Rogue Fable III
January-27-2019 - Update 1.11 - The Great Key Binding Update
Actual update notes are pretty brief considering I have like 50 things checked off on my todo. These were all behind the scenes type stuff though so what effects you guys is:
- Can now rebind keys with 3 slots per action in case you want to double bind. This system is definitely going to go through some iterations. I just wanted to get the basics out asap since I now a lot of people want this and also its good to get it tested and get some feedback on it.
- Reduced the max range of a lot of later game enemies. This really only effected enemies that had ranges beyond that of the max player range. I feel like this is really only fair. There shouldn't be enemies attacking from a range that literally no player build can hit.
- Enchantment and acquirement scrolls will no longer use a turn when you just open their menus. Simple little thing that has been mentioned before and I noticed while cleaning up code, so figured I'd correct it now before it gets forgotten.
Will be spending the next few days doing the bug fixing and clean up that was supposed to have occurred this week before I got burred in code refactoring.
From reading your guys feedback on the last balance changes it looks like we generally made good progress in the right direction so will mostly leave it alone for a little bit.
The big stuff on the list in the next few weeks is:
- Leader Boards and general stat tracking
- Splitting the rogue and assassin into two classes
- A bunch of new items and improvement to the rand-art system.
Thanks as always for all the support and feedback on the game! Also thanks to everyone who has reviewed the game! I feel like we're slowly inching our way in the right direction here. Next update should be a lot faster than this one!
*EDIT*
Oh yes! In the little debug line of text at the bottom left of the screen, you'l see some text just describing what 'state' the game is in. If you get a weird crash or lock up after this update please let me know what the 'state' says. Will be removing this with the next update once I'm certain some of the changes I made have actually worked.
January-022-2019 - Update 1.10 - The Big Balancing Update
Today is the first of many balancing updates that will be occurring throughout development. Balance is going to be an ongoing process right up until the full release, so be warned, that stuff will be swinging wildly back and forth pretty much until the last month of EA. For now, I'm not trying to get anything 'perfect', since new additions and changes to mechanics / content tend to upset any fine tuning. Rather I'm just trying to hammer on the glaring issues.
As a rule, especially this early on, I try to err on the side of overbalancing i.e. making large changes rather than small ones. This is simply so that we can actually 'see' the effect of changes through the fog of the RNG.
This first round of balancing focuses on two things:
1) Reducing random difficulty created by the RNG:
Obviously variety between runs is critical for the replay-ability of a rogue-like and obviously there is going to be some runs that are harder than others. That being said, I'd like this variation in difficulty to offer opportunities for players to demonstrate their skill and knowledge of the game. What I mean by this is a run may be 'hard' because it doesn't give you everything you need to do a standard character build, but a clever player should still be able to adapt. A run should not be hard because it just randomly refuses to generate any enchantment scrolls or tables. The reverse case is also an issue i.e. a run becoming a no-brainer, easy run, simply due to some extreme edge case in generation.
2) Balancing Classes:
This is simply targeting the worst offenders of over-powered classes and under-powered classes and attempting to give them a nerf or buff to bring them more in line. The goal here isn't perfect balance, and this is always going to depend a lot on play style, but we're mostly targeting the extreme offenders on either side.
As a side note, the Rogue is being left alone for now until the split into Assassin and Rogue since his current kit was designed back in Alpha when he got all of his EXP from items and non from kills which is why it is mostly based around avoidance, with killing as a secondary consideration.
Current Class Balance:
Thank you everyone for your feedback on class balance! Here's the combined data I got from you guys:
OVER-POWERED:
- Storm Mage [6]
- Ranger [5]
- Enchanter [5]
- Necromancer [4]
- Fire Mage [2]
- Ice Mage [2]
- Warrior [1]
UNDER-POWERED:
- Barbarian [6]
- Rogue [4] (poor guys gonna have to wait another week unfortunately)
- Fire Mage [4]
- Warrior [3]
- Ice Mage [2]
With that said, on to the updates:
GLOBAL_DIFFICULTY_BALANCE:
Up until this point, there was no global (dungeon wide) control on any of the generation. This meant there was an insane range in the number of certain features that could spawn. For example you could get something crazy like 0-20 enchantment tables (though the average was something like 3-4). The exact numbers here may need some adjusting (possibly widening the ranges a bit), but this is a first stab at controlling this more carefully.
- Merchants: 1-3 per dungeon on levels >= 6. The 3 guaranteed spawns don't count towards this.
- Enchantment tables: 2-4 per dungeon on levels >= 6.
- Transference tables: 1-3 per dungeon on levels >= 9.
- Well of Wishing: 1-2 per dungeon
- Skill Trainer: 1 per dungeon in either TIER_III (9-12), BRANCH_I or BRANCH_II (but never on the last levels).
- Talent trainer: same as the skill trainer
- Priests: 1-2 per dungeon in BRANCH_I, BRANCH_II or Yendor (never twice in same zone).
CLASS_BALANCING_NERFS:
- Strafe attack will never trigger when increasing distance from an enemy. Its not supposed to be used for kiting. We may need to play with the 'shape' of this a bit and perhaps add additional talent levels.
- Shock Damage: 18,22,24 => 14,18,20. Shock is easily the best room clearing spell in the game. It likely will still hold this place even with a damage reduction.
- Confusion duration: 6,10,12 => 6,6,6. The AoE already increases in size with levels which is a massive boost. Plus your magic modifier is applied to duration already.
- Reduced all caster natural hit points from 24-48 to 20-40 (levels 1-20). All casters showed up on the OP list so this is a bit of a nerf to them while also helping to distinguish them as the 'glass cannons'. For casters that need a boost I'd prefer to do this through their abilities.
- Lunge has had its range reduced: 3,4,5 => 3.0, 3.5, 4.0. Its was WAY better than charge.
CLASS_BALANCE_BUFF:
- Barbarian is no longer restricted from using magic. Though I really like the idea of him having this unique penalty it really just doesn't work in such a short game like this where 50% of your drops therefore become useless.
- Barbarian maintains his rage longer 10 => 12 turns per point.
- Barbarian will maintain higher rage longer i.e. the turns to decrease rage are BASE + RAGE_LEVEL
- Deflect Talent now increases reflect w/ talent points: 10,10,10 => 10,14,16.
- Fire Mage now has the talent Shield of Flames instead of flaming hands which provides fire resistance, a 3 point damage shield and will burn off webs or nets cast on the player. I like that this talent will actually be very useful for pretty much any class that can find it.
- Ice armor now provides a point of cold resistance. Ice Armor + Shield of Flames therefore give the casters a way to gain elemental immunity while also providing another way to do this for all other classes.
MISC:
- +2MP for consuming a mana potion (brings it in line with healing pots).
- Removed mummies toxic resistance bonus. I'm not even looking at race balance atm but this guy is just so OP that he certainly doesn't need MORE bonuses :P
- You can now summon ranged weapons from wells and scrolls. Will be adding more ranged weapons soon as its currently just long bow and sling. Ranger is likely gonna need even more nerfs after this one as he's now pretty much guaranteed to get a good bow if he wants one.
- Changed ring of sustenance to simply halve the rate of food consumption so that you don't have to fiddle with it once you drop below 20 food.
- Iron Imps now correctly spawn in Arcane Tower.
CONCLUSION:
So we'l let this sit for a bit before making further adjustments so that we can all digest the changes. I look forward to hearing feedback on all these changes :)
Next few days will be bug fixes and interface stuff (keybindings especially).
Thanks again for all your help and support and thank you everyone who has been reviewing the game, it helps a lot!
January-20-2019 - Update 1.9 (Hot Fix)
Thanks for your patience, let me know as other issues arise.
- Fixed crashes with portals
- Fixed crashes with switches
January-19-2019 - Update 1.9
As mentioned elsewhere, I'd like to spend every 4th week of development on 'clean up', handling all the little things that tend to get ignored while working on larger chunks of content or mechanics. I believe that taking the time to get a lot of little things right, tends to accumulate into big results in the long run.
Will be going through all the recent suggestions and feedback this week and trying to catch as much of the low hanging fruit as possible.
32 BIT WINDOWS VERSION:
In response to emails from several people who were unable to play the game, I've changed the game to 32bit. I doubt it will make any real difference (didn't notice anything while testing), but unfortunately it will require a decent size download for this update. Sorry for that!
MISC SMALL STUFF:
- The greater staff of storms now works like the shock spell i.e. it only spreads when it can hit enemies. This should stop auto attack / auto explore killing you by accident.
- Added descriptions to the power, resistance and bless status effects.
- Reduced the animation delay of fire and shock effects. This was slowing the game down quite a bit especially for classes using staves and attacking every turn.
- Reverted the rogues sneak attack changes (stealth now adds additional bonuses to melee attacks against unaware opponents as before).
- Axes can only hit a max of 3 enemies with a swing. This is a balance change that's been on the books for a long time (I think its literally the first suggestions from back in alpha). Simply put, axes were pretty OP. If 3 turns out to be to few we can experiment with 4 or perhaps different 'shapes' to its hit box.
OPTION TO DISABLE AUTO-CENTER CAMERA:
- As per request of a player you can now toggle the camera to not follow the player in the options menu.
- The F key will focus the camera on the player.
- Planning to add the ability to pan the camera around manually in general in a future update.
- You'l have to let me know how its working for you since this is def not a feature I'd ever play with, so I have no idea what sort of solution is optimal.
UPDATES
- Yo dawg, you may be reading this update from the game since the update added in game updates to update you on the state of future updates.
BUGS AND CRASHES:
- Fixed blinking from net keeping you netted (you guys trying to net crystal golems lol?)
- Fixed the racial descriptions remaining even when mouse was not hovering.
- Fixed the left over text messages on the main screen when you quickly quite a game.
- Removed grass growing on lava (also added checks for grass growing on toxic waste).
- Cave ins will no longer destroy the crystal chests in the library
- Cave ins will no longer destroy multi-tile objects like the big trees.
- Speed and levitate should now correctly display on rand-arts.
NOTES:
We reached 50 reviews haza! Thank you everyone for your support on this, it helps a lot.
My hope is that I can continue to focus on improving the game, and responding to you guys feedback, and just let reviews and word of mouth handle the 'marketing' side of things.
I'm not the sort of person that relishes the idea of opening 20 social media accounts and spending half my day shouting for attention on the internet, so the reviews (which do make a big difference in steam traffic), help enormously.
Thanks again everyone!
January-16-2019 - Update 1.8 + Hot Fix
Will be finishing up a bunch of stuff this week with another update or two. Next week (week 4 since launch), I'll be dedicating most of the time to bug fixes, reading through all the suggestions and balance issues on forums/discord, working on performance and just generally trying to polish everything up as much as possible. I'm gonna try to make it a habit of spending every 4th week on 'clean-up', balancing and just general polish type issues so that this stuff doesn't get out of hand.
LIBRARIAN:
- Added a librarian NPC type that will spawn as part of the library vault.
- She sells 10 talents that the player can choose to buy individually for 75gp.
- These talents should be those unknown to the player when he reaches the level for the first time.
- The purpose of this is to once again, try to offer a bit more choice to the player as far as character builds go.
- The library was also moved to dungeon level 10 to help center it a bit more in the overall dungeon.
LEVEL_GENERATION:
- New generator for the sewers
- 2 New static levels for The Upper Dungeon (still need tons more here since its played so often and they tend to noticeably repeat).
THE_ABYSMAL_ALTAR:
- Added as the special level in The Dark Temple
- Haven't done its special event code yet. Wanted to add just the stub of it to keep the dungeon length balanced.
NEW_MONSTERS:
- New named unique slime in the sewers
- Demonologist in Yendor that summons destroyable portals, that, if allowed to fully open, will summon an imp.
RAND-ARTS:
- Beginning of the rand-art system (tons of work to do here)
- Items have a 10% chance to spawn with additional stats on them
- Right now this is all just completely random but will definitely be refined in the future to do stuff like tying the stats to the zone they drop in, adding negative stats, adding multiple stats on very rare pieces.
- Rings will likely be changed so that a standard ring is never branded rather a new ring sprite will be used and a completely new ring with 2 or more stats will be created.
- I'd also like to have items such as 'Fire Shards' that when applied to an item will add stats depending on the base item type. So for example a weapon would get the flaming brand, a ring would get the fire power bonus, and armor would get the resistance.
USER_INTERFACE:
- Enchanted items now have their descriptive text name in green.
- Rand-Art items now have their descriptive text name in blue.
- Enemies now have their descriptive text name color coded based on their relative level (green, blue, white, yellow, red).
- The popup text from picking up an item is also color coded as above.
BALANCE_CHANGES:
- Changed the price of talents at the talent trainer from 100gp => 75gp
- Ring of evasion base evasion 5 => 3 (to be same as protection)
ITEM PRICE CHANGES:
- Changed the way that prices are calculated for modded items. Modded items now cost: baseVal + enchantScrollVal / 2. This has the effect of making cheap items slightly more expensive but drastically reduces the cost of expensive, highly modded items (it was ridiculously unaffordable).
- Example of price changes:
- Cheap Item (+3 Robe): 88gp => 100gp
- Med Item (+3 Long Sword): 176gp => 140gp
- Expensive Item (+3 Gloves of Vampirism): 264gp => 180gp
WEAPON_RANGE_REDUCTION:
- All ranged weapons have had their range reduced by 1.
- There is a pretty big balance issue in the game regarding ranged vs melee weapons, especially since the game does not use any ammo system.
- Since a range weapon has the potential to hit an enemy 5-6 times as they are walking towards the player, if I were to balance this purely on damage, then ranged weapons would just take an absurd amount of time to kill enemies.
- So this is a first pass attempt at balancing ranged vs melee.
That's it for now!
Side Note: Please Review the Game!
I really appreciate anyone who takes the time to review the game here on Steam. Good reviews, bad reviews, long text, short text, english or your native language, it all helps!
The discovery algorithms are heavily influenced by the review score, and if its not high enough the game pretty much becomes invisible. We need to reach at least 50 reviews before the game can even be listed as more than 'positive' which steam treats as about a 70%.
Hot Fix:
Later that night....
- Fixed crystal chest descriptive text
- Fixed librarian giving you negative talent points (she's not supposed to cost talent points, only gold)
- Fixed wands and charms having [object, object] in desc
- Added descs to wand of draining and helm of telepathy
- fixed darts and other throwables selling for absurd amounts (is just +1gp per mod now which the merchant tends to round down to 1 anyways since he's a thrify bastard)
Thanks for the bug reports everyone!
Mac Version Released!
January-11-2019 - Update 1.7
Planning on continuing working on enemies, levels, generators, traps etc next week and for the rest of January. Will be switching focus for the month of February back to player side content: new class, new race, new items and talents etc.
BUGS_AND_CRASHES:
- Summoning blades should default to spawning the blades on dangerous terrain if there is not enough safe terrain. (Blades were not spawning over stuff like lava, pits, etc.)
- Lunge now shows the correct path it will take when the ability is targeted.
- Fixed a 'hack' with enchantment and transference tables in which they were not consumed but item was still enchanted / transferred.
- Changed the F12 => F11 to open the console window (screen shot button on steam).
- Attacking with a weapon in the quick slot will no longer corrode the weapon in the primary slot.
- Changed the description of races to list races as values rather than %.
- Immobile enemies (fire pots) will remain visible even when out of vision.
MECHANICS_AND_BALANCE:
- Stealth bonus to crits was actually being counted twice. Once by adding damage to sneak attacks, and then again by adding damage to crits. This has been fixed so that the stealth bonus is a flat +5% to crit hits regardless of how those crits were executed.
- Poison staff will now tick damage on the turn it is cast. You would always get hit once for example if you poisoned a rat in melee range even though he immediately died.
- Charms are now usable when confused, much like wands.
January-08-2019 - Update 1.6
- Stalagmites in water in caves
- Shock reeds that act like fire shrooms but placed in water and create a shock.
LEVEL_GENERATION:
- New crypt generator
MECHANICS:
- Cold Resistance I will now block ambient cold in The Ice Caves
- Cold Resistance II will now block the slowing effect of cold
- Note: other resistances will eventually get hard counters like this.
- Walls of Fire now spread on flammable objects
- Walls of Fire now destroy arrows that pass throw them and explode bombs.
- Walls of Fire now destroy ice
- Taking fire damage will immediately set your cold level to 0 (The Ice Caves)
- Taking fire damage will immediately remove the slowing effects of cold.
- Electricity now spreads on toxic water
- Electricity will now ignite oil
NPC_TYPES:
- Dark Elf Warper: can blink his allies into range and clear LoS of the player.
- Pestilence Priest: can convert pools of blood into maggots.
- Vampire Bats: now a generic enemy appearing in the crypt (not as tough as the unique in Upper Dungeon who will be getting an actual name along with the other uniques).
BALANCE:
- The merchant will try to only stock items that have not already dropped in the dungeon.
- The merchant stocking an item will not however block that item from dropping normally in the dungeon.
- Note: will be using a similar mechanic for crystal chests, locked treasure rooms, acquirement etc. so that the player gets less duplicates.
January-05-2019 - Update 1.5
Should have the special level for The Dark Temple coming in next few days. Planning on adding some new enemies as well next week to zones that are currently lacking a bit of variety. Still have to get a bunch of the moving trap rooms that were cut from the release working as well (just a matter of getting auto explore / pathing to not run you into them).
BUGS_AND_CRASHES:
- Fixed doors appearing over pits.
- Fixed max enchant not actually working on items. Was noted on the vampirism items after the latest update but this will also mean charms are now capped at 3 (they always were, the code just wasn't working).
- Fixed fire storm cast by NPCs not saving its radius correctly when changing levels / saving and exiting.
- Fixed: when stairs appeared behind a locked gate on some levels, the original stairs were not removed, but were also not setup correctly. This resulted in a crash when using them.
INTERFACE:
- You can now descend into pits when levitating in the same way that you would use stairs.
- shift + w will now open a wield menu in which you can select a weapon to wield using the keyboard.
LEVELS:
- New, rare, templated level generator in the Orc Fortress
MISC:
- Added races to the daily challenge.
- Auto running to stairs will now perfer to take you to the main stairs down rather than the branch stairs (eventually we will have a 'goto' command to make interlevel travel easier and selecting stairs).
As a side note, regarding the daily challenge, since its not actually described anywhere in game yet. The daily challenge is a shared seed that should produce a game that is nearly identical across all of our games. There are a few points I am aware of where they may differ but generally speaking you'l get the same layouts, enemies, items, etc. as everyone else.
January-03-2019 - Update 1.4
- Iron Fortress special level with cannons traveling around on tracks.
- Will likely be using a similar system for other NPC types in the future.
- Kind of rough right now but I'm trying to get a special level for each zone on tier III so that the game doesn't randomly have an extra level on some runs.
- Will be returning to work on these special levels next week once The Dark Temple one is created.
KEYBOARD_USE_MENU:
- 'u' will now open a use menu in which the keyboard can be used to select consumables.
- Working on getting the rest of the game controls mapped to the keyboard.
BALANCE:
- Life Spike can no longer be used on your allies for free healing.
- Reduced the duration of confusion since its currently incredibly over powered.
- Reduced the HP penalty on speed, learning and wealth rings/boots from 30% to 25%.
- Reduced the HP penalty on levitation rings and boots from 30% to 15% since levitation is not nearly as powerful as speed.
Will be getting the special level for The Dark Temple implemented in the next few days then will be making a pass over all zones and adding new content and variations everywhere. Definitely focused on expanding the size of the dungeon in this first month but I want to also continue increasing the amount of content/variation so that it doesn't get bland and repetitive.