Messages

1

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Wizard School Dropout - Be Mage Do Crime (Preview 5: 5/30/25 - Tower Management)

« on: May 31, 2025, 12:08:07 AM »

Preview Release 5: All Along the Watchtower has been released, adding tower management!

The headline feature for this update: You can now clean up and repair your tower, and build rooms in it that grant various bonuses or enable new actions. There are many different rooms, but a few ones I want to highlight that bring some new features to the game are:

• A training room, which actually lets you upgrade your physical stats for the first time!
• A kitchen, which lets you cook several new food recipes which have dynamic effects based on the ingredients used to make them. Most food recipes don't need to be discovered in recipe books, but are immediately available when you have a kitchen.

Full changelog at https://weirdfellows.itch.io/wizard-school-dropout/devlog/949117/release-preview-5-all-along-the-watchtower, game itself available at https://weirdfellows.itch.io/wizard-school-dropout

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Wizard School Dropout - Be Mage Do Crime (Preview 4: 5/1/25 - Mansions/Factions)

« on: April 30, 2025, 09:15:59 PM »

Preview release 4: Mansion on the Hill has been released, adding the Mansion location type, expanding the faction system, and adding difficulty settings.

IMPORTANT: Saves from previous versions of the game will not work with this version! At best, several mechanics will be broken, and it's very likely that old saves will cause errors or crashes.

This has ended up being a pretty big update, but let's start with the most notable change, which is the introduction of a new location type: Mansions!

• Mansions are full of valuable treasure, but also full of guards.
• It's possible to get an Invitation to a mansion in which case you may be able to walk in through the front door without being bothered, as long as you're well-dressed enough. If you stay on everyone's good side, some nobles you talk to may have opportunities for you.

There have also been some additions to faction interaction:

• You now gain reputation with factions as you trade with them, but gaining rep with a faction causes its enemies to like you less.
• Some previously always-hostile factions might be able to be won over and traded with now (or even start neutral rather than hostile).
• There's a new trespassing and disguise system in place when visiting locations.

Another change worth mentioning is the introduction of difficulty settings before you start the game.

Full changelog at https://weirdfellows.itch.io/wizard-school-dropout/devlog/914169/release-preview-4-mansion-on-the-hill, game itself available at https://weirdfellows.itch.io/

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Wizard School Dropout - Be Mage Do Crime (Preview 3: 3/1/25 - Air Spells!)

« on: April 21, 2025, 05:32:50 PM »

Typed up a big update talking about some of the upcoming changes but did it in the browser and accidentally reloaded and lost it all, so here's a shorter, quicker post.

I'm planning to release the next version on May 1, keeping with the more-or-less tradition of releasing on the 1st of the month. (I missed April but this update ended up getting pretty big, and maybe every 2 months is a more reasonable cadence than every month anyway)

The mansions themselves are building and populating nicely, and all the dialog and mini-quests there are done. But the scope of the update got a little bigger than that. As part of developing the non-hostile interactions in the mansion and adding related factions, I ended up expanding factions in general.

Trading with factions now increases your reputation with them over time. And if you become friendly with a faction, they'll send you gifts.


What's the Dorian Club? You'll have to find that out on your own.

A new trespassing/authorized/disguise system when visiting locations has been implemented. Being friendly with a faction lets you freely walk around locations owned by that faction, although if you're seen committing any crimes they'll still become hostile. If you're neutral with them, you might be able to wear certain equipment to blend in and walk around undisturbed instead. But if you're an enemy, they'll be hostile to you no matter what.

The Wizards faction now starts neutral to you, and can be traded with. Wizard towers use the trespassing system detailed above, and as it happens your starting equipment makes you look like a wizard, letting you blend in at the towers.



Vampires can technically become friendly if you kill enough Grievers, and I did enable trading with them so you can sell them blood, but there's not really much interaction there with them yet. I'll be expanding on them in the future though.

A pretty nice technical change is coming in this update too: I've massively decreased the amount of time it takes for maps to generate. The mansion maps are bigger and more complex than the other maps so far and were taking an unacceptable amount of time to generate, so I decided to profile the map generation code and see where the slowdowns were happening.

Turns out that every time a tile was being changed, it was recalculating what the player could see. This is what we want if it happens during regular gameplay, and is not something that happens that often anyway. But when generating a new map, it doesn't need to happen since 1) we refresh the player's sight immediately when they arrive anyway, 2) the player isn't even on the new map yet so doing that is just refreshing the player's sight on the map they're about to leave, and 3) because hundreds of tiles are being changed at the same time, meaning the sight's being refreshed hundreds of times in a row!

The refresh sight code is relatively time consuming - quick enough that it's not an issue once a turn or when a tile changes in play, but doing it hundreds of times definitely adds up. I made it not do that and now all maps are generating in less than a second. Even the test code that generates 50 maps in a row to check for errors, which used to take a few minutes, now takes less than 10 seconds. So that'll make playing the game much nicer.

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Wizard School Dropout - Be Mage Do Crime (Preview 3: 3/1/25 - Air Spells!)

« on: March 19, 2025, 02:03:38 PM »

I've created a couple of surveys for people who've played the game. I'd appreciate your feedback!

The first survey (and the biggest focus, at the moment) is focused on debt and item value. The next release is going to feature mansions, which have a lot of valuable-but-not-useful loot, so I'm looking to take this opportunity to rebalance the values of items and the debt, and I'm curious what people's experiences have been with them so far in play.

Debt survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScU3Jp1TMIjd_OLSj3z-_vigCyYDScOlvhJD8_0TSiw2DQDKw/viewform

The second survey is more general questions about what you like/don't like about the game so far. It's less directed, but if I see that a multiple people saying the same thing, it might give me an idea of things to focus on that I might not otherwise have thought of on my own.

General survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeZ2QNd6UilvPeeCzFhzY14dVrnB6d0W40GQ1NU7HX99mTQtA/viewform?usp=dialog

And here's some information about some new stuff! I'm currently working on adding a new location type: Mansions, full of expensive loot.

Mansions can of course be assaulted like other locations, but they're heavily guarded so that might not always be the best idea.

Instead, if you haven't managed to piss off the nobility yet, you might be able to walk right through the gate! Fancy nobles are always having each other over for parties and to show off their homes, so if you manage to get an invitation for one of them (or bribe the guards!), and you're dressed the part, you might just be allowed to wander around unimpeded!



Though you may be allowed inside, that doesn't mean you're just allowed to take whatever you want, though. If you're caught stealing, you will get a chance to put the item back, which will prevent everyone from becoming hostile towards you. This will also apply in most other situations where creatures who aren't already hostile towards you catch you stealing.



Once you've gained access to the mansion through peaceful means, there are a variety of nobles inside to talk to. Some may offer mini-quests you can do which will grant small rewards and increase your favor with the nobility, and may even lead to contacting a new faction with plenty of disposable income to throw your way...

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Wizard School Dropout - Be Mage Do Crime (Preview 3: 3/1/25 - Air Spells!)

« on: March 12, 2025, 12:53:19 PM »

They're not procedurally generated. There are a wide variety of spells in addition to your basic damage spells, some with pretty unique effects, so I think procedurally generating them would actually make things less interesting because it'd force them more into a standard framework.

Right now it's mostly set upgrades, though the framework exists to expand beyond that so it may in the future. And actually, technically that is sort of in the game already - you can find damage/healing formulas you can apply to your spells that extend those values beyond what their built-in upgrades do, but I feel like you're asking for something a bit more interesting, in line with Rift Wizard's shrines or something.

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Wizard School Dropout - Be Mage Do Crime (Preview 3: 3/1/25 - Air Spells!)

« on: March 06, 2025, 02:36:31 PM »

Currently, there are "corruption" values that are tied to specific magic types. As your corruption value increases, your power with that magic type usually increases, but you also acquire some downsides.
For example, the death corruption "Necrosis" makes your max HP decrease and you are more vulnerable to Rot damage (a damage type that undead are extra susceptible to).
It's on my list to expand and deepen this system though. So rather than just being flat modifiers corruption will cause you to gain mutations, some helpful, some harmful.

There are a couple of addictive substances in the game that grant benefits when taken, but have a chance of causing withdrawal when the effects wear off. For vampire blood, after using it you're stronger, faster, and regenerate HP, but while withdrawing from it you're slower and weaker. Withdrawal isn't a permanent effect, it can be waited out or mitigated by taking more (though that will lead you right back to withdrawal again once it wears off).

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Wizard School Dropout - Be Mage Do Crime (Preview 3: 3/1/25 - Air Spells!)

« on: February 28, 2025, 10:19:30 PM »

A major update to WSD today with Preview 3, the Air arcana is now available! It features a variety of air and electricity spells. Air-themed wizard towers are now available as a potential location, and added air and electric based items, creatures, and enchantments.

If you haven't played Wizard School Dropout yet, now's a great time to try it! https://weirdfellows.itch.io/wizard-school-dropout





In addition to air spells, there have been quite a few QoL and content changes as well, full changelog available here: https://weirdfellows.itch.io/wizard-school-dropout/devlog/894372/release-preview-3-electric-feel

And here's the list of air spells available:

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Wizard School Dropout - Be Mage Do Crime (Initial Release)

« on: January 02, 2025, 12:45:04 AM »

AppImages are supposed to be nearly universal for Linux, but I guess Linux wouldn't be Linux if there weren't edge cases haha. Glad you were able to get it working!

Thanks for pointing out the vampire thing, I'll fix that.

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Wizard School Dropout - Be Mage Do Crime (Preview 5: 5/30/25 - Tower Management)

« on: January 01, 2025, 06:15:02 PM »

Excited to announce the initial release of my new roguelike, Wizard School Dropout! Available for Windows and Linux, currently for free:
https://weirdfellows.itch.io/wizard-school-dropout

You left wizard school in disgrace. Cast out of magical society, you have only one option to pay off your exorbitant student loans: crime.

Using the unlicensed but probably mostly safe portal generator you found in a mysteriously abandoned tower, go on heists where you infiltrate and steal from the rich and powerful.

Wizard School Dropout is a magic-focused, turn-based traditional roguelike featuring lots of environmental interaction and spell combinations for a wide variety of playstyles. Do you want to go in loud, blowing holes in the walls with fireballs and incinerating everyone who stands in your way, teleport into and out of safety, or just waltz in and use mind powers to make the guards forget you were even there?

Features

• Magic-focused gameplay with a wide variety of spells that can be upgraded and customized.
• Large amount of environmental interactions and effects. Light furniture on fire, freeze water to walk across it, spill all sorts of dangerous chemicals on the floor.
• Short heists and "dungeons" within a longer-term game: "coffeebreak" style gameplay mixed with a longer campaign.
• Varied playstyles. Blast everyone who stands in your way or sneak through in magical darkness. Terrify guards away or freeze them solid, Turn your enemies against each other or summon powerful creatures to do your bidding for you.
• Customize and upgrade your wizard tower home base.

Other Things You Can Do

• Study magic books, artifacts, or materials in order to improve your spells and gain new abilities
• Become corrupted by forbidden knowledge and curses, or addicted to vampire blood
• Increase your magic power through insights gained from dreams
• Smoke hookah with and befriend chill wizards
• Trade secrets with cats

Current Status
The game is fully playable and winnable at this point, but still in development and much more content is planned.

This initial release features three magic types: Death, Fire, and Water, and two location types: Wizard's Tower (with variants for each magic type) and Vampire Crypt.

UPDATE 3/1/25: Air magic is now available!
UPDATE 5/1/25: Mansions have been added as a location type, and the faction system has been expanded!
UPDATE 5/30/25: Your tower can now be repaired, and new rooms built.

Screenshots

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Possession: Play as a ghost and possess other monsters! (10/3/19: Version 10)

« on: January 24, 2020, 09:15:54 PM »

A few versions of Possession have been released since my last post.
V11:

Content Changes:
    Removed the "Adjusting to New Body" condition
    Levels are now generated 60 x 60 tiles rather than 75 x 75 tiles. This also decreases the number of creatures on the level (but the density is slightly increased)
    The old 75 x 75 size can be enabled as a "Cheat" (now called "Game Modifiers") on the new game screen
    The trail of slime from the snailperson is no longer applied on water

Bug Fixes:
    Fixed a crash that could be caused by moving using the mouse and then getting shot with a healing syringe by the orc healer
    Fixed a crash that happened when you quit directly from the new game screen
    Fixed a crash that could happen when clicking on certain locations in the load game screen

Misc:
    On a crash, the game now saves an error log in the following locations:

Linux: ~/.local/share/possessionroguelike/
Windows: C:Users(YourUserName)AppDataRoamingpossessionroguelike
Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/possessionroguelike/

V12:

New Features:
    Rather than auto-assigning points to your stats when you kill an enemy, you can now choose which stats you want to increase from the character screen. There's a setting to set it back to the old style where it randomly assigns
    Tombstones can now generate on levels where you've died, with the name of your character & date of their death.

Miscellaneous:
    The game will now try to autosave if it crashes. It does this in a new file, so it doesn't risk corrupting your old save.

V13:

Biggest change this version is the introduction of the Mausoleum as a potential first level. It has the same creatures as the Graveyard (because I think they're a good set to learn the game on), but a different layout so there's a bit more variety at the beginning of each game.



Content changes:
    Dwarven bombers are less likely to throw bombs on any given turn, hopefully making them slightly less annoying.
    Added an AI-only cooldown for the Brainiac's hypnotize ability, so they don't spam it constantly.
    Spiderwebs now only cause one turn of web paralysis.
    Ratlings are now all in the same faction, so if you're possessing any type of ratling, other ratlings of any type won't generally be hostile unless something else causes them to be.
    If the [redacted] is under your command, you're able to [redacted].

Interface Fixes and Changes:
    You can now move the cursor over the tiles on the map borders.
    The popups that show damage now have a small variation in their speed, and speed up as they get older. This way, if a creature takes two hits at the same time you might be able to read both of them.
    Description boxes from mousing over sidebar buttons will no longer show while a window (for example, the spell screen) is open.

Modding:
    Added a calc_damage callback, which can return a number to change the amount of damage being done.

Possession is currently 25% off for the Steam Sale: https://store.steampowered.com/app/629340/Possession/
I also recently posted a "2020 in Roguelikedev" post with a retrospective on 2019 and outlook for 2020: https://www.reddit.com/r/roguelikedev/comments/etak1x/2020_in_roguelikedev_possession/

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn-based) / Re: Possession: Considering shortening the game

« on: November 12, 2019, 12:29:58 AM »

1. How long does it take to get to level 5?

2. Is this a project you love, or a combo of love and want to make money from? Making money is OK

1. For me, who made the game and so don't have to deal with learning what new things do, it takes about 1-2 hours for a winning plathrough. I'd imagine for the people who have won it's taken longer since they probably play more conservatively since they're less experienced with it.
I haven't seen how long it takes me just to get to level 5. I'd guess slightly less than half of that, since the first few levels are easier.

10 levels doesn't sound like a big game, how large is one level? If the difficulty of the game is anywhere near traditional roguelikes then I think only 10-20% players will win it. Making it easier (rather than shorter) could be a better option, but then you could alienate experienced players. How about adding difficulty levels in some form?

Also, another thing is that roguelikes are supposed to be difficult, that's one of the reasons some players like them. If the gameplay is enjoyable then winning is not that important or it may be a longer term task for the player to learn how to win the game.

Levels are 75x75 tiles. I've had some feedback that they might be too big, so I'll probably be shrinking them.
I'm actually not too concerned about the win stats, my line of thinking is along the lines that there's a significant amount of content most players aren't seeing, and moving it to the part of the game that people are experiencing would increase the variety of that part of the game (basically doubling the content), which would would make it more enjoyable.

I do have some difficulty options available when players start a new game, although I have them in a menu called "cheats" which may stop some people from using them.

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn-based) / Possession: Considering shortening the game

« on: November 06, 2019, 10:48:42 PM »

Hopefully a few of you on here have played Possession, and might have an opinion on this.
(If you haven't played it, it's a game where you play as a ghost and try to make your way back to the surface while possessing monsters along the way. It, as well as a free demo, is available from https://weirdfellows.itch.io/possession and https://store.steampowered.com/app/629340/Possession/)

tl;dr:

Very few people have reached the halfway mark, let alone the end of Possession. The game is currently 10 levels plus the surface, and I'm considering shortening it to be only 5 levels plus the surface. The current level 5+ creatures and levels would be rebalanced and added to the earlier levels. Would anyone actually *dislike* that? Are there any major disadvantages to this that I'm missing?

Longer Explanation:

I'm looking into making more content for Possession, but I'm wondering about where to focus my energy.

Right now, the game has 10 levels plus the surface. 64% of people have made it to level 2. I'm mainly concerned with the experience of these players, since anyone who hasn't probably either decided they weren't interested in the game, or just hasn't played it much yet.

14% of the people who made it to level 2 made it to level 5. Fair enough.

3% of the people who made it to level 2 made it to the surface, and 22% of those who made it to level 5 made it to the surface.

Unfortunately, I don't know more specifically how far most people are getting, or how often people are making it to level 5 but no farther, etc. But for 86% of the players who've put any amount of time into the game, half the content might as well not even exist, and for 97% of players, they've never made it all the way through the game.

There are a couple of reasons this might be the case:

• The later levels are too hard.
• The game's too long.

My suspicion is that #2 is the issue. Although there's a lot of variety in creatures and levels, there's not really a ton of variety in the way you play the game as you get further on (besides maybe needing to be more conservative with bodyswapping), so it's very possible that the game outstays its welcome.

So, I'm considering shortening the game to be only 5 levels plus the surface. The current level 5+ creatures and levels would be rebalanced and added to the earlier levels. In addition to making the game shorter, this also has the advantage of adding more variety between playthroughs, by expanding the possible content you could see at any given level (I'd probably also make it so that the first level isn't *always* the Graveyard, to make the beginning less repetitive as well).

I guess the major question is, would anyone actually *dislike* that? Are there any major disadvantages here that I'm missing?

It's not as though it would make the game "too easy," since only 14% of players are making it to level 5 anyway. If you've beaten the game as is, maybe it'll cheapen your feeling of achievement, but there's not a ton of people who have done that (but if you have and dislike this change, please reach out and let me know your thoughts).

For what it's worth, the original 7-Day Roguelike version of Possession was only 5 levels, and didn't have nearly the variety of levels and creatures this one does. If you've played both, I'm very curious what your thoughts are comparing the two.

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Possession: Play as a ghost and possess other monsters! (8/14/19: Version 1.0.7)

« on: October 30, 2019, 10:20:06 PM »

Missed posting this, but versions 1.0.8 and 10 have been released. I'm changing the version numbers to reflect the release number, rather than sticking with semantic versioning (1.X.X), because it didn't make much sense.

Version 1.0.8 Changes:
- You can use the Enter key on the numpad everywhere you can use the main Enter/Return key
- You can now select "it" as your pronoun when starting a new game
- The minimap gets less visible if you mouse over it

Version 10 Changes:
-The UI can now be scaled from the Settings menu. This only affects the in-game UI, not the other menus. I wouldn't recommend using it if you're not on a 4K screen, because it doesn't look very good. Anyone who does have a 4K screen, please let me know how it looks for you, and if I should update the rest of the screens to scale as well.
-If clicking would cause you to move, it now shows an arrow rather than the targeting reticule
-Fixed a crash that could be caused when receiving an achievement without Steam open

If you haven't grabbed Possession yet, it's now a spooky 13% off for Halloween on both Steam and itch.io!

https://weirdfellows.itch.io/possession (until November 4)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/629340/Possession/ (until November 1)

If you do have it and enjoy it, please consider leaving us a review!

14

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Possession: Play as a ghost and possess other monsters! (8/14/19: Version 1.0.7)

« on: August 25, 2019, 01:48:11 PM »

Version 1.0.7 (the zoom update) is released, as well as a demo version now being available on steam

Interface Changes:
-You can now zoom in and out. This can be done using the scroll wheel, or by using the - and = keys on top of the keyboard - rebindable from settings, of course! Only applies to the gameplay graphics, not the UI (UI scaling is the next project).


Modding:
-You can now easily add creatures to a special level by returning a levelCreatures table from a mod. Example: levelCreatures={graveyard={'graverobber'}}


Bug fixes:
-Fixed a crash that occurred when using the scroll wheel on the spell selection screen

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Possession: Play as a ghost and possess other monsters! (8/4/19: Version 1.0.6)

« on: August 06, 2019, 11:44:34 PM »

Version 1.0.6 (The minimap update) released!



Interface Changes:

• There's now a minimap! It can be disabled from the settings page.
• The stairs up are now colored yellow in ASCII mode, and have an up arrow attached to the tile in graphical mode. The up arrow is drawn on top of whatever else is on the tile, so if something is standing on the stairs it's easier to see them.
• The default preferences are now set to show creature stats on the sidebar. (This only applies to people who haven't played the game yet)

Gameplay changes:

• Flying creatures who move over water while on fire now have their fire put out

Code/modding changes:

• Tilesets can now have separate colors for the ground and the walls in ASCII mode (and the Graveyard has been updated to use this feature to more closely match its appearance in graphical mode)
• There's now a Map:get_blocking_feature function to check and return a movement-blocking feature in a tile

Bug fixes:

• Fixed a crash in the credits screen in ASCII mode

Steam version on Linux:

• Possession now launches using your system's libraries rather than the Steam runtime's. This is to fix an issue where the game was not launching on some systems (notably running Manjaro). If this causes a problem and the game's not able to launch on your system when it could before, please let me know!