Upgraded rally flag and the first layer of skills completed
So I have finished it so that all the creatures now have one skill each. I think that is a good start :)
Buthering
Employs inherent buthering skills to strike down enemies at close range.
This screenshot do look a little messy, but in game it is pretty cool, the Piggeh goes berserk and starts swinging with both arms pulling the enemy close to him striking him down with several blows. This one is extremely dangerous if the piggeh gets close enough and is not attacked on from other directions.
This one is for the fishman, it attaches a long sticky tongue on the enemy and pull him back to the caster. A combination with enough fishmans and piggehs at the back and the orcs at the front can be very efficient. The orcs blocks the attacks, the fishman drags the enemies in behind the lines and the piggeh butcher them. Having several fishman on a row is pretty cool as well because they can take turns and drag a knight far far away from his group making him very vulnerable.
Besides from that I have been solving a couple of bugs the last days, and while doing so I had to improve the rally flag a bit. So now the creature stands still around the rally flag instead of walking around it aimlessly. I think this is a good step towards making a good strategic combat system.
And in the final screenshot we have some roots in the open, something I haven't seen in a long while, I even thought it wasn't possible, but still, there they are :P Triggered by cave ins.
Soon, I have almost fixed all the bugs reported and after that I only have some minor things left on my todo list that I have promised some of the forum members to do to make the game smoother.
More skills and upgraded creatures menu
I have added two more skills, one for the Orc and one for the Impanzee.
Stunning Block
The Orc got something similar to the "Shield Bash" as Mello Tonin mentioned at the Dwelvers forum. He got "Stunning Block", so when he manage to block an attack from an enemy he does it so good that the enemy gets stunned. This makes it more important for the Orc to have a shield with a high block chance.
The other skill that the Impanzee got was the "Barrel Roll - Tucks and rolls to nearest enemy stunning it briefly" as also mentioned by Mello.
It was hard getting a good screenshot of this, but here we see two Impanzees in action:
[IMG]http://i955.photobucket.com/albums/ae36/ralleman/BarrelRoll.png[/IMG]
Skills tab added to the creature menu
I have also expanded the creature menu a little so that we now have a skills tab as seen here:
Today I have been working on adding some creature skills, and this is the result:
Teleporting
The Imp get the skill Teleport at level 8. This means that he can teleport to a location that is owned by the player and is reachable by foot (meaning that they can't teleport through walls), and that they can't teleport when they are carrying items, creatures and carts.
The Cyclotaur get the skill Bullrush at level 4. This skill makes him charge through enemy crowds like they were thin air and he will not stop until he hits something solid.
The Rogue gets... You guessed it, a stealing skill from level 4. This skill gives him the ability to steal equipment from his enemies while in combat. Like in this screenshot where he stole the Orc's shield.
The Knight get the skill Hurricane at level 4. So when he is surrounded by enemies he is able to spin his two handed weapon around damaging all the enemies around him. This is a very powerful attack that you don't want to be in the middle off! In this screenshot you can see a combination of the Cyclotaur's Bullrush and the Knight's Hurricane.
The idea here is that we are going to give the food chain some more depth. As you may have seen in previous news the mice has been introduced to the game. These mice will work not only as a building material for the mill in the farm room but also as food source if necessary. Once the barbeque has been built the workers will put alive mice (that is why they are tied up as seen in the screenshot) on the barbeque, and once they have been roasted enough we will have a "roasted mouse" as a new item, which can be eaten...
The fish is no longer consumable either, now you will have to barbecue it as well before your creatures will eat it.
Next up I will fix so that certain creatures will prioritize certain food, they will still eat all the food but they will be more efficient if they get their favorite food. In this way the player will be wise to get as much food variety as possible.
New paint job in cookery room
Not much to say, I repainted the brewing vat and the baking table as seen here:
Dwelvers alpha v0.9e is available for download at the Dwelvers Website and on Steam.
I am happy to see that I don't have to make more hotfixes for the 0.9e version (five should be enough ;)), there have of course been some bug reports, but nothing game breaking. So for the last two weeks I have been working on adding peasants to the surface, and I have also been filling the dungeon with mice, Evil Mice to be honest thanks to Burning Pet :P. But the dungeon can of course be cleansed from these creatures with traps or by walking on them. Another creature made by CobraMode is also on its way, a female spectre that will be controlling the dungeon ghosts, but more about that in the next news post when we have more material to show off ;)
Dwelvers alpha v0.9e-5 has now been released and is available for download at the Dwelvers Website and on Steam.
As you all can see on the version number there were some hotfixes in the 0.9e version. There was randomly appearing water blocks and items not being delivered between the rooms as they should. The reason for this was that I enabled threading with the surface world, so the dungeon world and the surface world was updated simultaneously in the CPU to increase the game performance. Unfortunately the game wasn't really ready for this, and therefore we got some really nasty bugs with it. I would like to thank the community for reporting all these bugs, and I have learned that I need to come up with a system to make it possible for players to backtrack to a more stable version if things goes wrong as they did in the 0.9e version.
Anyway, the good thing about this is that the end result is now that the game is performing better and the production chain is running a lot smoother than it did before the 0.9e version.
But it has not all been bug fixing, I also took some time to improve the mill design and balance the production time all over the dungeon, you can read more about this down below :)
Production time has been changed and new mill introduced
0.9e-4 - Bar not stocked - In the recent hotfix 9e-4 i had trouble when i built a bar. the food and beer weren't transferred to the tables. Production halted, in that the imps would deliver stock to the bar, but the bar's stock total didn't rise, in a continual ferry loop.
See what was changed & fixed in previous versions here...
Dwelvers Alpha v0.9e released
Dwelvers alpha v0.9e has now been released and is available for download at the Dwelvers Website and on Steam.
With the last version I got really good feedback, not only from the Dwelvers forum but also from the steam users. It seems like since 0.9 was released some people have been having some performance issues. I traced it back to when introduced the surface world, and the issue was that with both the dungeon world and the surface world being updated it was a little bit too demanding for the computer. I solved this issue by threading the surface world. Another suggestion I also got was that some people don't like that the path claiming system is limited to 3 tiles away from a player building. So I added an options menu in the production menu where the player can choose how far away (s)he wants the imps to claim land. And of course, many many bugs have been solved ;)
0.9d - Alt+Tab Locks Mouse - After Alt+Tabbing and returning to the game, the mouse won't move freely across the screen.
0.9d - Rendering Issues - This affects claim border, claim indicator diamonds and arrows, and construction arrows. Those are the ones that stick out the most and that I can remember. This happens in both 4:3 and 16:9.
0.9d - Can't Rally up a Ladder - If the only way to reach a place is by a ladder and you set a Rally Flag there, creatures will ignore the Rally Flag.
0.9d - Cave-in Resources Float on Water - Not sure I would call this a bug it's more of an issue. It just looks really weird to have resources floating in the air over water. They should sink or be pushed to nearest neighboring tile.
See what was changed & fixed in previous versions here...
Dwelvers Alpha 0.9d released - 30% off on Steam and on the Website
Dwelvers alpha v0.9d has now been released and are available for download.
In this version we have backtracked a little bit and reinstated the auto claiming system, but with some changed of course :) We also want to introduce cave-ins, this feature adds a cave in risk when digging straight down and will therefore will force the player to dig outwards instead of digging straight down after minerals. A lot of other features, improvements and creatures has also been introduced with this version, for example, it now possible to place a ladder and dig underneath it with it being destroyed. This makes the excavation a lot smoother without having to rebuild ladders all the time.
I also want to add that the possession spell has been upgraded. You can now dig, attack and throw rocks at the enemy when you have possessed a creature.
To make this release extra special we have a special one week offer on Steam and on Dwelvers Website. Buy now and get a 30% discount :D
Check out the patch notes at the steam community for more details here...
Dwelvers Alpha 0.9c released - Time to raid the surface!
2015.06.17 - Dwelvers Alpha 0.9c released
As this will be the first 0.9 release for the Steam users I may become a little repetative in the news flow, I hope you don't mind.
There have been some delays since the 0.8 version, and as usual the reason is that I want to get as much in there as possible, and the longer I wait with the release the more perfect it has to be :P Now Dwelvers has been bug tested and balanced thanks to the forum members, their help has saved me a huge amount of time and I am therefore hugely grateful to them :)
The main update with the 0.9 version is the surface world but we also have a lot of other features introduced that will keep the player occupied, some of these features changes the game play since previous versions and can create some confusion. But to avoid this we have added some help tools in the game. The tutorial are still incomplete and needs work, but I don't want to put down to much time on it at this moment as the game features are still under some changes, and I don't redo the tutorial to frequently or lock my self up by avoiding adding features because I would know this would require extra work with the tutorial, I hope this is understandable.
This topic is about giving the creatures an backpack so that they are able to transport several items at once and be able to speed up the item transportation.
This topic is about removing the auto path claiming and giving the player the option to build the roads himself. These roads can also be upgraded to increase the movement speed.
Now we have an option to repair different objects in the dungeon with a simple click instead of waiting on them to regenerate their health. The main reason why this feature got implemented now is because we need a repair option for the fences. In the next update I will make it so that when a fence is damaged enough it will not be destroyed, it will only get a new model that shows that it is possible for the enemy to walk right over the fence, then the player will have to repair it again, or sell it and build a new one.
This menu opens up a some information about the most basic features of Dwelvers if you need some quick information about why things are working as they are.
