Neutral characters will only be upset if you attack someone in their group, and ONLY if that NPC would return the favor. (Humanoids who care about (almost) all humanoids do NOT care about humanoids who hate other humanoids)

Abominations and flora have no group. Animals, arthropods, and constructs are grouped only with the same name. Everything else is grouped with the same species.

Also, individual types can now have exceptions to this rule. For example, cannibals do not care if you attack other humanoids, and humanoids don’t care if you attack cannibals. Wild Roamers only care about other wild roamers, and other humanoids don’t care about them.

 -SUPER DIPLOMACY, part 2: Enemies are now much more interested in peace if they are badly injured. The effective DC to make an enemy become peaceful goes down by 3 if they are below half health, or by 6 if they are below one-quarter health.

 -There is now a special movement type, “Impossible”, for plants and other immobile enemies.

 Quality of Life

-You now get a chance to see your final stats after you die.

-Two extra stats tracked: Times you moved, in total and on an individual floor. For comparison with rooms explored to see how much backtracking you actually ended up doing. Also used for in-game calculations.

Balance

-Goblins now have their own species, Goblin, rather than being humanoids. This is so that with new diplomacy, goblins will all group together, but won’t care if you fight servants of Draknor or other humanoids.

-Short Bow now increases dodge by an additional 1 point, increasing ranger’s starting defense to 16. Hopefully this will make ranger a balanced start, without making them another generic high-dps starting class.

-Decreased the odds of multiple enemies spawning in one room on room generation by about 8 percentile points. This will prevent gigantic gangbangs on floor 1.

Misc

nothing

[draknorgame-blog]

golly gee wizz i’ve been making so much progress lately

that’s gonna end real soon as the next quarter starts up for me

but before that happens i’ll hopefully have another big update out. this one’s the blasphemy update. It includes renown, improved diplomacy, a few balance tweaks and other junk.

After that I actually have no clue what I’ll do. This is going to be the last major feature I have planned. I guess I’ll balance the game in its current state for a bit, think about if any major features need to be added or changes need to be made, and if not, start expanding the content to make the actual game??

[draknorgame-blog]

Version 0.55 Release

https://www.dropbox.com/s/lnglooxconirirr/Draknorv0.55.zip?dl=0

COMPATIBILITY: 5.0 or later

 Bug Fixes

-Fixed the ‘heal1’ ability for NPCs being completely screwed up and messing with any NPCs that used it.

-Fixed a bug causing enemies to only revive if other (living) enemies were in the room.

-Fixed pack enemies only displaying one ‘appear’ message when appearing in the player’s room. (For example: from midnight shrine)

Features

-SUB-DUNGEONS: New ‘entrances’ will appear at the edges of dungeons starting at depth 2. These lead to special sub-dungeons with a unique shape and spawn list. The rooms here have different features than normal, including unusual shrines to replace normal ones, and no exit wells. You may explore a sub-dungeon as much as you would like, before returning to the main dungeon to eventually proceed. However, once you leave a sub-dungeon, you can never re-enter that particular sub-dungeon.

-Currently the only sub-dungeon is the Crypt.

-There are 4 unusual shrines to replace the 4 normal shrines in sub-dungeons. however, some of them relate to features that are not yet in the game. As such, only 3 are functional.

-Dungeon Names: Each floor of the dungeon now has a fairly unique name descriptor. This won’t add a lot to gameplay at the moment, but is helpful for keeping track of where you are. (especially for me when I’m teleporting around fixing bugs.) And it will eventually be more important, probably.

-New room type: Library. Marked on the map. Functionally similar to a normal room but with one guaranteed spellbook spawn (if the room would have any loot at all). At least one is guaranteed to appear on every floor past floor 0. This should prevent players from having no access to tomes due to bullshit chance, hopefully without increasing the amount they receive by a ridiculous number.

-New enemy: Haunt. Ghosts are a relatively common spawn type and seeing 200 rampaging ghosts every run gets boring. Also, more variety in damage types is needed to balance early playthroughs. Thus, this frost-bringing ghost has been added to the spawn tables.

-Added two new spells: Shout, and Ash. Shout is a single-target sonic attack that ignores dodge. Ash is a utility spell which destroys corpses, preventing enemies from returning to life.

Quality of Life

-Boss rooms now appear on the map as “B” if you haven’t summoned the boss, or, “b” if you have already done it. Likewise, subdungeons appear as “E” if you haven’t used them, or “e” if you have.

-You can now cancel out of a dawn shrine, if you want to use it later. This will allow you to check your stats, use potions, or do whatever you want before you use it.

-Looking at a chest will now give you advice about chests even if you’re too stupid to see the chest’s description.

-Your HP and MP will always display at the bottom of an action, not just when you take actions or move.

Balance

-Huge Axe max damage lowered by 1

-Berserker Charisma lowered by 1

-Cleric Charisma raised by 1

-Ranger dexterity raised by 1

-Midnight shrines now bring two deadly enemies, rather than one deadly and a few common.

-Woken Corpse now spawns in packs of 1-4 instead of 2-5

Misc

-An error will appear if a map feature fails to generate. That way, just in case something causes the boss room / exit to not appear, you won’t go searching in vain. This is also important for debugging and bug reporting.

[draknorgame-blog]

Version 0.51 Release

https://www.dropbox.com/s/wu8w9pvziiytj3n/Draknorv0.51.zip?dl=0

COMPATIBILITY: 5.0 or later

Bug Fixes

-The guide will no longer appear at the entrance to every single floor of the dungeon.

-Your coin purse will no longer appear as random loot

-Fixed a bug where enemies were described as “strange ____” when you killed them even if your intelligence was high enough to know what they were.

Features

nothing

Quality of Life

-Certain NPCs, like the guide, will now say all their conversation options in order, rather than picking a random one. That way, if you want to go through the guide’s tips all in a row, you can.

Balance

-Enemies now become marginally more powerful the further down you go; meaning, individual enemies now gain stat boosts. This will hopefully allow deadly enemies to remain a threat even as you go down, and reward you for fighting them as early as possible. Also, it should stop trash mobs from being nothing but free clumps of experience.

-Floor size now scales much slower. It takes (roughly) twice as long for floors to increase in their base size. (not counting size modifications from floor types)

-Vastly increased the power of the floor 5 bosses, but also increased their experience by 50 each.

-You now see the flavor description of enemies on all but the worst int ratings, rather than on the top two only.

Misc

nothing

[draknorgame-blog]

I’ve already been alerted to some bugs, but so far they’re just hilarious, and not actually stopping people from playing.

For example, the guide seems to appear in every floor of the dungeon, and your coinpurse was accidentally made a normal loot item. meaning, guides and coins appear everywhere all the time. Probably the second or third funniest thing that’s happened so far unintentionally.

Like i said, this is weird, but doesn’t make the game unplayable, so i wont bother publishing a bugfix patch until i learn of anything more substantial. Instead i’m going to take a little break then start working on the next big feature. Which will probably be one of three things: Hunter enemies, blasphemy, or sub-dungeons.

[draknorgame-blog]

Version 0.5 Release

COMPATIBILITY: Incompatible with previous save files

 https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27803372/Draknor/Draknorv0.5.zip

Bug Fixes

-Fixed players being able to go above inventory size by equipping items off the ground

-Fixed entering a blank command giving a “You don’t have the ability to cast that spell” message

-Changed description of rusty boots to reflect their new stats

-Changed description of nightmare ring to be more specific

-Enemies that did not count as deadly enemies for stat-tracking purposes have been fixed.

-Fixed sunder incorrectly displaying ‘reduces enemy armor by 0’

-Enemies can no longer enter locked rooms from the outside.

-When describing item drops from enemies, the game will now correctly pick either “a” or “an”, for example “an antidote”. (It will also correctly pick “the” for unique items)

Features

-BOSSES: This feature is extremely large. These enemies appear at static floors, but at a random place on the floor each time. When you find the boss room they will not be there, but you can summon them to your location any time you are ready to fight. When a floor has a boss (or bosses) you must defeat them all before you can go down a well. When you summon the boss, the room will lock until one of you dies! Bosses have unique item drops and special dialog for most events, even some events that probably will never happen.

-A friendly guide NPC has been added to the start of the game with lots of helpful hints. Don’t stab him, that would be rude.

-When you look at an enemy, instead of a binary state of knowing everything or nothing about it, there are now four different stages of knowledge, at double the normal requirement, the normal requirement, one half the normal requirement, and less than one half. This will allow different ranges of intelligence to feel more distinct.

-Two more martial abilities were added: Cripple and Distract, which lower physical damage and mana respectively. Weapons have been tweaked accordingly. Now, some weapons that are typically weaker have multiple abilities to compensate.

-Many creatures are now less picky about who you attack. Any creature with the type of “Animal”, “Arthropod”, or “Flora”, “Construct”, or “Abomination” will no longer become angry if you attack another creature of the same category, UNLESS that creature shares the exact same name. For example, if you are in a room with a hostile Cave Cat and two neutral Giant Toads, attacking the cat will no longer make the toads angry with you. However, attacking either toad will still cause both toads in the room to become hostile.

Quality of Life

-Version detection added. When loading a save file, the game will check the version of the save file with the current version, and alert you if your saved game is incompatible with the newest version of the game. (Unfortunately this will not start working until NEXT patch, because v0.4 has no version data. Do not attempt to use v0.4 data with this version.)

-Partial word search now only searches for the first word typed. So, trying to get a ‘copper ring’ will now no longer grab other types of rings, if no copper ring is available. Partial word search is still being changed a lot and may not work perfectly.

-If a creature hates you so much that it will never be friendly, the diplomacy DC displayed when looking at them now just says “Impossible”

-“Look at” is now acceptable syntax for “Look”

-If the word “The” is entered as the second word, it will be ignored. This should allow commands such as “take the ___”, “Look at the ___”, “equip the ____” to function.

-Typing “Run” “Flee” “Escape” or “Leave” will display a message explaining that you only need to make a normal move if you want to try to run from combat.

-“Items” now opens the inventory

-“Skills” “Experience” “Exp” “Character” and “Char” now all open the status menu.

Balance

-Escaping from multiple enemies now only requires you to successfully escape from the fastest enemy in the room. An early run can be ended immediately by accidentally walking into a room where three or more enemies have clustered, so this has been tweaked to give players with high escape values a much fairer attempt to flee.

-The ripple ring was far too powerful, but rather than making it boring, it now debuffs accuracy as well as giving its bonuses PLUS an even further increased reflex save.

-Cost of double strike reduced from 7 to 6

-Cost of maim reduced from 2 to 1

Misc

-Added an icon to the file to give the illusion that I know how to make an application

-The process for assigning drops to enemies has been totally redone to make it a billion trillion times easier. This means that making new enemies will be much faster (when it’s time for that) but also that the number of bugged item drops will go way down, as there are now less than half as many variables that need to be entered by hand.

-Enemies now move between rooms even on turns that the player moves between rooms, BUT they will never enter a room that the player just entered.

-A movement AI that chases the player with reasonable accuracy has been added, for later use.

-The new bosses have dialog for a variety of circumstances like encountering the player, dying, killing the player, taking a turn, and so on. This can also apply to non-bosses. Some enemies will later be updated to have some dialog.

[draknorgame-blog]

Pre-Patch Status Update

hello good friends of mine

the game will be updating sometime this week with a couple of big additions and changes

its taken an extremely long time because during my last quarter i spent some time trying to see if i was cool enough to make a gui for this game

long story short: no, i have no idea how to do that in a good and useful way, mostly because i started this as a c++ console application. but thats fine. this is still really just something for me to get better at c++ and programming in general. a pet project that i play with and then maybe some day euthanize.

But let’s talk about something nicer. Intelligence, and looking at things.

Previously in the game, enemies had an int requirement. If your intelligence was above this, you could see the enemy’s name, and looking at them revealed all their stats. If your int wasn’t high enough, they appeared as a “Strange _____”, where ____ was there creature type. (like “strange animal”, “strange humanoid”.)

I really like systems like this in games, where your attributes not only determine your strengths and weaknesses but also determine how you view the world, and how others view you. But I realized that this extreme and instant flip was really weird. So for the next update one of the big changes will be an expanded intelligence system.

Now there are four states of knowledge, that work like this:

Full knowledge: Your intelligence is TWICE the normal requirement.

Some knowledge: Your intelligence is the requirement.

A little knowledge: Your intelligence is at least half the requirement.

No knowledge: Your intelligence is not even half the requirement.

This way the transition will be much more gradual, and there will be a much more reasonable variety of things you do and don’t know. Only the absolute most brick-headed characters will fail to identify other humans as being human. And only the smartest of smartypants will be able to know everything there is to know about strange spirits, awful abominations, and complex constructs.

Here’s examples of looking at a Blood Thrall with the newest system, from lowest to highest intelligence:

INT < Requirement*0.5

INT >= Requirement*0.5  

Int >= Requirement

Int >= Requirement*2

[draknorgame-blog]

Version 0.4 Release

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27803372/Draknor/Draknorv0.4.zip

COMPATIBILITY: Incompatible with previous save files

 Bug Fixes

-Fixed another bug with looking, where partial items were checked before NPCs. Looking should (SHOULD (“SHOULD”)) always look at the right item now.

-Fixed item requirements not being checked after attributes are lowered due to using an item that decreases an attribute.

-Fixed enemy spell ‘mind1’ incorrectly giving a reflex save instead of a will save to halve damage.

Features

-Chests: Chests will now appear in rooms. They can be of various qualities, depending on room depth. Chests will tend to have better items if their quality is higher. Chests can be inspected, if your wisdom is high enough. Chests might be trapped or may be mimics in disguise. You can attack a chest if you think it is a mimic, but attacking a trapped chest will make you more vulnerable to the trap.

-Along with chests several other features have been rolled out to make them work, such as locked rooms, and traps. These features currently only appear when interacting with chests, but in the future, there will probably be other instances where they are used.

-Martial abilities have been added. Most weapons will now grant the player one (or more) abilities which can be used while holding the weapon. There are currently five martial abilities: Power attack, needle strike, double strike, sunder, and maim. More will be added with future tiers of weapons or possibly with weapon revisions or additions sometime in the future.

Quality of Life

-When an enemy enters a room, they are placed at the end of the enemy list, instead of the start. This way, if you continuously “attack 1” to attack the first enemy, the enemy will stay consistent, even if more enemies enter the room.

-When you try to use a spell that you don’t have access to, instead of saying ‘command not recognized’, the game will tell you you have no items which allow casting that spell.

-Made some stupid cheatcodes that kill you or do horrible things harder to accidentally trigger

Balance

-Base chance of items spawning on the floor of rooms decreased by about 10%, to reduce free items now that chests are in the game.

-There were too many tier-1 armor-increasing items. As such, the rusty boots now provide +3 hp instead, and old gauntlets now provide +1 fort instead.

-Short bow was too weak for a starting weapon. Its accuracy has been increased by 1.

-Changed some enemy’s magical attacks to have lower base damage, to account for bonuses received from the enemy’s spell power.

[draknorgame-blog]

Current state of the mimic encounter

[draknorgame-blog]

Status Update

Nobody reads this yet but here’s a progress update anyways. I’ve been doing other stuff but I’m getting a bit of work done. Upcoming features are chests, which come in different varieties and will partially replace all the loose items lying around on the ground. They’ll have more valuable items in them than loose items, but have a chance to be trapped or be mimics. (Either one of which still gives you some items but requires work to avoid/fight.) Wisdom will give you insight as to what kind of hazard the chest poses, if any. That will give wisdom the buff it needs. Attacking a chest if it’s a mimic will cut its health by half for the mimic fight. However, attacking a trapped chest lowers your saving throw against the trap. So if your wisdom is low you need to play a guessing game.

Obviously this means I’m also working on traps, which will eventually be a feature of the game that can be triggered in other ways than just chests.

After that I’m going to be adding ‘martial spells’. Lots of weapons will have special attacks that use mana. This’ll give non-wizards actual shit to do. These won’t require intelligence or wisdom to use, and will gain benefits from normal damage and accuracy. However, it means charisma (providing max mana) will be important for fighters. Hopefully this means there will be more interesting variety in builds instead of strong mcstrong man and wizard spell man.

[draknorgame-blog]

0.31 Release

Version 0.31 (Released)

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27803372/Draknor/Draknorv0d31.zip 

COMPATIBILITY: Incompatible with previous save files

 Bug Fixes

-Looking at items now does a full search for the complete item name through ALL item containers, then only afterwards does a partial search through all item containers. This should resolve looking at the wrong item when items with similar names are in different containers.

-Added more item attribute bonus ratings. Some items had ratings with no text, making them say “none” for their bonus, when in reality their bonus was very high.

-Fixed bug where, when trying to use an item that doesn’t exist, enemies still get a turn as if you had actually used an item.

-Fixed bug where loading, dying, and starting a new game caused you to start in a randomized floor, instead of a populated dungeon.

Balance

-When a midnight shrine generates items, (not the items generated by mightnight shrine enemies,) they have a 30% higher rarity than normal. This stacks with other bonuses. For example, midnight shrines in treasure rooms have a huge quantity of rare items.

-Rampaging ghost and cell ghost have had their mind attack reduced by one point in max damage. Normal rampaging ghost attack has also been reduced by 1 max damage. Both ghosts have had heat resist removed. They were too difficult especially considering their high spawn rates on the first floor.

-MANY items that dealt multiple damage types have been buffed, or changed to one damage type. With so many enemies that have wide ranges of DR, multiple damage type weapons tended to perform very poorly compared to single ones. This should change them to be more reasonable.

-Carry Capacity base value increased by 2