Announcing Brogue v1.5
Pender
Windows and Linux. Downloads, screenshots and a forum can be found
here:
https://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/home
New features since v1.4:
- Dungeons now include interactive “quest rooms,” which include lock-
and-key puzzles, collapsing/flooding terrain, hidden items, elaborate
traps, challenges, boss monsters and more.
- All new weapons: spears/pikes, which hit an adjacent enemy and the
enemy behind it; axes, which hit all adjacent enemies; and maces/
hammers, which hit twice as hard and require an extra turn to recover
afterward.
- Added item description screens, which include useful statistics
about the item and are accessible via the inventory or by examining a
discarded item on the ground.
- New monsters, items and weapon/armor runic abilities.
- Monster descriptions include statistics about how certain staffs
and wands will harm or affect the monster, and whether the monster is
carrying an item that it stole from you.
- Messages and monster descriptions are color-coded for clarity.
- Monsters that can blink will now do so more intelligently to
approach enemies, flee attackers and escape harmful terrain.
- Numerous tweaks to make colors crisper and the interface less
distracting.
- Allies get stronger over time at a faster rate, are able to attack
wall turrets, and are better at following you down pits and stairs.
- Monsters are no longer generated in sight of the level start.
- Merged Potions of Healing and Extra Healing; eliminated Scrolls of
Sanctuary.
- Gold is now generated independently from items, both to reduce the
variance of per-game aggregate gold quantity and to stop gold from
being generated at the expense of items.
- Rings now auto-identify after being worn for a while, similarly to
armor and weapons.
- Subtle change in ally color to distinguish allies from enemies.
- Spectral blades and other inanimate creatures do not avoid gas
clouds if the clouds would not affect them.
- Wisdom is now a ring instead of an armor runic.
- Reflection is now an armor runic instead of a ring.
- Cancellation is now called negation; certain monsters are marked as
animated by magic and will die if negated. New Scrolls of Negation
will negate all creatures and items within your field of view (but
will not affect items in your inventory). Negated weapons, armor and
rings will lose their magical properties, and negated wands and staffs
will lose their charges.
- Removed Scrolls of Sanctuary.
- Added a point of damage to darts.
- Creatures exposed to fire will burn about half as long.
- The duration of entrancement no longer varies with the target’s
maximum health.
- Auto-resting will terminate if you are embedded in an obstruction
and it dissolves.
- When pink jellies split, their health is divided between their
progeny, and they have commensurately more health initially.
- Items and monsters won’t spawn in hallways or doorways, but items
may spawn in shallow water.
- Detect magic icons are now also color-coded to distinguish good
items from bad.
- The ‘D’iscoveries screen specifies whether the detect magic potion
will flag that item as good or bad magic.
- Wands and staffs that are meant to target enemies once identified
will not default to auto-aiming at captive monsters.
- You can now see allies that are invisible (and wands of
invisibility will auto-identify if you use them on an ally).
- New special effects for magic mapping and aggravate monsters
scrolls.
Andrew Doull
> It is my pleasure to announce the release of Brogue v1.5 for Mac OS X,
> Windows and Linux. Downloads, screenshots and a forum can be found
> here:
>
> https://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/home
>
> New features since v1.4:
> - Dungeons now include interactive “quest rooms,” which include lock-
> and-key puzzles, collapsing/flooding terrain, hidden items, elaborate
> traps, challenges, boss monsters and more.
Colour me intrigued. How random are these? Will you get the same lock
and key puzzle in the same room every time?
Pender
Pretty random, and definitely not. The level geography is generated
randomly, and then the quest room function takes over, picks a quest
room type (of which there are currently 17, defined by the data in a
master blueprints table) and scans the level to find discrete areas
that meet certain requirements of that quest room -- e.g. a dead-end
area of certain size range that is dominated by a single chokepoint
cell. Then it adapts that area to serve as that kind of quest room.
For example -- minor spoiler, I suppose -- one of the quest rooms that
is designed to guard keys is an eel trap. The quest room function
walls the room off from surrounding hostile terrain with unbreakable
walls. Then it places a key on an altar far away from the room
entrance, a door at the entrance, and several small pools of water
around the room. Each pool of water has a level-appropriate water
monster collection added -- eels or krakens, the type and number of
which scale by the level depth. The pools are spaced far enough apart
that the player can always reach the altar without stepping in the
water. When the key is lifted from the altar, the shallow water from
the pools begins creeping outward until it floods the room, at which
point, if the player has not yet escaped, she is vulnerable to attack
from the water monsters. It accomplishes the flooding effect with a
series of clever terrain definitions. When the key is removed, the
altar's terrain definition causes it to promote, in turn promoting all
of the tiles that are part of the quest room that have a certain flag
set -- including the shallow water around the pools of water. When
that shallow water promotes, no visible change occurs, but it becomes
a different terrain type that randomly promotes again in the next few
turns. These subsequent promotions do two things: reduce the promoting
water tile to inert shallow water, and spread "active" shallow water
to the surrounding locations that have an inferior priority value in
their liquid layer. Then those tiles do the same thing, spreading
outward until they fill the room. The effect is a trap reminiscent of
Indiana Jones that requires no special code and that adapts to fit
whatever terrain already existed -- that is, it is not pre-defined on
a grid like a vault might be in Angband, and it does not rely on the
area having been generated as a "room"; it is just as much at home in
freeform areas generated by cellular automata, if they qualify. This
"eel trap" quest room is flagged to take a key from another room to
put on its altar, so it is generated only when another quest room
wishes to place a locked door at its entrance and put the paired key
up for adoption by another quest room. So the key that you take from
the eel room, assuming you escape, will be used to unlock a door
elsewhere on the level. These locked rooms can be nested within each
other, as can the rooms that guard the keys, and it is always possible
to unlock them all in a single game (though it is also possible
through careless play, in certain circumstances, to render some of
them inaccessible).
I'm very happy with the framework, and plan to continue working on it
in subsequent versions until the "set pieces" of the level are
essentially indistinguishable from the rest of the level -- hopefully
resulting in a dungeon filled with interactive features and traps as
you might see in a hand-designed dungeon crawl game, except thoroughly
procedurally generated.
Andrew Doull
> On Oct 11, 12:28 pm, Andrew Doull <andrewdo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On Oct 11, 8:20 am, Pender <penderpr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > New features since v1.4:
> > > - Dungeons now include interactive “quest rooms,” which include lock-
> > > and-key puzzles, collapsing/flooding terrain, hidden items, elaborate
> > > traps, challenges, boss monsters and more.
>
> > Colour me intrigued. How random are these? Will you get the same lock
> > and key puzzle in the same room every time?
>
> Pretty random, and definitely not.
> I'm very happy with the framework, and plan to continue working on it
> in subsequent versions until the "set pieces" of the level are
> essentially indistinguishable from the rest of the level -- hopefully
> resulting in a dungeon filled with interactive features and traps as
> you might see in a hand-designed dungeon crawl game, except thoroughly
> procedurally generated.
Having played with the new rooms in a little while, I've thoroughly
enjoyed them - and more than a little jealous since I've been planning
something similar for some time (but infrastructure changes in
Unangband have got in the way for far too long).
The only issue I can see is having some room types which require
particular objects be generated on the level. This makes it a little
predictable when e.g. testing unidentified potions. I'd like to see
multiple solutions for each room type if possible - I'm sure you're
aware of that. For spanning or destroying terrain, to use one example,
Unangband lets you fire rope arrows over chasms, summoning spiders
creates webs which can span chasms, vines can grow over chasms, you
can order flying or climbing summoned monsters to get things for you
(if they can pick up items); and will have drafts of air which
temporarily allow you to float and levers which extend bridges, boots
which allow you to walk on clouds in addition to the levitation
effect.
Of course, I'm forced to provide these alternatives because I'm not
guaranteeing connected dungeons, or at the moment saving levels.
Todd Page
Super-excited for the new version of brogue. Sounds like some
excellent work, Pender. Congrats!
So long, evening plans!
Matt_S
> It is my pleasure to announce the release of Brogue v1.5 for Mac OS X,
> Windows and Linux. Downloads, screenshots and a forum can be found
> here:
>
> https://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/home
Sounds great!
purplearcanist
Minor nitpick, why is shift necessary to examine items, why not just
press the corresponding letter?
Pender
Because the player should be able to examine items any time the
inventory is displayed, be it through the "i" command or when prompted
to pick an item for something. But in the latter case, pressing a
letter chooses the corresponding item, so shift is necessary to
distinguish the command. And if you need to hold shift to get the item
description sometimes, I had to make the interface consistent and
require it at all times -- otherwise, when prompted to enchant
something, I kept forgetting to hold shift and enchanted things I
wanted to examine.
purplearcanist
not display), I will post here.
Played through brogue, got the amulet of yendor, and a bit of
lumenstones. Made it down to dungeon level 34, and had about 13
lumenstones. Was planning to do a 26 lumenstone run, and I think it
would have been possible with this strategy. :P Loved the new special
rooms. Only reason I died was because I entered a room with four
dragons that I had scouted beforehand with clarvoyance.
However, I felt that it was due to the discovery a game breaking
srategy, I find that troll allies (and golems), in sufficient
quantities are EXTREMELY powerful, when they get healing and a ton of
other abilities they will kill everything. The only vulnerabilities
to this strategy (at least in endgame) are annoying: confusion traps
(because your allies will kill each other or you), negation (takes
away all good abilities, either allied ability reflecting off of
golems / certain casters), or discord (pretty much a death sentence,
as your other allies will gank your ally, again same sources). A
discovered wand of cloning helped too. Ironically, it actually hurt
when an ally got negation or discord. Prepare to hit yourself with a
beam of negation stupid troll.
With allies, my awesome instakill sword was only helpful against
golems.
Allies is an overpowered strategy lategame if you have the right ones
(I think trolls/golems are best) and they get the right instrincs, and
here is why:
1. Free healing/haste for yourself and allies. It heals really well,
and it doesn't require items.
2. Free attack spells on your enemies.
3. Allies will tank damage extremely well, and dish it out too.
While I think the absorb monster feature ability is cool, and its cool
that allies get more powerful, I feel that the balance of this may
need to be examined. My endgame allies were able to cover all roles,
with few vulnerabilities.
purplearcanist
-Found a bug when examining a staff of digging [?/2], it said that it
would dig through 0 tiles and some insanely huge (I think 10 million)
value when upgraded, but it worked normally. This may have been
reported.
gut
c98aa9...@s12g2000prb.googlegroups.com:
dungeon level 4, but had these observations:
I liked it enough to play it a few times, which is more than I
can say for most rl's I try. It seems a very detailed game,
especially the environment descriptions and effects. I plan to
play more.
I liked the 'sunlight trickling in' the dungeon effect.
Is it just me, or is diagonal movement upon entering or exiting
a room banned? If that is intentional, why? I cannot even open
a door diagonally. Even if a monster (which CAN move diagonally
upon room entry/exit) is on a diagonal tile, I can't attack it.
My diagonals all work fine once inside of rooms.
MONSTERS can move diagonally upon entering rooms, which causes
me to lose a step while chasing them.
The 'lose your items in the water current' thing is funny, but
only the first time, after that it is annoying.
I liked the effect from setting monsters and environment on fire.
If there was a way to chose a primary missile, like loading
one, I couldn't find it. I was having to chose missile type
every 't'hrow, which was cumbersome.
Andrew Doull
> Pender <penderpr...@gmail.com> wrote in news:81bfe478-4da7-474c-93c5-
> c98aa927c...@s12g2000prb.googlegroups.com:
corner - that is you cannot move diagonally if the corresponding two
cardinal moves would involve moving through a wall.
> The 'lose your items in the water current' thing is funny, but
> only the first time, after that it is annoying.
better than any other way of handling movement through water (which
usually involves tedious removal and throwing of equipment).
> If there was a way to chose a primary missile, like loading
> one, I couldn't find it. I was having to chose missile type
> every 't'hrow, which was cumbersome.
You'll find as you progress that there are almost no throwing weapon
drops.
paul-d...@sbcglobal.net
water, and the need to collect my items afterwards made the whole
situation more interesting. What can I grab while swimming, do I really
need to go back for that, which things are going to wash up where I
do?