Monsterland cover
Monsterland screenshot
PC Steam
Genre: Adventure, Indie

Monsterland

Full support for Steam Deck controls
Monsterland is now fully controllable via Steam Deck with zero configuration required.

Hybrid graphics and streamlined gameplay
The full-graphics mode was a mixed bag. Characters looked particularly bad. Monsterland is now using a hybrid mode which preserves its ASCII personality while retaining the most often encountered/boring ASCII - walls, floors and doors - as being replaced by graphical textures. Most of the effects are back to being ASCII - explosions, portals, blood, water. Player and other human and semi-human characters are back to the letter "P", monsters are "M", etc.

There's no FULL ASCII mode option yet, but that may be implemented in the future.

Since inventory and certain item mechanics were perfunctory/experimental, they're switched off by default, returning the game to pure shooter identity. The intro story level has been removed as well, as it doesn't have monster-killing.

OTHER STUFF:

I'm experimenting with random map generation again. If I can get it to make interesting maps, it will be possible for 2 people to play Monsterland co-op, however it would require one of them to forward port 5029 (TCP) in their router, and have ping of <80ms between them. I wish I could port Monsterland/s TCP/IP stack to Steam P2P and eliminate router busywork, but the game is written in Pascal, which makes it difficult.

Switching from ASCII to tiled bitmaps.
What's New:


  • Permanently switched graphics from ASCII to tiles, replicating most ASCII effects in tile form (damage splash, blood).
  • Renderer migrated from SDL1 to SDL2, no longer using unstable custom OpenGL code
  • New intro level
  • Enhanced ending level providing proper closure to the story
  • Improved music in several places
  • More responsive movement when rapidly changing direction
  • Small level changes (lighting, tweaks to story)
  • Primitive inventory system (mostly to make Torches for dark places at this time)
  • Ability to travel back and forth between levels a la Hexen hubs - useful to grab health or scrap
  • Beta option to use mouse aiming (still limited to 8 directions, obviously)
  • Game no longer pauses on player thoughts or NPC quips; other minor cosmetic improvements


Known Issues:


  • Inability to switch back to ASCII mode at this time (too many rendering pipeline changes). NOTE: old ASCII version is now available in "beta" branch with password "asciigraphics"; however, it also lacks all the non-graphics updates that made it into the bitmap version.
  • Unresolved water warping effect picked up during SDL2 migration
  • Video resolution options are not there at the moment; game defaults to desktop resolution
  • "Previous weapon", "Next weapon", "Next Inventory Item" keys are missing, thus complicating the mapping of controller buttons to keyboard



(Possible) Future Plans:


  • Random campaign generation with achievements for passing the first 2,4,8,16, etc levels without dying.