October 2018 Release Notes

From Itch.io

## Update 0.30 - October-29-2018

TALENTS\_AND\_ABILITIES:

* Talent Books will attempt to fill themselves with talents the player does not already have.
* Fire Bolt Spell
* Flash Freeze Spell: freezes all NPCs in LoS for a short duration
* Keen Hearing Ability w/ 3 levels increasing range
* Innate resistance talents in the defensive book for fire, cold, shock, and toxic
* Spread talents out a bit more so that the player gets access to new talents earlier and must wait later to upgrade (allows for a bit more variety early on).

BUGS\_AND\_CRASHES:

* Fixed monsters blinking themselves into pits and killing themselves.
* Stopped ranged attack tab from targeting hidden enemies
* Telepathy allows the player to spot hidden enemies
* Maggots are unstable immune
* Fixed Arcane Tower placing odd water under teleport pads
* Fixed selecting an attribute taking a turn and moving player (click through button)
* Fixed one of the vaults that had weirdly rotated book shelves.
* You will now correctly explore / move over lava when flying

QUALITY\_OF\_LIFE:

* You can now view the character screen upon death or victory to check your equipment, skills, talents etc.
* Classes with special rules have them described (somewhat) on the main menu screen. Will need to figure out UI on this to make more room.
* Show a description of attributes when mousing over them on the attribute select menu.

LEVELS\_AND\_GENERATION:

* Added 5 more 'Dungeon' type vaults that spawn in the Upper Dungeon and Orc Fortress

MAJOR\_MECHANIC\_CHANGE: SKILLS

Playing around with adding skills back into the game, as in RFII but not requiring them in order to get associated talents. Mostly I just miss the ability to grab a few points of melee as a caster if I find a good weapon or otherwise quickly adjust my build based on what loot is dropping. I find w/o skills your sort of doubly at the mercy of the RNG since not only is equipment drops random, but then you might not have talents available to actually take proper advantage of them. I'd like to give the player a bit of a chance to control his build rather than being so at the whim of the RNG. Bunch of stuff got changed to incorporate this mainly:

* Only one talent point per level all the way to level 20 (instead of doubling post 10)
* Added back chance to get skill points from bookshelves.
* Added back skill trainer NPC
* Reduced many of the talents from 5 levels to 3 levels to compensate for increase power gain from skills.

MAJOR\_MECHANIC\_CHANGE: REST\_TO\_REGEN:

This one I'm just sort of toying with on a whim to see how it feels. Since I've never really removed all the code for the way RFII handled regen w/ mushrooms, fountains and no passive regen I tried reverting it back to see how the game would play as per RFIIs design and it actually felt really good. I missed the sort of optimization challenge of trying to squeeze every bit of regen I could out of fountains, level ups, etc, and hoarding my shrooms to the end. Will be playing with this myself in next few days to see if I prefer it within the context of all the new changes to the game. Balance is probably a bit off but would appreciate feedback on this one. I tried to make the changes as minimal as possible to make it easy to revert back if I/we are not feeling it.

* Draining status effect just reduces stats now rather than halting regen
* Any item or talent that says it grants either MP or HP regen should be read as adding +[x] to the amount of HP a healing or mana mushroom gives.
* Obviously troll race is just sort of busted by this (races will likely be disabled for the web release anyway in order to try to get everything tight and balanced).

NPC\_TYPES:

* Freaking realized that the reason I'm never seeing uniques on later levels isn't because they are rare but because code is busted in such a way that the early uniques still spawned but later uniques never did so this is now fixed.
* Removed orcs from core and ice caves to avoid repetition of content
* Added Mummy Priests, Snapping Turtles, Giant Bees, Sun Flows, Centaur Warriors, Yaks, Storm Statues, and Obsidian Golems.
* Added a few new uniques deeper in the dungeon.

## Update 0.29 - October-26-2018

BUGS\_AND\_CRASHES:

* Stopped Cone of Cold spell from casting through walls
* The deflect status effect will drop if the player unequips his shield or equips a two handed weapon
* Stopped merchant from double spawning on a floor
* Fixed player dying twice in a single turn.
* Fixed grammar on 'killed by' for unique enemies.
* Skeletons should now resurrect in the crypt.
* Homing fireballs now have 0 exp (they were granting exp previously)

QUALITY\_OF\_LIFE:

* Added help dialog for first time: trying to step on dangerous terrain
* Added help dialog for first time: stepping on stairs (tells you to use < or > or HUD button)
* Added help dialog for first time: low on health (tells you to shift + click to rest)
* Highlighted altars on mini-map

MECHANICS:

* Added resistance and vulnerabilities to NPCs (displayed on mouse over)
* Enemies will not shoot each other if they are directly adjacent (stops glyph rooms and ambush rooms from just destroying themselves).
* Orbs of fire will only be cast by NPCs if they have an initially clear line of sight (same idea, stops them from so easily destroying their friends).
* isMindless property added to orbs of fire, inferno orbs, clockworks, undead etc. to prevent them from being charmed.

GRAPHICS:

* Level up and experience boost animation.
* Characters will face their target when casting spells
* Added summon graphic when NPCs summon ice bombs
* Added graphics for fire and cold attunement
* Smoothed out the shadow circle surrounding the player (was very noticeable previously on smooth tiles like water and grass)

LEVELS\_AND\_GENERATION:

* Added more variation to many of the generators in how they place rooms and halls. (lots of stuff here that's difficult to list)
* Added a post process step to trim single walls and various other oddities.
* Removed full cave levels from many of the zone types in order to differentiate them from the zones that use caves extensively.
* Added 15 new rooms to the crypt generator to help differentiate it visually
* Added a few new rooms to the Iron Fortress generator to help differentiate it visually.
* Added a bunch of new static levels throughout the dungeon to avoid repeats (lots more work to do here)

DUNGEON\_RESTRUCTURING:

* Removed the first branch and simply added all zones to the random selection for the main dungeon levels 5-8.
* Moved crypt from a side branch to alternate with The Dark Temple on levels 9-12

WHY:

* First off this will likely be either reverted or additional content will be added to increase the size of the dungeon in the future. This is mostly a temporary solution to try to get as much variety as possible where it counts.
* 90% of deaths occur before dungeon level 8 and so I'd like to front load as much variety into the early game as possible.
* Shortens the game a little bit which though unnecessary for experienced players will help with newer players who are often clocking 2+ hour runs right now.
* Helps simplify the early game for new players.
* The 3 zones that are being moved onto the main dungeon line i.e. The Under Grove, The Sunless Desert and The Swamp, don't have any particularly impossible resists that could block certain classes from progressing.

## Update 0.28 - October-19-2018

CRASH\_AND\_BUGS:

* Fixed succubus / charm crash when killing the succubus

NPCS:

* Added lightning bolts to higher level storm mages. NPCs need to start having more AoE type spells to deal with player summons and allies. Will be slowly going through the list of higher level enemies and adding some new spells here and there.
* Added dark elf storm mage to the deeper levels

GRAPHICS:

* Some new spell casting graphics.
* Early stages of new lighting system to add some extra flash to spells, magical enemies, stuff like fountains etc.

## Update 0.27 - October-16-2018

I've decided to postpone the release of the game to Kongregate and Steam for another month or so in order to really spend the time to polish everything up, improve the visuals and audio, and add a lot more unique, rare content, throughout the dungeon in order to keep each run as varied as possible. I figure that I only really get one shot at a release to Kongregate that has to stay up indefinitely without updates and so it will be worth spending the time now to make it as good as possible. Similarly from what I understand the first few days on Steam are basically make or break for a game so I'd like to come out as strong as possible. With that in mind updates will sort of be all over the place for the next month or so as I tackle the hundreds of little bits I'd like to improve. Graphics and animation in particular tend to take me a long time and go through many iterations as I'm basically learning as I go along. With that out of the way, on to the update!

CRASHES\_AND\_BUGS:

* Fixed an 'uncaught. no room for item' crash that was occurring when changing levels. This tended to result in random crashes between levels in the later dungeon that were not fixable with a reload (merchants saved inventory was overflowing).
* Fixed the stealth talent to actually provide bonus stealth on each subsequent upgrade (was only working for the first level)
* Charming a hidden enemy will make it stop hiding (its possible to spot them with a high stealth skill and being directly adjacent to them).
* Swimming characters that the player has charmed will not swap places with him ending up on land.
* Music will stay toggled between save/reload
* Fixed a soft lock when sprinting into view of something like a merchant (merchant spotted! text)
* Fixed some layering issues with graphics on top of walls
* Fire balls will now correctly spread within dust clouds
* A transference table cannot transfer mods to an item with a base mod of 1 if the other item does not also have a mod (was resulting in broken 0 charge charms.
* Fixed a rare crash during level generation (all levels), when the level generation would fail and reattempt generation, some objects were not being cleared correctly.

MISC:

* Charming and confusing enemies will agro them.
* Charms of energy, energy potions, and energy fountains will all cure charm as well a confusion (this will be continuously expanded to include all detrimental mental effects.
* All forms of healing will cure draining (will be continuously expanded to include all detrimental physical effects.).
* Merged the AI of ballistas, fire staff turrets, and normal mobs (they were using separate, routines to handle their rotation and this was causing a bunch of inconsistencies with how they would behave compared to other enemies. For example: attacking on the first turn of spotting player, trying to attack the player through a wall even though the players charmed allies are hammering away at it etc.)
* Enemies will only miss a turn if they spot the player, not if the player hits them first or they are alerted by a friend.
* Soft capped the max number of enemies per level in preparation for adding more monster vaults. (previously it was possible for levels to have wildly different numbers of enemies due to monster vault spawning).
* Capped the number of glyph rooms to one per level (same idea as far as trying to keep number of enemies and treasure per level somewhat controlled).
* In both the above cases, number of enemies and treasure still varies randomly per level but I'd like to be able to control it further up the logic chain rather than having late placed features completely throw things off.
* Charm of energy and healing now have descriptions.

RARE\_CONTENT:

* A rare chance to encounter an ogre lair level in the orc fortress levels of the main dungeon with several small side caverns full of ogres and ogre shamans.
* A rare chance to have the stairs down blocked by a locked gate with a switch somewhere else in the level.

GRAPHICS:

* This is the stuff that's taken me FOREVER to get going on and will likely consume a lot of my time in the next few weeks, as I learn and iterate on stuff continuously.
* Small hit effect when characters are hit by projectiles or melee (will eventually have variations for melee, physical projectiles, magical projectiles etc.)
* Shooting animation for the staff of magic missiles (will need to adjust and recolor for other staves / magical attacks).
* New summoning animation
* New healing animation

OPTIMIZATION:

* Another big thing that took a ton of time. Just rough optimizations all over the game trying to get things to run smoothly, should result in better FPS and less random stuttering.
* I have a 5 year old laptop that I'm testing on and will be trying to get the game to run silky smooth at 60FPS by the time of release.

## Update 0.26 - October-11-2018

Still just working on boring clean up and debugging for the web release to Kongregate and subsequent early access release.

CRASHES\_AND\_BUGS:

* Fixed: charming a wraith causes a crash w/ his attack
* Enemies that blink when hit cannot do so when immobile
* Fixed crash on entering a crypt level: (Uncaught TypeError: this.isGoodObjIndex is not a function)
* Waiting on stairs now correctly pops up the wait text
* Fixed sprinting into dangerous terrain soft locking
* Fixed enemies on a new level carrying over poison damage from enemies on previous level (lots of bugs that were confusing me on this one w/ enemies on a new level taking bits of damage, blinking, fire pots randomly exploding etc.)
* Fixed NPC healing (they were healing a % of the casters HP rather than the targets). This will likely make healers harder.

DESCRIPTIONS:

* What started as a simple desire to add better descriptions to talents and abilities turned into a massive rewrite.
* Talents now show what sort of improvements they make when you upgrade them.
* I believe this same system will allow me the very easily add enemy attacks and ability damage to their mouse over description.

GRAPHICS:

* Fixed the layering on walls so that characters and objects are behind the walls rather than on top.
* Updated the tiles to the new style in crypt, arcane and sewers.
* Updated cave wall tiles to be the same height as the dungeon walls.
* Fiddled with height of walls so that the rim around the top lines up for all the various directions.
* Not super happy with how everything looks right now, so this will be a continuous iterative process.
* Added correct title screen: Rogue Fable III
* Added back the scrolling maps on the title screen

MISC:

* Doubled the poison damage of all NPCs (poison was generally pretty weak compared to just the standard melee attacks).
* Flaming hands no longer uses mana.
* While adding descriptions to talents/abilities which required an absurd amount of refactoring I ended up fixing a whole bunch of missing stuff on talents that I've since forgotten about. Generally, many talents have had additional levels added to them, their duration is now effected by their associated skill/power, just a lot of little tweaks and fixes here.

## Update 0.25 - October-08-2018

BUGS\_AND\_CRASHES:

* Fixed a crash where your cleave kills a summoner and then tries to cleave the empty tiles previously occupied by his summons.
* Fixed crash on changing levels w/ an active life spike.
* Fixed certain angles showing valid ranged targeting and then having the projectile hit walls or objects.
* Merchant was occasionally not spawning in swamps 4/4 as there was not enough room to place him.
* Fixed a soft lock when sprinting or charging when charmed by a succubus.

MISC:

* Strafe dodge now works against melee attacks.
* Game will now prompt the player if he is about to step onto a dangerous tile i.e. fire shrooms or poison gas (hold shift to force move into danger)
* Exploration will now halt upon spotting friendly NPCs, enchantment tables, transference tables, attribute fountains.
* Arcane portals now show up on mini-map.
* Player and stairs are outlined on mini-map to make them more distinguishable.
* Arcane tower now spawns water and pillars again (messed it up awhile ago when fiddling with room gen and it was just making boring, empty rooms).
* Player must now be on top of stairs and either click the HUD button or use < or > to use the stair case (so you can now wait on stairs).

## Update 0.24 - October-06-2018

BUGS\_AND\_CRASHEs\*Fixed axes and spears not attacking crates.

* Fixed: Enemies trampling or otherwise knocking back the player onto a trap or into a corner and crashing game (not on tileIndex).
* Fixed: Very specific crash when shooting a projectile that causes a status effect ex. life spike at a reflecting golem standing on a trap.
* Fixed: Infectious Disease description
* Fixed: nests were spawning terrain around them ex. bones, upon reloading a level rather than just when they are initially created.
* Fixed: npcs were not saving their mana on save/reload of levels (caused nests to continue spawning NPCs infinitely)
* Fixed: spider queen has a limited number of eggs to spawn so you can't farm her for infinite exp
* Fixed: killing the caster of smite or fire storm should now correctly remove targeting squares (this was caused by another one of those timing issues, since it only occurred w/ damage dealt from status effects ex. infectious disease or life spike).
* As a side note, recent fixes to bugs have tightened up a lot of this timing stuff so please report if you are still getting killed and appear to have HP remaining along w/ a description of what you think killed you + what you think healed you simultaneously. Leveling up at some time as dying is currently a known example of this.

MISC:

* Fire cast atop ice will now destroy the ice.
* Characters that are immobile i.e. trapped in a bear trap, cannot be knocked back.
* Flying characters (including player) will not be knocked back on slippery surfaces.

NEW\_TALENT\_MENU:

* Still very temporary at this point (all UI stuff will remain temporary for a long time as underlying stats and mechanics keep changing).
* Scrolls if the num talents in either column are exceeded so should not have issues anymore of getting to many talents and spilling out.
* Shows the your current talent level / max talent level.

## Update 0.23 - October-05-2018

STATUS EFFECTS:\*NPCs will now save status effects when passing between levels

* Player will now save status effects when saving / reloading

BUGS\_AND\_CRASHES:

* Fixed the crash upon reloading w/ charms (Cannot read property 'mana' of undefined)
* Fixed so you can buy books from merchants
* Temporarily charmed enemies will not become permanently charmed when using stairs (part of status effect update)
* Auto explore will not attempt to infinitely attack crates w/ a bow when in min range
* Fixed merchant cost text location
* Fixed boots of speed completely messing up and soft locking sprints / charge
* Removed pit vaults from end levels

MISC:

* When a cloud is created it will now destroy existing clouds on the same tile (fixes some odd issues w/ various clouds not dealing damage after being spawned on a tile w/ an existing cloud).
* Merchant only tries to provide upgrades when he actually stocks his inventory in order to prevent the buy / sell mod exploit.
* Added a final test at end of players turn to remove sprint / charge effect (hopefully will catch lingering issues here)
* Added sizes to all NPCs which can be seen in the mouse over text description.
* Player can no longer use abilities / consumables on the death screen
* Axes and pole arms will not hit charmed NPCs
* Saving and loading over a pit will not make you fall down on reload (even though you are levitating)
* Knock back should trigger every trap an enemy is knocked over
* Immobile creatures will not follow you up stairs
* Wands will not recharge upon selling them to merchants
* Merchant will adjust the buy/sell price of wands based on remaining charges

## Update 0.22 - October-02-2018

CRASHES\_AND\_BUGS:

* Fixed nimble fingers immediately crashing the game upon learning it
* Confused enemies will no longer attack the merchant and other neutral NPCs
* Stopped player from being able to click consumables, abilities, weapons etc. while sprinting / charging
* Fixed auto explore w/ ogre (still need to check a few more edge cases here)
* Stopped auto explore trying to send you into pits
* Fixed sprinting and charging trying to send you into pits
* Fixed 'failed to place stairs' crash in swamps (it should automatically retry generating the level until it succeeds).
* BIG ONE: fixed save + quit + refresh + reload rendering player unable to move (this occurred 100% of the time and was getting confused with other bugs.)

STAFF\_OF\_MAGIC\_MISSILES:

* Casters now start w/ a ranged staff though much weaker then their elemental versions
* The plan here is to differentiate them from the melees starting weapons but not give them a weapon that will take them all the way to the end game as in RFII
* Also opens up the possibility of future casters that may not have a decent basic damage spell in their starting kit to still have some ranged damage (enchanter)

STAVES\_UPGRADES:

* Fire staff does more damage
* Storm staff has a small AoE (same as fireball)
* Poison staff has had its damage doubled
* Staves of energy cast magic-missiles like the starter staff
* All elemental staves provide a spell power bonus
* Added Staff of Power: casts magic missiles on attack and grants generic spell bonus
* Added Orb of Power: shield slot orb that grants generic spell bonus

ENCHANTER\_CLASS:

* Confusion: as per scroll but with increasing AoE size and duration per talent level (modified by the generic spell power stat)
* Charm: temporary form of domination w/ duration modified by talent level and the generic spell power stat
* Mesmerize: puts a group of enemies to sleep
* Fear: same as scroll but again with extended AoE and duration based on talent and stats(edited)

TALENTS:

* Classes no longer technically start w/ a book rather they just have a set of talents that define their starting kit
* Books now randomly select 3 talents from their 'school' so you could find two different books of fire w/ different talents
* Reduced all ability talents (power strike, spells etc) to 3 talent levels and spread power across accordingly

NOTES:

* Changes to talents are going to allow me to add a lot more talents per school without having to cram them all into single books (I'd like to have 10+ talents per 'school' eventually)
* Less talents per book balances against the new bookshelves
* Changes to the talent levels reflects my goal of making abilities i.e. activatable things much stronger than passive bonuses and easier to level. It should now be much easier for a character to grab and upgrade abilities outside of his basic kit.