Hello everyone!

Another update in the ongoing push to clean up all the various odds and ends that have cropped up in development. This one is primary focused on improvements to the User Interface along with a whole bunch more level-gen content for the existing zones.

For those just joining us, I've decided to spend the rest of the year focused on this sort of 'house keeping' in the hopes of establishing a really solid foundation on which to build next year. I'm basically finished with what I consider to be Phase 1 of development which was to implement and tune all the major changes and gameplay additions I had planned for the project. Phase 2, which will take all of next year, will be the major content push that sees most of the new zones, sub-zones, monsters, bosses, classes, races, items etc. added to the game. The final phase before release will be all the fine tuning, balancing, polishing and extra features.

Clean Up Phase Goals:

Some of the things I'm trying to achieve with this clean up phase:

• Fix as many of the lingering bugs as possible. I try to fix common, game breaking bugs as soon as they are reported but there are still dozens if not hundreds of odd edge cases and rare exceptions that I'd like to get tidied up.
• Implement as many of the little quality of life and user interface improvements that have been suggested or that have accumulated in 'the list'.
• Normalize the amount of content in all the existing zones. By this I mean that some zones currently have less generators, vaults, or enemy types then the average and I'd like to establish and meet some minimum amount across the board.
• Rebalance any really obvious outliers. We're not nearly at the stage where doing really fine grained balancing is necessary (or even possible) but I would like to take a stab at anything that is really obviously horrible.

Level Generation Goals:

As an example of content normalization, here's the number of generators in each zone (not counting sub-zones) along with the number I'd like to hit by the end of the year. So some zones are 'complete' (for now), while others still need a bunch of new content to establish this nice base point. I'm not planning on doing anything super crazy with these generators as that would be something best left to sub-zones but I would like to get as much variety out of the base zones as possible before moving on.



Zone
Current
Goal

The Upper Dungeon1115
The Orc Fortress710
The Palace of Shadow610
The Under Grove45
The Sunless Desert55
The Swamp45
The Sewers65
The Core55
The Ice Caves45
Click Clock Keep45
The Arcane Tower35
The Crypt65

Monster Count Goals:

Similar to the level-gen counts, the number of monsters per zone also has some variability though its not nearly as bad. The Under Grove is the main culprit here and I at least need to get 3 more monster types in this zone to establish a minimum at the first blue line. Pushing up to the 2nd blue line also seems very doable as this would only take another 10 new enemies. The Vault of Yendor is a bit of a unique case though it would also be really good to get a few more, really interesting and challenging enemies added here before the end of the year.

Update 1.17:

Game Stats:
This is something we've talked about for a long time and I figured it was time to take a first initial stab at implementation. The game will now track and display a number of gameplay related stats to you when you win or lose the game. Initially I thought this would just be something inconsequential that was 'nice to have' but further thought has led me to the idea that this could actually be a really good way of helping players improve their gameplay.

I think the trick will lie in tracking stats that actually give a good indication of how skillfully the player is playing the game. I'd like to start collecting screen shots from players of their Game-Stats page when they successfully win the game and from these get some averages for each stat that we can display as a sort of Par number. Ideally these would be non-ranked games with Human race so we can establish a better average.

This would then give newer players who are looking at the death screen something to compare with and might indicate a way to improve their game. I would love some suggestions for other stats to track. The current ones are:

• Number of shrooms used.
• Number of times the player takes damage.
• Number of times an enemy takes trap damage
• Number of consumables used
• Number of speed points used
• Number of critical hits the player deals
• Number of abilities the player uses.

These are all displayed as the average per Character-Level so that a player dying in the early game can still get a decent comparison to winning runs with characters at max level. With enough examples of winning run stats I think we can establish some decent Par values for each character class.

User Interface:

• Auto-Explore will no longer immediately open chests. Hitting E again when adjacent to a chest will then open it. If you take at least 1 step away from the chest, auto-explore will then ignore the chest and explore the rest of the level. This lets you continue to use auto-explore while avoiding obvious trapped chests and came from another discussion during a live stream. If anyone just can't live without the old system let me know and we can make this a toggle option.
• You can now toggle in the options menu to have auto-explore use switches. The same rules above apply to switches.
• Reverted range targeting to the old system where you can only shoot a valid target to prevent mis-clicks. Holding [z] will let you target any tile in case you need to shoot at invis or otherwise hidden enemies. I'm going to rename the [z] key 'Free-Action' instead of 'Unsafe Move' as its role expands.
• Holding the 'Free-Action' key will let you path through beneficial shrooms.
• Added scrolling to the class section of the records window so that new classes don't overflow the menu.
• Expanded to badge window to include the new classes. Might eventually need to scroll as well as we add new classes.
• New, stream-lined Acquirement menu that now allows you to choose the armor slot when summoning items. Also shows the loot-tier of summoned items and notes that its based on your current character level. I'm planning to have Acquirement actually offer you a choice between 2 random items once you've chosen the category to make the mechanic much more likely to give you something you actually want.
• Rephrased the death menu text to be a bit more positive: "Your human warrior survived until level 7 before dying in the Sunless Desert." vs "Your level 7 human warrior died in the Sunless Desert".
• Added unique death messages for Starvation, Poison and Torment. Would love some suggestions on other sources of death that could have a unique message.

Game Balance:

• Equipment and consumables are now guaranteed to drop on alternating levels. Previously it was just a 50/50 chance that any spawned item would be equipment vs consumables. This meant it was possible to have seeds that were really skewed in one direction or the other. The game now guarantees 1 equipment on level-1, 1 consumable on level-2, 1 equipment on level-3, 1 consumable on level-4 etc. The rest of the drops remain random but this means that about 50% of the drops are guaranteed to maintain this 50/50 balance.
• The spawning of 'guaranteed equipment' is now forced into the first half of the dungeon rather than spread across the whole thing. Guaranteed Equipment forces the dungeon to generate a melee weapon, a range weapon, a staff, a helm etc. The 3 weapon types are guaranteed to spawn and about half of the armor/ring slots are also guaranteed to spawn.
• Whips are no longer included in 'Guaranteed Equipment' as a range weapon so you will in fact find a bow somewhere in the first half of the dungeon.
• There are now 2 extra items dropping across Branch-I. Just a little thing to make the base game slightly easier and reward players clearing the branch.
• The greater elemental staves now all have the associated Tier-1 ability on a 10T cool-down. So, for example, Greater-Staff-of-Fire now has Fire-Ball on a 10T CD. This is something discussed in one of the live streams that we're gonna test out with the possibility of pretty much all staves having some sort of associated ability.
• Poison damage per tick (5T) now increases in damage rather than deceases. Works similar to hunger except that it starts at 5DMG. This incentivizes and allows the player to spend some turns moving to a Healing Shroom to cure it while the damage is low rather than the previous system where, by the time you reached the shroom, the damage was already mostly dealt.

Level Generation:

• Levels like The-Sunless-Desert that have both sand and cave floor tiles will now no longer connect Challenge-Vaults with sand to the inside of caves with cave floor tiles. This looked really odd and happened in Grove, Desert, and Ice-Cave.
• New Cave-Tunnels generator for The-Upper-Dungeon
• New Mine-Tunnels generator for The-Upper-Dungeon
• New Forest-Template generator for The-Under-Grove
• New Islands-Template generator for The-Under-Grove
• New Cave-Rooms generator for The-Ice-Caves
• New Gauntlet-Rooms generator for The-Orc-Fortress

Conclusion:

That's it for this update! Not exactly sure yet what I want to focus on next update. Might pivot back to debugging and maybe try to get all those extra enemy types added since it would be nice to check that off the list. Thank you everyone for your continued support and feedback!

Hot Fixes:

Hot-Fix 1.17.1

• Fixed level gen crashes in The-Sewers
• Fixed level gen crashes in The-Under-Grove

Hot-Fix 1.17.2

• Fixed level gen crashes The-Upper-Dungeon

Hot-Fix 1.17.3

• Game-Stats will now display correctly (not NaN) when the player is at max level 12.

Hot-Fix 1.17.4

• Fixed level gen crashes in The-Sunless-Desert

Hot-Fix 1.17.5

• Fixed the shooting blink shroom crash.
• Soul-Reaper changed to actually be 2-Handed as per its description and stats.
• Fixed Boots-of-Speed and Rocket-Boots crashing with Centaur.
• Fixed: turning off screen flashes was causing game to freeze on the main menu.
• Fixed: Tunnel-Shot could not be targeted through enemies AND an opaque cloud.
• Fixed: Casting a cloud over a steam vent was crashing when the steam tried to spawn.