I didn’t get as much as I wanted done but I did accomplish my three main goals:
Play or download at http://trystans.blogspot.com/2013/03/pugnacious-wizards-day-7.html.
Let me know what you think!
A bit of refactoring led to bug fixes, tweaks, several new spells, and better worldgen. One new spell is called “Timed Death”. When you cast it, a timer is set at your location. After 5 turns, anything within it’s field of view is hit with massive damage. Another spell heals you based on the amount of blood on the ground around you. And another spell converts all the corpses you see into small explosions. Good times.
Just two more days. I think everything is set set up so I can focus on more interesting traps and spells. Maybe some puzzles, but I’m not sure how pathfinding will work with that. We’ll see.
Teleport and burn your surroundings. Or freeze everyone near you and blink away. Or shoot a magic missile that bounces off walls and enemies. Try some magic that has multiple effects at once at http://trystans.blogspot.com/2013/03/pugnacious-wizards-day-4.html.
What few hours I had today were mostly spent refactoring the magic stuff so I can make it more interesting. I was going to wait until friday and saturday but decided to do that now. Still not entirely happy with how convoluted that turned out. It will take a while more to get the code in a non-embarrassing state.
What will I do now that half the week is over?
Use magic, avoid traps, kill, be killed, and maybe escape with all three pieces of the amulet. Play online at http://trystans.blogspot.com/2013/03/pugnacious-wizards-day-3.html. Let me know what you think if you try it.
While playtesting today I made it to one of the wizards who keeps freezing me and attacking me while I’m vulnerable. So I lit myself on fire as soon as I saw him. His freeze spell put the fire out and gave me a couple turns to attack him at the cost of losing a few hp from being on fire. I may need to tweak some numbers with the fire and freezing stuff.
Today I added a help screen, an examine screen, and a system of popups so the first time you find new things you get some details about them. Not much new content, but useful stuff that I want to try anyway. It’s also a good time to get some non-roguelike players to try. I’ll see if anyone I know wants to try it.
Only four days left. What else do I want to do?
Explore varied castle rooms; kill, evade, or trick guards, archers, and wizards; collect the tree pieces of the amulet; escape. Think you can do it? Play from your browser, download the swf, or download the source at http://trystans.blogspot.com/2013/03/pugnacious-wizards-day-2.html
A solid 4 or so hours of progress. Aside from some minor ai and visual tweaks, the demo hero and defending wizards can cast the same magic you do. There’s also 8 types of themed rooms. Not all room themes appear in each castle so you have to play at least twice to see them all. Or watch the demo hero attempt it.
What’s left?
Can you find the three pieces of the amulet and escape from the castle? Play from your browser or download at http://trystans.blogspot.com/2013/03/pugnacious-wizards-day-1.html
I managed to get a good 9 or so hours of work done today. As far as features go, I’ve got a lot of done already: basic worldgen, enemies with basic ai, some basic magic, victory, defeat, and an intro that shows how to play the game. I also tackled a couple things I’ve never done and wasn’t sure how to do: animations, magic, and a decent ai for the demo hero.
That means that I can focus on cool ideas for the rest of the week:
Done!
I’m glad I saved the last day for polish and minor content because I was able to add a bit to just about everything. A few new items, a few changes to worldgen, a help screen, two bugfixes, minor tweaks to rival ai, and more small stuff that I can’t even remember. I was crazy productive. One big change was to start you off with 50% more health and reduce how much fame you earn from most things. This makes the game last a little longer and makes your fame, and how long you live, less vulnerable to your starting position too.
I added a new “dungeon” theme that you can see here in the upper right. I was thinking of adding underground dungeons but decided against it since the overworld is already too big to explore (unless you find a flying magic carpet) so just having one room here or there seemed like a decent comprimise. I would create underground ones if I was creating a bigger roguelike because I think it would be really cool, especially if there were interesting traps, treasures, and bosses. Anyway, these dungeon rooms have a miniboss and a famous treasure in the center so finding them is a high priority. After clearing one out today, I found some spike armor. I swapped it with my snorkel then ran around the world laughing minaiacly while hapless monsters impaled themselves on me. Good times. I still died though – I think huberus is the leading cause of death for my characters.
I ditched a few ideas because they weren’t fun but I think I was able to implement a neat overworld, random monsters, and some fun items.
Here’s a list of the creatures: The player, zoras, armos, 12 rivals, summoned imps, goblins, 8 random monster species, random minibosses.
I guess I went a little overboard on the items: hearts, heart containers, 1 rupee, 5 rupees, 50 rupees, mutation ring, magic wand, bag of imps, dark cloak, ring of evasion, jumping boots, random artifacts that are worth fame, evasion potion, magic carpet, spellbook of 3 spells, rupee amulet, rupee machine, ring of regeneration, first aid kit, snorkel, bombs, bow, specticales, a large shield, heavy armor, spiked armor, long staff, spear, sword, club, knife. Most of those have passive ability and an active ability, but some don’t.
It’s up and running on my blog where you can play it from your browser or download it and run it localy.
Total hours: 42