Unique Weapons

I just added unique weapons to my roguelike game engine. There are only a handful of them now. You never run into these weapons by just wandering the dungeon. You must defeat specific unique monsters. That causes the unique weapons to appear.

The explanation is that the some unique monsters carry unique weapons. They drop them when they die. The power of some of the uniques I got requires you to find and wield the unique weapons. Now that I got this done, I should be able to easily add unique armor.

I still need to do some testing on the unique weapon generation code. The unique monsters that carry the weapons occupy the lower levels of the dungeon. I have yet to implement any dungeon levels other than 1.

Looks like I know what feature I need to implement next. Then I test.

Stairways

One of the last features to add in my JSRL roguelike game is multiple levels. I implemented this feature today. You need stairs up and down. Of course the topmost level should not have a stairway leading up. And the lowest level should not have a stairway going down.

I wanted to make the stairway movement logical. That means if you go down a stairway to get to a lower level, then you should be right at the location in the lower level where the reverse stairway exists. It was a little tricky, but I got that right. You walk down the stairs to find yourself standing on the stairway that leads back up to the higher dungeon level.

The final major feature I need to add is monsters. I am saving that task for tomorrow.

Gold in the Hills

I need something to give the players of my JSRL roguelike a score. One part will be how much gold they collect. Today I implemented placing random amounts of gold in the dungeon. Then I had to implement a gold display that shows how much you have collected so far. This display will be part of the main player stats line.

There are only two more ideas I want to implement before I call this 7DRL a success. They are multiple dungeon levels and monsters. I think I will tackle the multiple dungeon levels issue next. I want the whole game to be 10 levels. I just need to add some staircases up (and down if you are lower than dungeon level 1). Then I want to make sure the lower levels have more gold.

Pablo is Moving Forward

I had previously played PabloQuest and had some problems with it. Turns out I did not fully understand how the game worked. Once I figured that out, the game did not seem to freeze.

I heard from the author of PabloQuest. Apparently he has a new version out. I downloaded and played this new version. Immediately I saw some new stuff. You start out a new game by stating how many levels you want to play.

This time around I paid more attention to your companion Quest. I guess he is a dog or something. Quest will go into a room and kill the monsters for you. Works for me.

There are still questions I have. For example my hit points don't seem to regenerate by themselves. I tried reading a scroll of heal, but got only 1HP of health back. Also I found it strange that I would walk right over top of gold. I got to press a key to grab it. Look here. I am always going to want to grab the gold. Why wouldn't I?

Finally I must have gained a character level, because I was asked what I want to increase. I answered "life". Not sure what that did. Maybe in the end, when the game is finished, I can read the manual.

Borg Unleashed

I was so distraught with my last character Bizz dying, that I decided to let the computer play for me. Therefore I fired up the Angband Borg. I decided to let the Borg be a Dunedan Mage. The idea was that the Borg would do all the boring work. Then I would take over the character later.

The Borg quickly brought my character up through the character levels. Every once in a while I would stop the Borg and check on the progress. I was most interested in any artifacts the Borg had discovered. At first there were few. Then the Borg started diving down, getting nice treasures.

By the time the Borg reached character level 50, it had great items to spare. Normally I go for the items that give me the highest speed. The Borg chose otherwise. For example, it kept a Ring of Speed +14 at home. I would be wielding that on my finger immediately. The Borg also found at left Ringil at home. Come on. It gives you +10 speed!

In the end, I just let Borg do most of the playing. It dived down to dungeons levels 81 through 99. It strangely spent a lot of time at levels 80 and 81, even when it had gone much deeper previously. Eventually the Borg character died too. I did not feel that bad. The computer did all the work. Now it is time for me to start up another character. Maybe I will not choose human mage this time.