The Home Stretch

I implemented the "drop" and "take off" actions using my new easy to use menus. That's enough menu work for now. I got some unique monsters for you to fight. There are some bugs. Can't seem to pinpoint the source as they don't happen all the time. But things are going well.

Not all the menus look and behave the same. I don't think I will be addressing that before finishing the game. I probably should add a help screen where I list all the commands. Right now I am starting to figure out if I can sneak an intro screen into the game. That will take some work. Should I do that, or implement more roguelike features? We shall see.

Althought I started this thing on a Saturday, I plan to finish up some time tomorrow (Friday). This is definitely turning into my best roguelike yet. I know so because it takes a long time to do testing. That means there is a lot to the game. Oh yeah. I can feel the finish coming up soon.

Return to Roguelikes

I have been sick for a while. So work on my roguelike game engine had stopped. Today I felt really good. Got a long nap in after work and dinner. I fired up my IDE and took a look at what needed to be done in the engine.

At this point I have enough code that I need to start tracking down some bugs. One nasty one was that items would appear in the dungeon, but I could not pick them up. It was like they were not there. But they were displayed.

Today I went through the code where the player picks up the items. Then I tracked down how the items get put there in the first place. Finally I checked all the code where items get moved around. Finally I found the problem. At the beginning of the game I give the player a few low level items. I steal them from the dungeon, but don't erase them. Problem solved.

Next I tried to test out whether unique items dropped by unique monsters might get picked up by regular monsters. Was unable to set up a scenario to test this. However I did find that some unique monsters did not drop unique itesm when they should have. This is another bug to track down.

Level Up

I implemented character levels today. The player starts out at level 25, a relatively high level. I did this so we can skip the boring low level character advancement. I also wanted to give the player a chance to surive the harsh dungeon environment. This does not mean the game will be an easy win. You will just have a chance.

Along with character levels comes the opportunity to advance levels. I let the character gain the first couple character levels with ease. You just need to kill a few monsters. It gets harder and harder to advance after a while. I generously add more hit points to your maximum hit points when you gain a level.

In other news, I have been fixing some bugs I found. For example, when a monster was close to death, I got some errors computing damage that the monster did when hitting the character. This was because the damage done is based on the amount of hit points the monster has. I guess the random number generator does not want the range of random numbers to be too small.

Pretty soon I will have to add some more dungeon levels. I will also finally need to add unique monsters. With them will come the need for unique treasures (such as weapons and armor). A lot has been done. But there is so much more to do. Onward.

JSRL Version 1.3

Previously I had mentioned that my game JSRL did not work right under the Google Chrome browser. Yes it was true. But all that is a thing of the past. I just released JSRL version 1.3. And I fixed the Chrome bugs.

The layout of the game did not look well in the Chrome browser either. That got fixed as well. Functionally I added a bunch of different monsters in the game. I have not rebalanced the game as a result yet.

Here are some tough monsters I added to the game: basilisks, minotaurs, rocs, vampires, beholders, golems, liches, and nagas. There are also some other new monsters that are easy to beat like skeletons, orcs, and ogres. Next time I want to try to add a town level to the game.