Possession
Possession v20 Released (Bug Fix)
Possession v19 Released (Bug Fix)
Occasionally, for some reason, the game would save without the player character being placed on the map, causing a crash when you'd try to load the save.
I haven't identified what's causing the problem to happen, but this version does have a fix where if you try to load one of these saves, the player character will be placed at the downward stairs and the save will load, letting you continue playing.
Possession v18 Released (Crash Fixes)
Possession v17 Released! (Text Resizing)
UI Changes:
- New font size and tooltip font size settings.
- New setting to make the buttons on the sidebar bigger (independent of font size)
- Game cheats screen now resizes if the UI scale setting is changed.
- Added a menu button to the main game screen that can be clicked to pull up the "pause" menu.
- The health bar is now drawn in color, fading from green to red depending on how hurt you are.
- The "close" button icon is now a "back" button since that's always how I thought about it anyway, which is why it's in the top left. Hopefully this change will stop its location being a thing people get weird about.
Note: There's no limit on how big/small you can resize the text, so it's possible to make things overflow if you make the text very large, or have huge UI scaling or a tiny window, or something.
I've tested it out and it works fine for what I consider several reasonable sizes, but it's possible I overlooked something or forgot to update an obscure screen to work with different text sizes.
Please report any wonkiness (aside from setting it to extreme values as mentioned above) as a bug.
Possession v16 Released (Minor fixes)
Fixes:
Fixed a crash that could be caused by a Swamp Witch spell
UI/UX Improvements:
Pressing the "target" button (default x) while in targeting mode now switches out of targeting mode
Possession v15 Released! (Minor bug fixes)
Fixes:
Fixed a crash that could occur when possessing piles of bones in the Mausoleum
Adjusted how click-to-move handles previously seen enemies, should stop less frequently now
Announcement on the Future of Possession
Full Post:
It's Possession's 1-year release anniversary, so now seems as good a time as any to say this.
For those of you who don't know, Possession is a one-person project. That one person is me, Taylor Vaughan. Someone very close to me died suddenly and unexpectedly a few months ago. This has impacted my life in a lot of ways but has also caused a serious decrease in my productivity; it's only recently I've even gotten back into working on game projects at all, and so far I've only been putting in a couple hours one day a week.
It may be a cliche, but something like that really does make you realize your time is finite. Making games isn't my full-time job. It's something I do because I enjoy it, a few hours a week I put in after work or on the weekends. Because of this, it takes me a long time to finish a game -- Possession took me nearly 6 years to make. I've got lots of ideas for things I want to make, so much so that even if I live to be 100 I'll never get to them all. For that reason, it just makes sense to me to move to a new project. Possession was neither a financial nor critical success, and it doesn't seem like it has a fan base who love it either (If I'm wrong and there's anyone who *is* a passionate fan, let me know!) - the consensus seems to be "fun for a while, but then time to move on." And I think it's fair for that to apply just as much to me as it does to the players. Although I previously said I wanted to work on adding new levels to the game, I just don't think it's something that really makes sense for me to do, or something I'd get much enjoyment out of at this point.
I understand if this news might be disappointing and some people might feel cheated (though I don't think there's many out there who will really care that much), but I considered Possession a finished game on release. The extra content I talked about making was only a potential bonus.
Now, I'm not abandoning the game entirely - I'll continue to fix bugs that are reported, and I may end up backporting some improvements I make to the engine (can't promise that, though). I'm not ready to announce what my next project is yet; I've got a couple ideas in mind I haven't fully settled on. Right now I've just been working adding features to the engine, like items, that'll be useful to any of them. So far, all the engine improvements I've been making are part of the public, open-source Roguelove project, so if you're interested in using it to make your own roguelike, or just to see what sort of things I'm adding, you can check it out at: https://github.com/vaughantay/roguelove/
If you want to follow what I'm doing, you can follow me on Twitter @vaughantay. I don't really post much, but any future projects I work on I will talk about there.
Possession v14 Released
This is mostly a bug fix release.
Fixes:
- Fixed mausoleum and graveyard having their IDs stored as "true" in the game stats
- Fixed crash on the stat screen from trying to load information on the nonexistent level "true" that resulted from this
- Fixed crash on stat screen when trying to view stats on a creature that doesn't exist (due to mods not being loaded, usually)
- Fixed crash on stats screen resulting from 0-turn wins (shouldn't have actually been a problem for anyone since that'd normally be impossible, but it came up during testing so I fixed it)
- The final level should now show up on the stats screen properly. Unfortunately, wins weren't being counted as "beating" the final level, so the win % for the final level will be wrong. They're being counted going forward, though
Content Changes:
- Electric arrows' damage to adjacent creatures now behaves properly -- it no longer deals "spread" damage to the original target
- If you're possessing a cultist-type enemy, you will no longer join a cult leader's cult when you see them (this didn't really DO anything when it happened, but it looked kinda silly)
Possession v13 (The Mausoleum Update) Released!
Content changes:
- Dwarven bombers are less likely to throw bombs on any given turn, hopefully making them slightly less annoying.
- Added an AI-only cooldown for the Brainiac's hypnotize ability, so they don't spam it constantly.
- Spiderwebs now only cause one turn of web paralysis.
- Ratlings are now all in the same faction, so if you're possessing any type of ratling, other ratlings of any type won't generally be hostile unless something else causes them to be.
- If the [redacted] is under your command, you're able to [redacted].
Interface Fixes and Changes:
- You can now move the cursor over the tiles on the map borders.
- The popups that show damage now have a small variation in their speed, and speed up as they get older. This way, if a creature takes two hits at the same time you might be able to read both of them.
- Description boxes from mousing over sidebar buttons will no longer show while a window (for example, the spell screen) is open.
Modding:
- Added a calc_damage callback, which can return a number to change the amount of damage being done.
Possession v12 Released!
New Features:
Rather than auto-assigning points to your stats when you kill an enemy, you can now choose which stats you want to increase from the character screen. There's a setting to set it back to the old style where it randomly assigns
Tombstones can now generate on levels where you've died, with the name of your character & date of their death.
Miscellaneous:
The game will now try to autosave if it crashes. It does this in a new file, so it doesn't risk corrupting your old save.