Accidentally introduced a bug today that gave the dog apocalyptically gigantic damage.

Oops.

Besides that, I’m pretty much done with the popup work. One last popups shot, featuring the talent tree popups:

Okay, this stuff isn’t very glamorous – but it makes all the difference when someone new to the game enjoys themselves and happily clears the first level within a few minutes instead of going “huh?” a lot and not really engaging with major systems. The game makes sense now, without any introductions or explanations. That’s huge. 😀

A little more usability work and bugfixing over the next few days, then it’s onto new stuff – like enemy variation, full talent trees for all the classes and some kind of boss fight.

The Inventory screen’s finally gone entirely! Everything’s been merged into the Character screen now.

I’ve also been busy expanding popups everywhere with helpful information showing where stats come from and what they do.

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Fixed ’em.

I wanted to get a whole lot more information in there, have them be prettier and more readable and feel more solid. I think this is maybe 60% of the way there. I’ve drawn some inspiration from Diablo 3, which has huge chunky popups that tell you everything; I haven’t gone quite as crazy as they did, though. There’s only so much you can do in 640×480.

I’ve started taking information that shows up in various panes in the current UI and moving it into popups:

It’ll now show you what potions and spells do (see the first shot) without you having to open the Inventory screen. More importantly, this’ll let me drop what’s left of the Inventory screen – those six equipment boxes – into the Character screen and get rid of the Inventory button altogether. Here’s to a cleaner, more informative UI. 😀

SHOPS are now in! You can buy stuff from scavengers. CQ2’s got a rudimentary economy, which will grow a bit shortly when I add gold stashes to loot drops, give you a gold bonus if you rush through a level instead of exploring it fully, and (possibly) allow you to carry gold over between runs like in Desktop Dungeons.

STATUS: Enemies now show little icons when they’re afraid, charmed or asleep. This is part of a whole battery of changes to combat – I’ve also been tweaking combat, delaying enemy actions, adding “block” animations and so on to make what’s going on in fights much clearer.

Last of all, I’ve just added the first terrain buff: bushes give you a Stealth buff so you can sneak up on people through them.

I’ve also been optimising enemy movement and plugging away at usability fixes. It’s been a productive few days and the game’s starting to feel much more playable. 😀

A few more major tasks and I’ll have finished my second milestone out of four on CQ2… then I’m on to adding an absolute ton of content!

I’ve recently been getting pretty sick lately of having a mess of an almost-game on my hands while I rummage around in its internals, fixing things and rewiring others. Since the last update I’ve focused on getting everything into a coherent (if crap) playable state – story, music, combat balance, shops, etc – just so I can finally get it in front of some people and start getting some feedback.

For example, with introductory plot and level entrance paths, town/forest levels now start a bit like this:

See? Crap but functional. Everything’s there (the UI slides in after), even if some of the stuff in the game is a bit wonky or placeholder. That copy’s not final, for example… the game’s going to have a slightly more serious tone!

Yesterday at Cambridge Indies CQ2 got its first real playtest, a quick runthrough by dock that gave me a ton of motivation and about a dozen things to fix. I’m now fixing all that stuff and similar things as they occur to me, so instead of my recent work featuring bold new systems and dialogs, my change log now looks like this:

The “Level up” notification was the main point of feedback. When you level up in CQ2 you get a talent point you can spend to increase your stats, learn a new spell or upgrade an existing spell. You have to go to the character screen to spend that talent point, but  no-one was realising a) you got points to spend or b) that they’d just levelled up. Hell, I was missing it myself! There was a notification, but it was just a little glowy thing down in the corner.

I FIXED IT

It did not need to be SUBTLE.

I’m not doing much that shows up in screenshots right now. What I’m mostly doing, based on feedback and watching a few people play it briefly, is making every part of it a little tighter, clearer and smarter. The mouse behaves better. Confusing or awkward things are laid out more nicely. Things you should notice are getting more obvious or working more like you’d expect.

It’s getting more solid. Yeah, this is ‘polish’. I’d normally put it off to the end, but smoothing out these rough edges is making the game more immediately fun – and a fun game’s much more fun to work on. So here’s to polish… and to playtesting. 😀

Wow – I haven’t had any spam on this blog over the past few days. Recently I’ve been fending off a flood of the stuff, especially trackback spam… but now I’ve got comments locked down on everything except the latest posts, comments can’t contain URLs and I’ve just disabled trackbacks entirely. Maybe I’ve got it licked?

I also lost some time this week tracking down and closing an exploit due to an outdated WordPress theme, if you can believe it, after a hacker tried to have a poke around (look up TimThumb; even if you’re not using a theme that contains it, having it installed leaves your server wide open). Basically, maintaining a web presence can be a pain in the arse 😀

Anyway! DEVELOPMENT NEWS.

Shops in roguelikes have always bugged me a bit. Diablo’s towns make a sort of sense, as does the town halfway through Nethack’s mines, but they’re very specific answers to this problem of where you can trade stuff. In general roguelikes just have random shops in the middle of nowhere, staffed by a single shopkeeper, with dozens of monsters banging around outside. Dungeons of Dredmor does exactly this. It’s always felt a bit weird.

So CQ2’s got scavengers.

Scavengers aren’t exactly shopkeepers. They’re foragers, sneaking around dungeons and battlefields, staying out of trouble (with invisibility) and picking up anything valuable they find. And, what do you know – they’ll sell it to you, if you’ve got the coin.

I haven’t got the shop in yet, but it’ll be a basic extension of the item comparison screen. Scavengers will only have two or three items worth buying, which simplifies things. Here’s a mockup:

Scavengers or wandering merchants wouldn’t work in everything, but it feels like a plausible way of letting you buy stuff in the middle of apocalyptic hellholes.

Oh – and it feels nice and bleak to have NPCs in the game make a living by going out there and nicking the boots off dead people.

I’ve been working on tile system features, how loot is managed and fixing a few bugs. It’s not very photogenic stuff! Fortunately, continuing the theme of making the game’s inner workings more visible, I’ve just added a list of active buffs/debuffs.

So now when something’s affecting you, you know it’s there and you know how long it’ll last. This’ll be especially useful when I get the terrain buffs working. (Moving through hedges will be slow but stealthy! That sort of thing.)

I’m currently going over two things in my head: shops and AI placement. Shop-wise, I think I’ll have vendors scattered through the game world that have one to three items for sale at fairly high prices; gold will carry over between playthroughs, up to a limit; and if you quit a level before all the monsters are dead, you’ll get extra gold as a bonus to compensate for less XP.

As far as AI placement goes, I’m contemplating putting most of the monsters in game into squads. Squads will tend to hang around each other, and when you alert one of them the rest will become alerted as well. It’s a way to make these open town, cave and forest areas a little more interesting, to stop you from easily pulling one enemy at a time as you clear through the level. Alerted AIs will also be able to open doors sometimes, too, so perhaps when you sneak up on someone and surprise them another AI will bust through a door behind you…

Well, back to it. The to-do list’s getting longer as quickly as it’s getting shorter; I need to fix that 😀

So I’m experimenting with scattering a handful of placeholder props and things around in sensible places, to make village huts and stuff feel a bit more lived in.

In towns, chests and enemies (and other NPCs) are going to try and spawn in houses rather than out in the streets and fields.

One major aspect I’m pushing with CQ2 is bringing a sense of geography and place into the mix. It’s still a way off that mark, and my temporary graphics shouldn’t be around for long… but the systems are getting there to support it, and that’s the main thing. 😀

Cardinal Quest’s tilemaps were pretty straightforward. Each 16×16 tile was a different image: wall, floor, door, stairs. The boundaries between tile types didn’t affect the graphics at all.

If we apply this approach to forests, we’d end up with Forest Tiles and Not Forest Tiles. Something like this (though obviously with better art):

That’d work, sure. But we can do better.

The approach I’ve decided to take is to stick with 16×16 tiles generally, but allow applying a variation to just a quarter of a tile – meaning the system can use 8×8 tiles where it counts.

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