Hello everyone, it's time to announce the latest new feature!
This time I've added what every game of this generation has: resource gathering! Now you can fish and mine for bunches of items, which is a great way expand upon the pacifist approach introduced with the previous update.
How does it work?
Resources are a type of NPC, so when you bump into them you interact with them instead of fighting them. The interaction that takes place when you bump into a Resource is a little time-based mini-game. Time it right and you'll get items!
The deeper you go in a dungeon, the harder it becomes to harvest resources, but you'll also get more items for being successful.
What if I don't want to play a stupid mini-game?
That's easy! You just blow up the resource with some magic like you can any other npc!
The only downside is the drop rate of exploding a resource is significantly less than if you played the mini-game. Where you could have gotten 3-4 items, you now will only get 1, if that.
How do I identify a resource?
Well, for one, resources don't move. There are 3 kinds of resources you can currently find: Water, where you fish; Ore, where you can mine; and Treasure Chests, which you can pick open.
Yes, Treasure Chests are now a resource instead of using the standard enemy approach. This means you will attempt to harvest them through picking their lock instead of just bashing it in by default. You can still "bash" them, though, by lighting them on fire with your magic. This is necessary if you wish to pursue the achievement.
Anything else?
There's the usual slew of bug fixes. I also made some performance improvements regarding particles in scenes. Additionally, I gained access to a new server where the daily dungeons can now be hosted. You can either change the url in your settings file manually to http://luna.red/public/storymode/dungeon.map or just reset all your settings to their defaults through the settings pane.
Additionally, the character creation menu navigation has been improved and can now be completely navigated with just the keyboard. No more mouse required!
Thanks again for the feedback, bug reports, and supporting development with your purchase. Be sure to tell your friends, too, if you like the game, or tell them not to waste their money if you didn't! Or maybe tell them about the game and let them decide if they like it or not.
I've already got plans for the next feature, so prepare yourselves! And as always, I probably introduced some bugs somewhere
Bug Fix and Dungeons Down
A fix has been pushed that should prevent dungeons from crashing on floor change (it was a bug regarding the new torch system)
In addition to the bug fix, windowed mode now allows for resizing by dragging the border. Due to texture scaling, it's possible that the game will look pretty dang ugly if you resize it manually.
Also, the daily dungeon server is currently down. I'm in the process of finding a new server to host on, something cheaper and smaller in scale because I really don't need much. In fact, with the new update you may manually override the url of the daily dungeon server by changing the value in the settings.json.
If you want to have fun and try hosting your own daily dungeon server, here's the script to generate the file. All you need to do is create a http server, then point the url to whatever is the public route to the file generated by the script is located.
Setup is really easy and lightweight. I personally just ran NGINX and had the dungeons generating using a cron job on Linux.
Good luck and have fun everyone. Even if I don't get around to answering every report personally, thanks you for filing them.
Do it like the cool kids do
It's been awhile since I went ahead and released an update. This new update fixes a few bugs that were present in the current version and adds a two new features as well.
The two big changes that are immediately visible are torches and a pacifist approach to the game.
Torches
Torches are randomly placed on each floor and will light up the map from a distance, allowing you to see things far away.
Pacifist
As for the pacifist approach, by using the same method to unlock chests and doors with keys, you can now use the same button combination to trade with monsters. This allows you to tell monsters off by giving them items instead of fighting them. Some monsters will want more items than others, and monsters will ask for even more if your level difference is great.
As for some bug fixes, I cleaned up some of the code for dungeon generation so it shouldn't be as intensive, and I went and rebalanced loot drops.
As always, thanks for the bug reports! Hope you enjoy the update
No Slacking Off
Lastest update to StoryMode has just been pushed complete with a whole new slew of features and more than likely a new slew of bugs too!
The big new feature that's been in the works and is finally out is...
Improved Character Customization
With the latest version and onward, character creation allows for a whole new degree of customization, and with it some new gameplay changes.
When creating a character you'll have the option to allocate upto 16 additional stat points into whatever category you wish. You'll also be able to select a sign that your character was born under, as well as their profession. The birth signs and job both provide special abilities and traits that can completely change how the game is played.
For example, those born under the constellation of Dynamite can cause enemies to explode on death when using a spell to result in collateral damage to adjacent enemies.
Any character created before this change can still be played. Their job is inherently as Slacker, and their birthsign being The Human. Characters made with that combination results in a gameplay session identical to that before these changes.
Other Changes
All drops now show an icon instead of just going straight into your inventory, much like the case was with equipment before, this now applies to everything.
As such, you will encounter money bag/item icons when killing enemies, or you may encounter mana potions, health hearts, or equipment. Stepping on the dropped icon will pick it up.
HP is now capable of recovering over time as long as you have not engaged in combat recently. To go with that, there are also now indicator rings that will identify how close you are to recovering HP or Mana naturally.
There's also the typical batch of crash and logic fixes. Some icons were also changed to help make things a little bit clearer. Then there's always the behind the scenes code refactoring that makes things easier on my end.
The version of LibGDX and other libraries were also upgraded with this version, so we're using the latest of everything that's available. This insures development of StoryMode may be more easily supported, we pick up any optimizations and fixes in the backend, and also makes it so we're more capable of also giving back to the community.
Thanks for your continued support, reports, and feedback
Have fun creating new characters. Hopefully this will spice things up for you
Minimaps and Minifixes
Several small fixes and updates made it into the game this past week. It's been a rather hectic one with I swear a new update being pushed each day.
To highlight what's new and what was done
In dungeons, you can now select to only sacrifice from the items that you picked up
Adding that feature led to some refactoring, which broke things, which I then had to fix...which I'm pretty sure I did. Hopefully. I miss things a lot.
Messed around with FOV a bit but rolled back the changes and instead went for a better system...
Memory and Performance optimizations have been made so it can run a bit smoother on floors with tons of entities.
additionally, the big highlight of the week is...
Minimaps
They're now a thing and they're simple and nice. They display walls that you've discovered, allowing you to plot out the shape of each floor. The maps persist between floors so you never lose progress on your run. Maps also persist between visits to the dungeon, with the maps being cached into the tmp folder alongside the dungeon's cache data. So if you visit a file multiple times in a sitting your exploration progress will not be lost.
Just like dungeon progress and visit history, maps do not persist between times you open up the game.
As always, thanks for the feedback and bug reports.
More Quests, More Bugs
Thanks to IndieGala there's been a surge of new bug reports and testers. I appreciate the support you guys are providing me so StoryMode can become a bigger, better game.
Over the weekend I patched up a few reported bugs, and I patched up a few more today as well. To summarize some of the changes
The new collision dynamics has been improved (though is not perfect yet)
Enemies can now drop more than one item (Especially big enemies)
Big and small enemies can no longer drop equipment
Add descend quests
Fixed some achievements
Fixed a few crash bugs regarding training
It appears the error dialog pop-up was not functional for most people, so instead the system has been changed to automatically create a log file in the game's installation directory whenever it crashes. This should also fix the error where the game would disappear but would still be "open" according to Steam. So now you will no longer have to go through steps to set up a debug environment through command line to track errors. Hopefully now reporting errors will be easier.
Thanks for the feedback
Big and Small
Greetings once more!
In the process of fixing up the Boss Battles bug tonight I decided to throw in more features that I had been bouncing around in my head for awhile.
To summarize the changes
You should now be able to engage in Boss Battles once more
Boss Battles have been rebalanced to only start appearing after the 10th floor of a dungeon
After the 5th floor, miniature versions of enemies may start popping up. They move in half steps and have half as much defense as usual, but several can appear in a single cell making them capable of mobbing you.
After the 15th floor, huge versions of enemies may start popping up. They move at the normal rate of 1 tile per step, but they take up the space of 4 tiles and can easily block your path.
As always with the introduction of new features, there's bound to be some bug that slipped through the crack because I'm awful at testing things.
Hope you have fun!
Items Everywhere and Smoother Shadows
Hello there!
First I'd like to thank people in the forums for reporting bugs for the game and providing criticism. The game is a lot more stable and less clumsy now because of your help. Launch was a bit bumpy but it should be smooth(er) sailing from now on.
For this weekend I went out and redid the item database to follow some new rules. The changes are as follows
Items now have "types"
Items can be found in any kind of file, but their chance of being found in a dungeon still depends on the file type
Details of items can now be collected in the PageFile alongside everything else
In addition to the change in items, I decided to just throw together a little detail that allows you to adjust the resolution of the FOV shadows. It's not the best system, as it really just subdivides the cells and isn't actually doing anything optimially like Box2D lights would be.
I recommend continuing to play with 1x Shadow Detail as that's how the game was designed to be played. This is just a stupid little feature added in for the heck of it.
