Rogue Fable III
March-01-2019 - Update 1.18
Just working my way through bugs-and-crashes on this one. We started out with 920 messages in the crash-and-bugs discord channel and we're now down to 560 so we're making progress here :) Thank you everyone for bearing with me as I work this all out!
This is also the start of month 3 of EA development, out of a total of about 9 months. So we're still really in the early stages here. That said, I'm planning on spending march 'consolidating' all the gains we've made in the past few months. What I mean by this is that by the end of March I'd like to have all possible issues with the current build debugged, polished, and working as intended. This will include the following things, in rough order of priority:
- Completely clear all bugs, crashes and unintended behavior.
- Fix any 'app' issues ex. game not closing correctly on some computers, resolution, stretching and blurring issues, F11 not opening console on macs, F12 not taking steam screen shots etc.
- Optimization and performance: get the game running silky smooth at 60FPS on everything faster than a potato.
- Stat Server Round II
- Quality of Life Features, interface and UI stuff, help / tutorial / in game knowledge. Will be creating a big thread in forums + discord looking for suggestions on this part. Basically everything that makes the game just 'play' better, or helps new players get into it.
So pretty much by the end of March I'd like the game to be completely stable, polished, running fast, and with a ton of improvements to the UI, controls, in game knowledge etc. This will be a nice solid milestone, basically a 'complete' game as far as all currently existing content / mechanics are concerned. From there we can then proceed to much everything up again with a big push on content.
UPDATE:
BUGS_AND_CRASHES:
- Fixed a generation error causing big solid squares to appear in caves.
- Strafe attack now targets hell portals
- Tab attack now targets hell portals
- Lunge now follows the path indicated by the targeting (lots of bugs were reported where the player took an alternate path, hit traps, fell down pits, bumped walls etc.)
- Falling or jumping down a pit in the Abysmal Altar (or any end level) will now result in death rather than a crash.
- Crystal chests now make sounds when opened and picking up the item.
- Fixed a crashed when player is hit by his own sleep dart bounced off a reflective enemy.
- Altar of wealth will not spawn gold over pits.
- Rapier lunging or sprinting onto an item will now pick it up (on the last tile of the path).
- Tab will now attack the nearest 'attackable' enemy rather than giving the 'line blocked' message if the nearest enemy happened to be behind something.
- Changed homing fireballs hp from 18 => 12 (back before the 1.5x hp update) since they use their hit points as a timer.
- Rand-Art evasion +5 => +3 in line with rings of evasion.
INTERFACE:
- Pits will give a different message if they are bottomeless and not give the option to jump in (knock back will still kill you).
- Up and down stairs buttons are always visible on the HUD so you can click them with mouse to fast travel.
BALANCE:
- Level gen will try to balance the number of locked treasure rooms and keys.
- There should never be more keys than treasure rooms.
- More treasure rooms is fine since it can 'force' a choice
February-26-2019 - Update 1.17 - Hot Fix
BALANCE:
- Reduced number of items, gold, and fountains in Yendor since there's getting to be to many items in the game again. This should make Yendor harder, and just generally remove some items from the game.
- As a side note, I've reduced drops several times over course of development to take into account all the additional drops that come from special rooms, branch ends, vaults etc.
- The 'safe zone' created around stairs which prevents enemies from spawning in massive gangs right on the stairs now varries based on depth. It was previous 3 tiles radius everywhere. It is now:
- Upper Dungeon (Tier I): 6 tiles
- Grove, Swamp etc. (Tier II): 4 tiles
- Temple, Crypt etc. (Tier III): 3 tiles
- Branches + Yendor: 2 tiles
BUGS_AND_CRASHES:
- Fixed insta-crash with charging enemies (pretty much any time a bull frog or rhino got in LoS). This is the SingleCharacterStraightRay or isIndexTransparent one.
- Fixed soft lock when starting a new game (little white bubbles showing on char).
- Charge / sprint into a portal was causing soft lock
- Charge / sprint into teleport trap was causing soft lock
- Ogres (or slow chars) can now 'squeeze' past portals
- Ogres (or slow chars) can now interact on the diagonal: doors, fountains etc.
- Ogres can now 'squeeze' past traps and dangerous terrain
Planning on rewriting all pathfinding in future to take squeeze moves into account for auto explore / moving over multiple tiles. At the moment its frustrating having to walk right up to the tile to engage the squeeze.
Also am def aware that stat server is slow. Once I clear out some more bugs and crashes I'll be having a round II with it to improve performance and track a whole bunch more stuff.
February-25-2019 - Update 1.17 - Bug Fixin
I've also decided to just set a date and time to be on discord so we can have little round table discussions regarding suggestions, balancing, feedback etc. or just hang out. I've gotten into the habit of staying off any sort of social media / discord during the day since it distracts me from working, but then I'm always to tired to log in at night. Def want to hang out with you guys and hear your feedback so I'm gonna be on discord:
- Wednesdays at 4:00pm PST
- Saturdays at 4:00pm PST
Now onto the update:
BUGS_AND_CRASHES:
- Fixed dungeon sense not updating when falling down pits
- Dungeon sense will now detect crystal chests.
- Charmed fire balls (produced by fire elementals) will now 'poof' if there are no nearby enemies rather than tracking the player and exploding.
- Hidden enemies will not show up on the mini map (unless player has some means of detecting them).
- Thunder clap will no longer stun your allies.
- You can no longer target enemies that are hidden by opaque clouds.
- Perfect aim should now work correctly with all staves.
- Rapier will now warn you if its lunge will bring you onto dangerous terrain (shift + click to override, same as movement).
- Strafe attack will now work when 'stepping in' to a valid attack.
- Strafe attack will not allow you to 'kite' enemies i.e. moving backwards in such a way that you are getting hits and he is not.
- Consumable throwing weapons will no longer be generated w/ rand-art stats.
INTERFACE:
- Adjusted position of mini map to take up more of the HUD.
- Switches will now show up on the mini map (orange like friendly NPCs)
- Skill and talent point text will be highlighted green if you have points to spend.
- Merchant will show costs in red if you cannot afford the item.
ITEMS:
- Added cross bow as a short range, high damage range option w/ knock back.
EVASION:
- Evasion dodge % changed from 5% per 1EV to 3% per 1EV since its really really easy for some class / races to reach the 75% cap w/ 5%.
February-20-2019 - Update 1.16
BUGS AND CRASHES::
- Spawners will now spawn in wide open locations so that they arn't crammed into corners or hallways.
- Spawners will 'close' the tiles around them so they cant get surrounded by stuff like fire shrooms.
- Player can no longer sell traps, allowing him to exceed the trap cap.
- On discord someone reported 'warping' through a timed gate. I wasn't able to replicate it but I've changed the gates so they won't close if someone is standing on them. My only guess is that you walked into it at the same time it closed maybe?
- Fixed: timed gate message doesn't show up if another message occurs at same time when entering a level.
- Fixed: if a terrain tile is placed where you are standing, it was taking a turn before you became unstable.
- Baby slimes will now 'float' on water (they were to small to see).
- Fixed: hellfire on enemies in water was causing Los to be lost due to steam and the hellfire didn't hit everyone it should have.
- Starvation damage will no longer free you from webs / nets
- Constrict will now block stair use, even if you are constricted on the same turn you try to use the stairs.
- Fixed 'available talents' list so that it resets its position when starting a new game.
- goto-stairs keys should prioritize the main dungeon rather than the branches.
- Putting on a helm of telepathy (or other item) will now instantly reveal the map, rather than taking a turn.
INTERFACE:
- Added a proper message queue to handle the bug above where messages would be 'overwritten' if two popped up at same time. Now any number of messages can be sent to the player and they will simply open one after another.
- Monsters will now show up as red dots on the mini map if they are in your LoS.
- You can now mouse over to get a desc of monsters on the mini map.
- Most text menus will now allow 'accept' and 'escape' buttons to trigger their buttons if its a simple yes/no question.
MISC:
- Monster glyph rooms will no longer spawn on the first floor of the dungeon.
- Changed ring of sustenance to unenchantable since there is currently no bonus to enchanting it.
February-18-2019 - Update 1.15 - Bug Fixes
After some consideration I've decided to use the rest of this month to try to clean up a bunch of the stuff we already have and just try to fix as many bugs as possible. Now that we have the stat server tracking win % its also a good time I think to do some preliminary balancing work just to try to keep everything in line. Speaking of the stat server, me and it are going to have to have a round 2 during this time as well since there's definitely some issues with it.
I'm continuously having to reassess what to prioritize since this is by far the largest project I've ever worked on, so I'm learning new things every day. At the moment, the bug and crashes list has gotten a bit out of hand, so I'd like to take some time to fix all these little issues before moving forward and making more of a mess. I continue to be amazed at just how much work is necessary to clean and polish all the little nooks and crannies of this game, not to mention the massive amount of new content that still needs to be added. So with that in mind I'll be doing a bit of cleaning and polishing for the next week or two in order to try to stay on top of things.
For those interested here are the stats from our server roughly from the time of writing:
Wins: Deaths: Win %:
TOTAL: 348 5949 5%
DUELIST: 50 490 9%
RANGER: 54 681 7%
BARBARIAN: 30 469 6%
ICE_MAGE: 33 534 5%
NECROMANCER: 47 757 5%
WARRIOR: 33 692 4%
ROGUE: 33 633 4%
STORM_MAGE: 30 579 4%
ENCHANTER: 19 534 3%
FIRE_MAGE: 19 580 3%
It actually doesn't look nearly as bad as I was expecting so it would appear that the work we've been doing has had an effect. As a rough guide, I'd like to get the classes as balanced as possible with each other, since this would imply that their talents are roughly equally powerful. I think this is important since one of my goals with this game is to make multi-classing actually a viable option.
I'll be tackling race balance as a separate issue in the future (first bits of it coming with this update). Roughly speaking I'd like to see the human race be the default 'easy' race with a significantly higher win %. This should give new players an easier entry into the game.
I'd actually like to get to the point where the human race is a bit to easy for experienced players which has the added benefit of providing an option for experienced players when they just feel like say, cracking a beer and doing a few easy runs while relaxing.
I'd like to have a couple of races that are moderately difficult for players to 'graduate' to once they've mastered the fundamentals of the game with the human i.e. won with a couple of the classes. Finally there should be a bunch (the most) of races that are specifically designed to challenge experienced players.
So generally speaking, the classes should be equally balanced in terms of power, which means the talents are balanced, which means multi-classing is viable. Races on the other hand will act as an organic difficulty curve and provide 'alternate game modes' for expert players.
Also as a rough rule I'd like to get just the overall win % up a little bit i.e. make the game a bit easier. I'll be shooting for something like 10% overall. I think this is necessary at this point since we need to take into account that there are a significant number of 'expert' players either from the web version or from back in alpha that are inflating the win %s a bit. So, especially with the human, I'd like to see these average win %s increase quite a bit so that newer players arn't just completely destroyed from the get go.
UPDATES:
BUGS_AND_CRASHES:
- New clouds will now always destroy existing clouds
- Ice blocks (from the freeze spell) will always destroy existing clouds (they are on the same layer).
- Ice blocks will also now freeze the water below them.
- Summoning an item should never produce an item with greater than max mod.
- Summoning an item should never create an item you have already picked up.
- You can now descend into pits when flying using the [s] key
BUTTON_REWRITE:
In response to a reported bug where some crazy combination of clicks and mouse movements on buttons in the acquirement menu could result in summoning multiple items, I've completely rewritten the buttons in the game.
All buttons will now only 'click' if the mouse is actually over them when releasing the click. This fixes the issue with acquirement menu and I'm sure fixes many other weird edge cases that are similar to this (I know we had a few like this before).
This 'rewriting' when fixing bugs is a policy that I've been adopting lately. In the past I would have just tried to fix the specific bug with some kind of little hack or quick fix. Now, as I'm noticing how massive the code base is getting, I'm trying to actually take the time to rewrite stuff to actually work correctly now and in the future. So hopefully, though it takes more time in the short term, it should pay off in the future.
As a side note, I'm finding it interesting to see with stuff like the menu rewrites, the state system, the button rewrites, the complete rewrite of handling input, etc. that I'm essentially getting what amounts to a 'game engine' out of all of this i.e. a whole set of generic components that handle all the common underlying functionality.
BALANCING:
In general I'm still just doing rough balancing at this point. In the future I'll likely be devoting a whole chunk of time to each class, one after another, and working through and updating their talents and abilities to both get things balanced and to really try to reinforce the classes 'theme'.
- Buffed warrior hit points from 24-48 to 26-52 in order to give him a bit of a boost and build on his 'theme' of tankyness.
- All fire mage spell damage increased a bit. Fire mage should be easy to balance since he's basically supposed to be the glassiest cannon in the game. We'l just keep buffing his damage output until he seems 'right'.
- The human race now gains an additional skill point every 3 levels at 2,5,8, etc. This is the first part of making them the default 'easier' class.
I feel like we'l have the human 'right' if experienced players basically find them to easy and a bit boring, while completely new players are still significantly challenge.
That's it for now! More bug fixes coming next time. Thanks as always for everyone's support and feedback!
February-13-2019 - Update 1.14 - Online Stats!
- Added support for steam cloud saves (I haven't tested this with mac yet as I don't have 2 so someone else will need to confirm that this actually works).
- The game will now log stats to an online server located at: http://justinwang123.pythonanywhere.com/ You can also access this with the 'online records' button in game.
Stat Tracking:
So this took freaking forever, mainly due to the fact that I didn't really know anything about building a web server and had to learn it all as I went along. Its very basic at the moment but it should at least work enough to let us start getting some data that may be relevant to balancing various classes and zones in the game.
I'll be slowly building this thing up over the course of EA, adding more features, more stats to track and more pages to view the stats. I'll also start to incorporate the actual stats more and more into the game itself. My vision is that the webpage itself can have just a ton of features and ways to view and sort statistics while the in game display can be left a lot simpler.
This thing is extremely rudimentary at the moment so expect a lot of changes to it throughout EA. Furthermore, the stats themselves will be subject to multiple wipes before we get to full release since I may need to significantly rewrite parts of it so don't get to attached to your stats.
Some stuff I'd like to get done in the future on it:
- A ranked game type separate from standard games that will be the primary way to compete on leaderboards. This will need to use a different stat than raw win% otherwise winning a single game and never playing again would give you a 100% win rate. So ranked will likely use some sort of SR system where you gain 'points' for wins and lose 'points' for losses. In this way the scores at the top of the board should represent both a high win % and a high number of total wins. Ranked will likely use random class/race like the daily challenge in order to truly test our abilities over the scope of the entire game.
- Daily Challenge win % shown in game. This is something I wanted to do as soon as I added the daily challenge. Since its a shared seed, I'd like to be able to see when you hover over it what the win % is of the current days challenge. This just acts as a rough indicator of how challenging the seed is.
- More stats in general, stuff like average win times, win streaks, number of turns taken etc.
Next Updates:
I'm finally emerging from my programmer mole cave so I'll be back and active on discord and the forums as I start working on the next updates. Next updates should start coming fast and furious again with a big emphasis on actual new content since we've been in a bit of a slow period lately. Obviously I'll also be tackling the various bugs and crashes that have accumulated.
I'll be fixing anything broken with the current stat server but will otherwise leave it as it is for a little while and focus on the game for the next few weeks. I'll likely return to it periodically to give it a nice boost. Like pretty much everything in this crazy project, its subject to many iterations before we finally get to full release.
Once again thanks everyone for your patience, I'm looking forward to getting back into the swing of regular development!
Sorry for the Long Update!
The long dev time is partially due to its complexity as its literally an entire separate web application, written from scratch, in a completely different language, that needs to live on a server and communicate with the game. Its also partially due to the fact that this is an area where I have very little experience and so am basically learning as I go.
I've been pretty quite on the forums/discord this last week simply due to the fact that I'm trying to focus completely on getting this stat server up and running.
One of the biggest problems I find with solo development is compartmentalizing my attention, so for huge programming focused tasks like this I find it difficult to keep up with discussion on balancing, suggestions features etc. without getting side tracked. So once this update goes live I'll be back online and looking for feedback on the next cycle of content and balancing updates.
Just to give a rough idea of what should be coming in the next update:
I got steams API integrated into the game and though I'm not using it for much yet (just getting user id stuff to send to the stat server), it was a huge hurdle just getting it running so it should be much easier going forward to start integrating more steam features.
One of the features I did integrate... just because (see getting side tracked is tempting!) was cloud storage, which is pretty damn cool. I was sitting with my laptop on a side table, playing games and then swapping over to the main PC and having it immediately sync.
The stat server is going to be pretty bare bones, particularly in the UI department at the start and will be completely web based, i.e. it will just be linked from within the game. I'll be starting a thread in the forums for feedback on what sort of cool stuff we can track here besides the basics.
I'd like to eventually get the web interface extremely complex with tons of different ways to sort, filter, and summarize various statistics about the game. Basically the more stuff the better, hence why I'll be looking for suggestions and feedback on this.
Then, some time in the future, we can start pulling what we consider the most relevant, or interesting stats and tables into the game itself in a much simpler form. This way, you can get a rough overview of global stats from within the game, and if you want to get more crazy details, you can use the more complex web site.
Extending Early Access:
I had initially planned for early access to take about 6 months but I'm now looking at something more like 9 months in order to get the amount of content, balance and polish into the game that I'd like. Based on my current output speed, working basically all day every day, I figure each of the following is going to take at least a full months worth of work:
- Balancing
- Fixing all bugs
- General polish and interface
So that's at least 3 full months of work just to get non-content stuff done. So in order to have enough time to actually add all the new content and mechanics I want, EA will definitely need to be about 9 months.
Conclusion:
So once again, apologize for the long update, its coming soon I promise! Thank you everyone for your patience while I figure all this stuff out, considering this is my first major game I'm having an absolute blast with it, and your guys support and feedback is a major part of that. Also thank you everyone who continues to provide feedback and suggestions (I'll be reading through and responding to it all once I get this update out and emerge from the dank dark programming cave), and thank you everyone who's reviewed the game!
February-02-2019 - Update 1.13 - Hot Fix
Started looking into setting up a server today to handle the upcoming leaderboard and stat tracking system. Will be holding off on steam leaderboard integration until later once the system is setup. I'd like to track a lot more stuff than a simple leaderboard would be able to handle, basically allowing for all sorts of interesting sorting and searching through game records. The steam leaderboard will be added once the system is fully working and we can just pick a few major stats we're interested in to push to it.
Fixes:
- Adjusted the hit points to x1.5 on all the enemies that I missed (guys with hard coded hit points). This catches stuff like the rats and bats.
- Fixed: quitting a game in progress was making the new game button unusable.
February-01-2019 - Update 1.13 - More House Keeping
BALANCE:
All enemy hit points have been increased by 1.5 and all player damage methods (weapons, abilities, spells etc) have been raised by the exact same amount. When there was a value that needed to be rounded, melee damage was rounded up and range damage was rounded down. So this is a very slight nerf to all range and a slight buff to all melee, which keeping with my own experience and your guys feedback, should be a step in the right direction. This change does a number of things:
- First it sets everything up for future balancing efforts in that having a wider range of values lets us fine tune exact numbers a bit more. I wanted to do this update early just so we could all get used to the new values (I know I'm still getting used to dealing 'so much' damage).
- It helps spread out the effect of all modifiers. For example, since say melee power only increases melee damage by 5% (always rounded), having a larger spread of values helps to make each point more likely to actually round to the next value.
- Prepares for an update to enchantments I'm planning on making where all items will uniformly be enchantable to +3 which will raise stats to 1.5 times their base. So for example, putting +1 enchantment on a 10 damage weapon may raise its damage by say 2 points wheres on a 5 damage weapon it would only raise by 1 point. Once again, a wider spread of values will just help with this.
- There's a nice symmetry between player hit points and enemy hit points now. Previously enemies had quite a bit less hp than the player.
- In general, this should not be seen as much of a change yet since, if I caught everything correctly, the actual mechanics have not changed. As said above, this is mostly a 'for the future' thing.
INTERFACE:
- Right clicking on yourself while standing on stairs will use them.
- New enchantment menu that is usable w/ the keyboard. Will be adding text to this in the future that shows the exact stat increases for enchanting each item which will become important with the enchantment update mentioned above.
DANGEROUS_OBJECTS
The player will now treat ice eggs and bombs as 'dangerous'. Let me know if there are any other objects you can think of that need this treatment. What this does is:
- Stops movement, exploration or resting when a 'dangerous' object is visible.
- Stops slow characters from diagonal stepping when a 'dangerous' object is visible. This works the same as hostile monsters currently.
- Stops player from resting if dangerous object is visible (same as hostile monsters currently).
- Stops player from starting exploration if dangerous object is visible (same as hostile monsters currently).
BUGS_AND_CRASHES:
- Fixed player unable to descend into a pit while levitating.
- Falling down a pit will now pull all of your summoned / charmed pets with you in the same way that stairs work.
- Fixed: being dragged into a pit by a tentacle leaving behind the tentacle sprites on the next level.
- Win times will now update immediately on the main menu rather than waiting for quit/reload.
- Hidden enemies, that are visible due to telepathy, will now count as visible for all safety checks (the sort of stuff that the dangerous objects are triggering above).
- Fixed block on shield not actually triggering.
REFACTORING:
As part of a general process of constantly cleaning up the code base I rewrote a ton of the code that handles menus, making it much more general and extensible. This is going to be a constant effort on my part over the course of the project. So much of the code was written, bit by bit, as needed and was never really systematized correctly. So I'll slowly be doing bits of clean up, whenever I need to touch a particularly nasty part of the code base. I hope that by spending a bit of time every week on clean up, I'll be able to make faster progress in the future simply due to a cleaner, more extensible code base.
NEXT UPDATE:
The next update (not counting hot fixes to this one), will be the leader board and stat tracking update. This ones going to take awhile to get done (maybe a week), though I may release bits of it for testing depending on how its going.
The leaderboard stuff is going to be pretty rough to start with, since I'll mostly just be trying to get the code correct and extensible. I'm still not sure the exact specifics of how I want to track stuff, how ranking will work, if we'l do some sort of 'seasons' etc. so this will mostly be about getting the infrastructure setup then we can discuss together how the actual records should work.
So be warned that these records will be liable to wiping over the course of early access as we fiddle with different ideas. Nonetheless I'd like to get them in here at an early date:
A) Because stats are cool
B) A little friendly competition is always good :)
C) It should help a lot with balancing to have actual stats on win %, average win times, deaths by level or zone etc.
CONCLUSION:
That's it for now! As I said, next update might take awhile to get through, though I'll still be active on the forums and discord. Thanks as always for your guys support and I hope you continue to enjoy the game!
January-28-2019 - Update 1.12 - House Keeping
BUGS_AND_CRASHES:
- Ice armor fixed to actually add cold resistance
- Moved position of the status effect text to not overlap rage bar.
- Fixed strafe attack so it doesn't trigger when backing up.
- Fixed a crash when clicking 'view character' on the death menu.
- New Update! message at the start of the game was blocking the main menu from showing.
- Fixed main menu not working after 'closing' the records menu.
STAIRS_TURN:
- You will now take a single turn when descending stairs, giving enemies a chance to hit you. Careful!
- This prevents a number of stair-dancing exploits.
- Specifically the poison staff damage ticking each time you ascend/descend without the player taking a hit.
INTERFACE:
- Status effects will highlight (show [] brackets like stats) when you mouse over them to check their description.
- Character level is now shown on the character screen (weren't able to see it when people were sharing screen shots of their stats).
- Can now 'view character' on the victory screen.
- Right click will now cancel using an ability. Still need to add mouse binding to the controls in case people want to change this.
- Renamed evade talent to vanish to not confuse with evasion. I tried to catch the incompatibilities that having an old save file with evade might cause, but as always, if your getting crashes on an old save, this might be the issue.