First of all, congratulations to Sinphaltimus for being the first player to win Wizard’s Doom! Along the way to a 93 rating, he also discovered several bugs I had to fix with the final encounter… Well done!
As I’m working on the CRPG, I want to make sure that the game has enough depth in play that it remains interesting all the way to the end. Some things I’m adding and changing in design:
- Weapons, armor and spells now use a damage type system, with slashing, piercing, blunt, fire, cold, etc. This allows for nuances like a skeleton being tougher to kill with a sword than a club.
- Weapons now have a throwing quality, so you can throw them in combat. Most are one-time use in this manner and it leaves you without a melee weapon for the rest of the combat. Some magical weapons return to you, allowing unlimited use in this manner.
- As part of moving item names and attributes into CPU memory, I can also have a “readied” weapon approach much like Tunnels of Doom did. So switching from a melee to a ranged weapon to a spellbook takes an action point.
- I may expand the party size from 4 to 6, but only allow you to create up to 4 maximum to start with.
- On that note, I may need to add a “hostel” system of some kind so you can remove characters but retrieve them later.
- I’m considering adding an “item storage” system so you can bank extra items for retrieval later.
- After thinking about it awhile, I think I will add in attributes and also expand out the skill sets. Because I can keep more active data in memory more easily, the calculations aren’t as crunched as they used to be. My chief concern is to avoid having any classes become automatically “better” than another.
I’ve actually completed all the regular sized monster graphics for the first quarter of the game, which was a lot of fun to do. My “monster editor” proved to be an easy and fast tool to do the work with!
The “boss monsters” are taking more time, mainly because I’m trying to get them to look just right.
I’ve also been re-working monster statistics to match my new approaches. For certain damage types, reduction applies, for others it doesn’t. That means monsters may end up with a lot more health than the players typically have, since they may have no damage reduction at all against a particular common attack.
I still need to get the transactions done for content, and I may need to create some more tools to convert text listings into binary code so I can easily update item lists, monster statistics and so forth. After that’s all done I hope I can start working on the common and travel modules and getting the game engine back on it’s feet!