Messages

1

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: I Am Overburdened, a silly roguelike (now at 1.2.10)

« on: April 22, 2022, 06:28:22 PM »

Hello there!

Hot-fix time. Sadly version 1.2.9. contained some "glitches"

Bugs everywhere

First and foremost please accept my apology for the bugs that I left in the game. Multiple discussions were started and you reached out to me with detailed descriptions and useful reproduction steps. I'm really thankful for having such an understanding and helping community. You are awesome!

Besides delivering the fixes I will do my best to minimize the occurrence of issues of any caliber in future updates.
That is a promise

Nightmare retry

A glaring issue. I'm really sorry about it. I don't know how I could miss this. Originally (before the 1.2.9. update) when retrying or restarting the game on Nightmare difficulty, the new game would also start on Nightmare difficulty. I messed this up with the Nightmare and Treasury shuffling and changes in the Inn and it always switches back to Normal.



Now it's fixed and I wrote some new automated tests to make sure I never break this feature again!

Achievements

An achievement (more specifically Nightmare achievements) related problem was described in a community discussion. I could not reproduce any related errors on my local build, but I did make changes to Nightmare and Treasury mode handling for update 1.2.9., so I decided to look into it. I haven't found any blatant mistakes, but I did put in some extra safety code changes.
Hopefully, if there was any bug in Nightmare achievements handling it is squashed now.

Teleport path-NOT-finding

The new movement mode (teleport) seems to be very well received, which makes me super happy
On the other hand, I did manage to leave a bug in this feature as well



Not a show-stopper, but the path-(NOT-)finding and navigation systems do not handle broken chests correctly (the "Toolbelt" item allows you to break them).



Normally you should be able to plan your movement through the broken chests without a necessary stop.
Now it works as intended.

Next stop

Progress is slower than expected on tying up the loose ends of the expansion pack. Steady, but a bit slow. I may change my mind in the end and release another smaller update beforehand. Will get back to you with the decision soon

Thank you very much for your patience and understanding.
Until then, take care and stay tuned!

2

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: I Am Overburdened, a silly roguelike (now at 1.2.9)

« on: March 24, 2022, 08:40:51 PM »

Two steps forward, one step back.

Hi everyone!

As the title suggests progress has been made, but I took a really bumpy road to get here. I'm done with a new update, but even though I mentioned around two weeks multiple times, it took more than a month :/

Big-ish? Or lots of small-ish?

I wanted to release some of the new goodies of the planned expansion pack without spoiling the new content. Just new functionality. For this to happen I had to make a version of the game which is halfway between my current development build and the existing released builds, which took way more time than I originally expected. Silly me. Regardless of not featuring new content, it does bring lots of convenience features and quality of life changes

Teleport to target

There's a new mouse control mode in town: teleport!
If you play the game a lot and dislike waiting for the movement animations this will speed it up to be *instantaneous.



Path-finding is still the default option for mouse controls, but you can change your settings within the "Options" menu under the "Mouse" sub-menu using the "Control" entry.



* Only the tile-to-tile movement is changed to be lightning fast. Picking up stuff, fighting battles, or opening chests still animate the same way for the sake of clarity.

Localization

The game has been localized to Polish ( )! I'm hoping I Am Overburdened will be enjoyed by more players in Poland thanks to this. Ahoy from Hungary my dear friends

Special thanks to Daniel Oskar Moroz (MorDan) for his awesome work!



This build also includes a bunch of localization text fixes. Typos corrected, a few things renamed, some sentences re-worded, and such in multiple languages.

I would love to add even more supported languages, but at the moment the translation of the updated content is still ongoing. New translations will probably not happen in the near future. I did add support for non-Latin characters/languages (e.g.: Cyrillic or CJK) though, so strides have been made in this direction.
Maybe...

Where credit is due



The game officially supports 8 languages already. For this to happen many people contributed and I wanted to honor their work more appropriately. Previously only the translators of the currently selected language were shown in the credits menu, but now there's a menu entry to cycle through the names of everyone who worked on the texts of the game.

Nightmare and Treasury confusion



There was a "discrepancy" between the Main Menu and the Inn area in the way the Treasury game variant and the Nightmare difficulty can be accessed. In the Inn, the Nightmare difficulty (goat-skull statue) worked as a difficulty toggle and the Treasury mode was a special trapdoor.



Personally, I liked the functionality of the Main Menu much better and it made more sense (to me at least). Nightmare being a different more vicious dungeon and Treasury is simply a game alteration toggle (like the Elite variant or the Stash items).



Now the Inn matches the Main Menu. There's a separate trapdoor for Nightmare difficulty and a toggle (golden lock) for the Treasury variant.

Only fools seek their own destruction



From now on Nightmare difficulty can be unlocked and accessed immediately (without completing a dungeon on Normal first). A present for those who are feeling a bit overconfident

Quality of life

Quite a few menu changes and fixes found their way into the game with this update.



I re-organized the Help menu screens to (better) describe all the inn entities.



For multiple menu entries, "page-turner" widgets were added for enhancing mouse support. These include the "Language" entry of the Options menu, the "Window" and "Scaling" entries within the Graphics menu, and the "Control" entry in the Mouse menu.



Multiple mouse right-click handling and mouse movement focus handling bugs were fixed (Start and Controls screens).

Is it over?

The change list for this update is, but the work on the big content patch is not yet. I know this must be tiring but it is really, really close though. In fact, I'm so close to finishing it, that I don't plan to publish more tiny updates beforehand.

It looks like the next one will be the one and only long-awaited expansion pack which I'm dubbing "The Encumbered Edition"

I still don't want to pick a date since I'm super bad with deadlines ( as you can see :giggle: ), but I want to give some structure to its release. I will start preparing and posting more info (+screenshots and gifs) about it in the following days.

Stay tuned and take care!

3

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: I Am Overburdened, a silly roguelike (now at 1.2.8)

« on: February 14, 2022, 01:14:17 PM »

A trail of broken dreams.

Hello there!

Not much news on my front, but I'm doing game development (at least some, sort-of) and I'm still alive

Where have you been?

I disappeared for a looong time from the online world and from I Am Overburdened development. I really wanted to continue releasing updates for the game, but I wasn't in a good place and my circumstances did not allow it. I hope you can understand and forgive the prolonged silence.

Where are you going to?

Not a Blue Cafe specifically, but I wish to finish my plans. I wasn't putting in many hours, but progress did happen bit by bit on the I Am Overburdened content update. I'm excited to return to it. I don't know if I'll be releasing it piece by piece or as a big package, but you can come with me if you are still interested in this journey

I want to know what is new!

Hold your horses (and your enthusiasm) just yet. This is a tiny update. Kind of a "first step" for me as well towards the release of the long-awaited expansion.

New dungeon templates



5 new assets were added for allowing the map generator to create even more varied levels. The game launched with 20, now reaching 40 with this update. These new ones were carefully balanced to fit into the difficulty range of the existing game well.

Level balance fixes

Many of the existing levels had balance "bugs". The underlying dungeon templates allowed the generator to create too easy setups, or just the opposite, quite grueling ones with too big of a chance. On a few levels you easily had to fight 3 or 4 enemies to open the way to the stairs, but sometimes 0 were put in your path.



9 dungeons from the existing ones were retouched to make these less frequent and/or less extreme.

An achievement hint

I remembered that the "Van Helsing" achievement left some players confused or puzzled about the last monster. Now a small hint appears if you unlocked all the other monsters and met the one you are supposed to unlock, to "nudge" you in the right direction.



Miles of endless roads

Yep, that is it and indeed it is not much. Regardless for me, it feels like a lot, since it means I still have the drive to release updates for this lovely project and hopefully the expansion pack will materialize.

To keep my momentum up and to not leave you waiting indefinitely again, I'm planning to write another post in about a week or so. Sort of like a follow-up to detail how and when this eluding expansion can happen.
Maybe it will be accompanied by another tiny update too

Thanks for your relentless interest.
I really appreciated all your inquiries and kind words even if and when I had no strength in me to show it to you in any form!
Take care, talk to you soon.

4

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: I Am Overburdened, a silly roguelike (now at 1.2.7)

« on: November 23, 2019, 09:07:34 PM »

Hi there!

Been pretty much out of touch with the online world in the last few weeks. So I guess it is time to break the silence with an I Am Overburdened update and some news about the expansion ?!

The update

Showcasing version 1.2.7. will be short as it is a refinement build. Nothing spectacular, just a bunch of fixes and tunings.

DPI/mouse issue bug-fix

There was a problem limiting the mouse movement which occurred on non-default DPI settings and/or high desktop resolutions. Now it is fixed and there is no need for using the workaround posted on the community forums of the game.

Book of monsters enhancements



To fix the confusion around the monster unlocks I've added progress visualization. You just have to kill a single monster from a given kind and then you can check how much more of it you have to fight to successfully open detailed information about them. As a tiny addition mouse-wheel scrolling is also supported in the book (forgot to add it in the last update).

Treasury and stash upgrades



To make the item selection more streamlined in treasury mode I moved the "Random artifact" option to the first slot and implemented in-game inventory highlights based on the currently focused item. It works the same way as with other pickups (e.g.: in the shop).



Repositioned the random stash item selection too mainly for consistency.

The expansion pack

It's almost at the finish line, but not properly baked yet. Let see what it already brings to the table!

Warning, spoilers ahead...

New boss fights

The original boss fight feels underwhelming to me mechanically. I like how the story, the characters, and the outcomes turned out, but the fight itself is a bit lame. More like a randomized stronger special enemy and less like a boss
I decided to introduce 3 new completely different scenarios, to keep you on your toes while battling the Buzzard wizard.



As you can imagine the new fights will not only make the conclusion of a run more varied, but new strategies will be possible and the value of many existing items will be altered.

New artifacts

More than a dozen new items will find their way into the expanded version. I haven't settled on the final number yet, but at the moment it is close to 140 artifacts total ! They will introduce new skills and allow way different strategies especially on the early levels (e.g.: stash choices) and in the end game (e.g.: boss fights).



Another goal with the new set is to introduce more synergies and heavier focus on "neglected" attributes (vitality and defense) too.

New monsters



All the 5 new creatures planed for the update pack are ready to be released. They will work as "variations" of certain enemies. Kind of like mobs in many other dungeon crawlers. In some runs you may encounter the "Leach", in others, you will have to fight the new "Ooze" in the sewers instead. Of course, you'll be able to unlock info about these variants the same way.
This system besides making the existing game more varied will be the foundation for adding even more monsters in the future

New features



These changes are still a bit WIP and subject to change, but they are now in a shape where I can reveal them:

• Attribute redesign! "Defense" will get a bigger boost and both "Vitality" and "Speed" will receive a little reinforcement.
• The help menus will get more detailed information on certain topics (attributes & pickups).
• A new game mode affecting pickups is under development.
• Enhancements on the unlocks and statistics front.
• Re-balancing some of the existing items and obviously the boss battle(s).
• + A big secret I'm keeping to myself until release

The release?

All that is left is the when and how!
I really wanted to let this package loose this year as a Christmas present latest, but I'm not 100% sure I can do it. Will try my best and in the worst case, it will be an early new year's gift
I settled on the pricing though. Essentially it will be a free DLC. But! I'm going to charge more for the game once it is out in the wild. Only raising it by a few bucks, since charging 10$ for it would not be reasonable.

Thank you very much for taking the time to read my post and thanks for your continued support.
Stay tuned!

5

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: I Am Overburdened, a silly roguelike (now at 1.2.5)

« on: September 16, 2019, 01:39:26 PM »

Hello there!

Time for one last small update before I go into full promotion mode regarding the new I Am Overburdened expansion pack

Update

The new 1.2.6. version is more of a refinement over the existing stuff, but it packs a lovely change which I hope receives a warm welcome.

Screen transition

I've been fighting with level change for a long while to make it look good and readable. I always wanted to help the player instantly recognize where Joey is when entering a new dungeon floor. Finally what I have now feels really good

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juvf24hARWY

I should have looked into cartoons for inspiration long ago.

Bug-fixes

While testing the new content I made for the expansion I've stumbled into a few issues



A huge error found its way into the game code with the previous update. Wearing the "Wizard Hat" item could cause a crash in certain cases upon reaching a dungeon level with a number of hallucinations in it. Now it's fixed!
Please accept my apology if any of your runs came to an unexpected end due to this mistake. I'm really sorry.



As you can see on this gif some item combinations could mess up the boss fight scene. Not a major problem, but it looked pretty weird.

Bad karma (balance)

I constantly tweak difficulty related things with each update and this one is no exception. With luck and a few right choices early on you could become too overpowered and I tried to address this "problem". Now the game tries to push back a little if you are shredding everything in your path with ease. It isn't drastic but affects your luck and the pickup and chest spawn rates a bit.



The second half of the gameplay was affected mostly so the change focuses on later dungeon levels as well.

Upcoming

The time has come to start showing some real footage from the expansion pack!
The first official reveal is one (or two in this case?) of the new enemies: the Ooze.
You can expect the same level of functional diversity. All new beasts are going to have their own special "thing"



The expansion will focus on replay value first and foremost and will NOT extend the story. The new monsters will be introduced as part of the existing dungeons as "variants" at certain sections, randomly selected for each run. That is why the Ooze is encountered in the caves.

I made good progress in the last month and it looks like I'm only going to release one more update before I complete the enhanced edition of the game. This also means I'm going to reveal a lot more details about the new stuff in the next few weeks!

Shopping

When I posted about the condition of my hand, I got a lot of suggestions for what to upgrade on my desk. My right got a tad bit better lately (I'm able to use it as "support"), so I decided to buy and try out some ergonomics stuff.



The first thing I tried is a vertical mouse and I have to say I'm really impressed so far. It does feel way more comfortable to use than a conventional one and I got the hang of it almost right away. So if you are using your wrists/hands (and a mouse) extensively for work or your hobbies (art, music, design, etc...) do yourself a favor and get one.



Since I was shopping I also got a new mug with my favorite comic book characters

Thanks for taking the time to read my post and thank you very much for your support.
Take care!

6

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: I Am Overburdened, a silly roguelike (now at 1.2.4)

« on: August 17, 2019, 08:05:20 AM »

Hi everyone!

Here comes a not so spectacular, but hopefully funny update for I Am Overburdened. As the name suggest version 1.2.5. is way more swift than the previous one, plus it is equipped with a nasty new trick to terrorize artifact hunters

Hallucination 2.0

Please welcome "positive" hallucinations. Previously when you accidentally drank poison or a venomous creature attacked you, monster phantasms (non-existent hallucinated creatures) would be placed randomly on the following dungeon level.



This feature always felt fun, but a bit insignificant. Its impact was quite low because if you played a lot you could figure out in many cases which of the monsters are hallucinated and you never feared extra monsters when in a good shape (health and loot wise).



Now other entities (chests, pickup, etc...) can be hallucinated and their placements are influenced by the level templates and the dungeon generator. The new version is way more effective, a.k.a. confusing :giggle:

If you have an existing save-game no worries. The new save files may be a tiny bit bigger (due to the more complex hallucinations), but the game is backward compatible.

Inventory triviality

A tiny ease of use feature. Now when opening your inventory while standing next to an item or opened chest the relevant item slot will be focused. The slot of the last picked up item still has priority though!



Optimization

I keep saying that I Am Overburdened runs on a toaster, but what does this mean and is it really true? Well, for the most part, it IS true. I have a 10+ years old laptop on which I test the game from time to time (1st gen 1.5Ghz Atom CPU, 1Gb RAM for real) and the game is able to run at 60 fps (not that it matters a lot with a turn-based game :giggle: but still). My work desktop is also quite modest so a performance mistake surfaces easily. The more taxing parts where the real problems lie are switching between screens and launching the game.

Checking loot

Sadly the inventory screen had a blatantly unoptimized implementation. Opening it could cause almost a second long halt on my older machine. It was still my original prototype implementation. Silly me, sorry for the inconvenience. I simplified the layout data of the screen, remade the loading algorithm and voila. Now it can load within the same frame of the press/click even on a simple computer.


A bit slowed down recording of opening the inventory in the old and the new version for comparison.

Parts of these changes got into the previous version so you may have experienced the speedup to an extent already.

Startup



So on the before mentioned toaster, it took 5+ seconds to show the title screen after launching the game. This was mainly due to pre-loading almost all the assets and saved data so that handling the content while the game is running can be simple. I postponed tiny parts of this, but the logic largely stayed the same and instead I choose to simplify the majority of the game data to speed-up load times. Still not lightning fast, but I measured a hefty 40-50% win which is really nice

Was all this work worth it for faster startup and inventory opening? Yes, absolutely! Besides improving the user experience, I always had plans of porting the game to mobile platforms. In the last few months with all the optimizations I've done I believe it is going to run flawlessly without sucking the batteries dry

Tech talk

So I wrote a lengthy tips & tricks technobabble about how specifically I optimized I Am Overburdened.
I did not include it here, because it is full of technical jargon (code samples, profiling, data formats, and other generally boring stuff  :| ).  You can find it on my blog in this post if you are interested in the nitty-gritty parts or if you think it should be here as well, just drop a comment and I make it happen
Don't say I did not warn you though

Upcoming?

My hand is only a tiny bit better, but at least it is not killing me nowadays. I'm slowly and carefully working towards finishing the expansion for I Am Overburdened. Sorry for not sharing new details about it with this entry. To make up for it I'm going to post images and gifs showcasing some of the new monsters and items with the following update For next time I'm planning to release another tiny graphical enhancement.

Thanks for reading my post and much love for your support.
Stay tuned!

7

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: I Am Overburdened, a silly roguelike (now at 1.2.3)

« on: July 23, 2019, 11:36:34 PM »

Hello everyone!

This entry will be a bit more personal and full of rambling about game development in real life and how come making a tiny bug-fix update for a game takes a whole month. Stay awhile, because if you can put up with my whining, you are going to read some real advice

The unexpected



Around a month ago severe cartilage damage and bone wear (arthrosis) was diagnosed in my right wrist-bone(s). This is a permanent change. One that quite possibly will heavily affect my future

I always had problems with my hand, we could call it chronic pain I guess, but it never was so frequent or so drastic that I thought something could be really wrong...
In middle school, I thought it must be my hobbies. A lot of Diablo and other games plus art (both classical and digital).
In university, I thought it must be my studies. My hobbies stayed with me and I started programming multiple hours daily.
As an employed programmer, software became my full-time job and I thought it must be my life-style. I started pouring hours after work into game development and art daily because I really wanted to make games, not just business software.



Probably you are rolling your eyes by now, that I must be crazy for not taking care of myself, but I'm pretty sure if you are reading this you may have a similar history and of course I always did everything I could to heal. I always took sufficient rest, sometimes totally stopping these activities for a few days taking medicinal products to recover, plus in the last few years, I used various supporters to help my hands during work.
I never experienced wild long-lasting pains.

Except for 5 weeks ago.



I heard it called pianist disease by a Doc and it is fairly common amongst musicians, artists, programmers, essentially anyone using their fingers and wrists excessively for work.

I've been doing physiotherapy and taking medication during the last month besides keeping my hand in a splint and barely using it at all. It is better now. I only experience pain if I disobey the "try not to use your right hand!" rule
Doctors told me that the pain will become manageable, but surgery seems to be necessary if I want to use it again for work...

Yep, you guessed it well. Even though I'm right-handed (was?) and relatively fast at typing (was!) writing this entry took me a while because I used my left hand only. That is how a tiny bug-fix update takes a month

Now onto the advice part:
Life will throw unexpected things at you. Even if you are at a point where everything seems to click and nothing can stop you, I'm pretty sure there is something that can. Take care of yourself and if you happen to experience similar things consult with a doctor to see if you can prevent bigger problems down the line.

The update

Since players discovered some glaring issues lately and I just managed to repair a few long-standing problems, I decided to put out a build with important fixes in it ASAP as version 1.2.4.

Not saved



Sadly the path was not "ensured" (existence of directories) in all cases when saving the game. I estimate, that this could affect quite a few people, but not many reported it so far on any of the channels for the game. I hope this means it worked for most people and not many run into it

If you did lose a save I'm really sorry. Please accept my apology and know that now it is fixed and works as intended.

Hallucinated boss



Some items in the game are totally insane and their combinations, well let just say they can lead to weird outcomes
One of these is the "Carnival Mask" which can turn monsters into hallucinations. It cannot be triggered on the boss level, as there are no other monsters around the boss itself. Except when you have an item on you which can summon monsters in certain situations. Mix in some chemical X and bang! The boss can easily turn into a hallucination, preventing the player from completing the run. Funny thing is that I already had a configuration coded for items to optionally disable them against certain enemy types (e.g.: the boss), but I probably thought this could not happen.
Fixed!

Left-handed



Due to the underlying technology I used the game could not support left-handed mouse usage (left and right buttons switched in the operating system). I swapped out parts of the tech and fixed this problem. As you can guess I only realized the existence of the issue when I myself started using my mouse in this mode
To all the left-handed people in the world who would have loved playing I Am Overburdened with a mouse: I'm sorry for not realizing this before!

Focus on what you are doing!



There were some reports about the game occasionally capturing mouse input even if its window is not in focus. I tried fixing this before, but I never had the complete picture about what is going wrong. I'm still not sure if it is fully fixed, but I could reproduce a case when it occurred and with the input tech change, I could correct this problem too.

Special thanks to all the community members who reported and helped in the diagnostics of these issues.

Is this the end?!

This slowed me to a crawl (no pun intended), but there is no way I'm stopping game development
I just wasn't prepared for it. Neither physically nor mentally. It will take some time getting used to it, but my left-hand dexterity is getting better each day and hopefully, surgery will further improve the state of things later on.
It is uncertain now how long it will take, but I will follow through my plans and deliver the content expansion pack for I Am Overburdened.

Thank you very much for reading my post and for all your support.
Take care!

8

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: I Am Overburdened, a silly roguelike (now at 1.2.2)

« on: June 26, 2019, 06:45:28 AM »

Hi there!

So it came to pass, that only a tiny update gets completed within two weeks while working on another way bigger project :giggle:
Hopefully, the user interface enhancements in I Am Overburdened version 1.2.3. will be appreciated still.

The book of monsters

The biggest (albeit functionally neglectable) change is the new "Book of Monsters" layout. Now the unlocked monsters can be explored using a scrollable grid just like in the case of the "Tome of Artifacts". It looks much less crammed + this was a necessary change for the future



Yep, this also means new monsters will join the party with the upcoming bigger content update (currently it looks like 4 to be more exact) and for this to happen the presentation had to be changed beforehand to accommodate.

Scroll madness

All the scroll-bars (not just the new monsters book one) were updated to handle up/down clicks too + screens where scrolling grids reacted to mouse movement (Stash, Treasury), were fixed since they could produce horrible noises with the quickly changing focused artifacts.



Nearby beasts

How could I forget about this feature?! The same thing was implemented for the "Tome of Artifacts" with nearby items long ago, but somehow I missed this one. Opening the "Book of Monsters" next to an enemy now selects it immediately.



Tome hot-keys

I also added hot-keys for accessing the tomes (Left Ctrl + A for the "Tome of Artifacts", Left Ctrl + M for the "Book of Monsters") with only one press as they may be opened semi-frequently during play. The input guide was updated to reflect these changes.



In-game inventory on steroids!

A real nemesis of mine. I could not find a good way to notify the player about nearby items so far. I tried multiple things in the past (some even made it into the game), but I was never satisfied.
I think I got it now? I really like the current version. Let me know what you think!



Little development history

One thing I tried long ago was changing the color palette of the slots which may be affected by a neighbor item pickup. Empty slots became lighter and used slots became red. I scrapped this approach because I could not find good enough color variants and it generally did not look that useful.



To give at least some help to the players I decided to add in-world slot notifications. I liked them quite a lot so I released this feature a while ago, but I admit that functionally it was not best (e.g.: with a full inventory the slot icons don't help too much )...



Then it hit me! Don't change the slots I have to focus on, change the ones I don't have to focus on. May sound counter-intuitive, but it worked way better than my first color based attempt



It wasn't a ~perfect solution though. I just could not pinpoint the best time when to fade in and out unrelated slots. It looked a bit chaotic. With some iteration, I worked it out though. If there is a rapid change just forget the whole thing (disable the feature) so it doesn't bother the player and only fade out the unneeded slots if the player stays still a little nearby an item (or items).

Summer Sale

In the meantime I Am Overburdened also joined the Summer Sale!



You can buy it at Steam or at itch.io for dirt cheap (50% Off - 2.49$, may vary based on region).

   

What's next?

This is the first "teaser" update where changes related to the expansion pack crawled into the official build of the game and I shared tiny but concrete info about what is to come. Expect a few more updates like this in the upcoming weeks, but soon (hopefully really soon) I will unleash a bigger and better I Am Overburdened upon the world

Thank you very much for following my progress and for all your support.
Stay tuned!

9

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: I Am Overburdened, a silly roguelike (now at 1.2.1)

« on: June 13, 2019, 10:21:25 PM »

Hello everyone!

New I Am Overburdened update, new entry
This time instead of launching new content or features I'm upgrading the graphics of the game a little.

Graphical facelift

As I hinted before on social media I've been working on multiple graphics related changes. This is the first update for I Am Overburdened focusing only on the visual aspect. If the response is good I may create another similar one
Let me know what you think!

Auto-Tiling

The biggest graphical improvement is the auto-tiling feature of the dungeon levels. In short, it is a technique to (dynamically) change tiles based on their neighbors to achieve a much less "blocky" look and to add depth to the scenes.



To me, the difference is night and day. It does make the grid structure of the levels less readable (functionally may be a bit of a downgrade), but it makes the dungeons feel much more claustrophobic so all in all, I feel like it is a big win

Some technical details:



The most flexible and well-established method is the "blob" or 8-way auto-tiling where you create special tile graphics with the required corners for all the relevant neighbor combinations (47 exist, the first part of the image). Each neighbor is represented by a bit (power of 2 value, the second part of the image) and by combining the flags of the ~important matching neighbors you get a unique value identifying the required tile.

Even though I coded a system like this long ago I decided to go with a different technique because of the amount of graphical work required...



So I switched to the "sub-tile" approach. It is super simple to implement and requires much less sprite work while still achieving a similar result. The idea here is to split tiles which require special corner graphics and check the relevant neighbors for each corner. To cover each situation 4 variants are required so 16 sub-tiles. Based on the horizontal, vertical and diagonal neighbors of a given corner the appropriate sub-tile graphic can be selected and voila. Auto-tiling.

Crystal clear

The looks of the last episode in the game received some valid criticism. My original goal was to make the "Crystalline Cavern" a bit confusing. Almost like a place full of mirrors. I think I went a little overboard and visual clarity suffered a lot.



I've redrawn parts of the tile-set, recolored the rest and a new walking effect was introduced to preserve the reflecting and mirror-like feeling.

Rain

The ambient sounds in the inn just weren't doing it justice. I added some splash effects outside of the building to set a more convincing mood.



Bugs & Performance

The fixes and optimizations are graphics related too. The biggest enhancement is the introduction of multiple (rendering) layers within the effect system and overall improved effect handling performance.

Effect layers

This problem probably did not bother many players, but some environment effects looked funny before the introduction of multi-layer spell effects.
Fixed!



Mouse control sprites

There was a tiny sprite state related bug which could only occur when controlling the game with the mouse. Not anymore.



Spell performance

Although the game could always run on a "toaster" hitches and frame-spikes during spell heavy moments weren't uncommon. This is now a thing of the past.



Next stop?

Work continues on I Am Overburdened. The planned content expansion pack is shaping up nicely. So far, I deliberately kept concrete info about it to the minimum since I'm still really bad at estimating the work left and I would like it to be a surprising and bigger release. This means the upcoming few updates will be similar to this and the last one (just a bunch of tiny changes), but I'm going to start teasing the new features in the following weeks

Thanks for taking the time to read my post.
Take care!

10

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: I Am Overburdened, a silly roguelike (now at 1.2.0)

« on: May 16, 2019, 06:18:10 PM »

Hi there!

Maybe I should start with some rambling about why I've been dormant for so long, but I want to jump right into the details of the latest I Am Overburdened update I've just released. I'm leaving the boring bits to the end !

Update

Version 1.2.1. has a plethora of changes, but most of these are fixes, tunings and other tiny additions. All in all it is not THE huge content update I've been teasing, but it has a bunch of nice things I hope many will appreciate.



The game has been localized to German ( ...) and Spanish ( ...). With this second set of official translations the game now supports 7 languages ! Hopefully this way even more players will be able to enjoy the wacky descriptions and dialogues I would love to add even more in the future, but I can't make promises yet as these take time and money. Will try my best.

Special thanks to the translators for their work:
Nico Weiß (canemus): German, Juan Buleo (PsychoKurt): Spanish

Mouse and UI

When I Am Overburdened launched it lacked proper mouse support. I patched-in this feature shortly after and I tried upgrading it ever since, but there are still a few ideas left worth pursuing.

Book graphics and controls



The menu book graphics were improved with a simple trick and all the screens received separate "Back" and "Close" buttons. This way it is way easier to navigate them (some menu "stacks" were quite deep) + now it is possible to move around with only the left mouse button easily.

In-game UI



There is a new book icon under the health-bar for opening the menus. Again this allows left mouse button only navigation during play.

Inn renovation



The same way the user interface needed some changes to better support controlling the game with mouse only, the inn had to be updated a bit to accommodate. I added a journal next to the innkeeper which can be used to access the main menu.

Stash confusion



Many players claimed that they did not notice the "Stash" in the inn and had no idea about collecting starting items. Mea culpa, this was a big design error on my end. Now when it has items in it there is a smoke effect triggered when entering the inn similar to the ones accompanying other unlocks and play variants. Hope this helps in discovering the unlocked starter items.

Bug-fixes and tweaks

Besides adding new languages a lot of localization fixes found their way into the game. Layouts of the menus were changed a little to make translated content better fit them. I also increased the item pickups notification time for longer fluff texts as translators suggested.



A small balance change was applied too. The luck penalty on nightmare difficulty has been decreased to 3 from 5. It is not a heavy impact modification, but it does make nightmare an itsy-bitsy less luck based.

Path-finding



I made a mistake in the underlying path-finding system which caused a rare but weird issue when controlling the player with the mouse. Fixed!

That is all for this update, but soon more will follow!

So what's up?

Sadly In the last six months I had to face a lot of difficulties (financial, personal and housing/moving related). Due to this I left the game hibernated and as a result its community dwindled

I really wish to do a 180 on this. I'm going to have free time for making updates in the upcoming months and I already re-organized my TODO list and plans. I'm also working on a somewhat "new" project pretty closely related to I Am Overburdened

To sum it up, I really had neither time, nor money or energy to work on the game. Thankfully it looks like now I'm on track to complete updates I've been dying to deliver for months now

Thanks for taking the time to read my post.
Stay tuned!

11

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: I Am Overburdened, a silly roguelike (now at 1.1.8)

« on: November 17, 2018, 06:49:02 PM »

Hello everyone,

So much time has passed. I've been away from my online life and making games for months. Thanks to some new opportunities it looks like the time has come for me to return to active development again

And what better way to restart my venture than putting out new updates for my games
I will share some details about my short term plans soon, but I'm devoting this entry to a long-overdue I Am Overburdened update!

Update

Version 1.2.0 is live and the highlight of it is the save-game feature! Besides this one major addition, it is mostly a bug-fix and tweak build.

Save & Exit

Finally the game can be suspended in the dungeon and continued later. Since a full play-through is relatively short plus I Am Overburdened is primarily a rogue-like and save-scumming would undermine this core idea so only one save slot exists. Of course more could be added with slots only having a continue option if there are genuine requests for it, but I think the game works well this way.

This is more like a convenience feature to be able to stop playing at any point you wish and finish the run when you have the time to spare.



The pause menu had to be reorganized a bit, since it was already crammed. As you can see it's cleaner now and the last option saves and closes the game.

I would like to create a more technical post too about this specific feature. Kind of like a tutorial about aspects of save systems. Let me know if you are interested!

Immediate (Save &) Exit

The immediate exit hot-key was remapped from F10 to F9. Sorry about this change, it was a necessity (os/platform reasons), but as a bright side it also supports saving the game. So now if you hit F9 during play and the game could be continued (e.g.: the player is not dead ), the state will be saved just like when saving and exiting using the pause menu. This change is already reflected in the input guide.

Pesky bugs

I've been working on the game on and off in short bursts in the last months and alongside with the community I discovered some problems too. I fixed quite a few things so I'm simply going to list them:

• Few items and their related skills could cause a crash under super specific circumstances. It's not likely many of you run into these issues, but if your play was interrupted by a crash I'm sorry.
  
• Certain item skills with persisting effects (e.g.: Fear, Cripple) could get stuck or be triggered on freshly summoned/resurrected monsters in rare cases. These were not visible, but could affect how well you did, so my apologies for the occasional unfair (de-)buffs.
  
• The positioning of hallucinations from toxicity effects (e.g.: Toad monsters, poison in potion) were not correctly randomized. These hallucinated monsters were always placed in the upper-left quarter of the map, breaking the illusion. Now this is fixed.
  
• A while ago I added item-slot notifications to item pickups and chests when standing nearby. It did not occur to me though, that with this modification the treasury pickups and chests triggered unnecessary ones too. Oops, fixed!
  

In balance

With this update balance tweaks found their way into the game too. There were still some complaints regarding this aspect, so I made normal mode a tad bit harder and nightmare difficulty a tiny bit more forgiving. These are not substantial changes, only slightly affecting the pickup and chest spawn rates. Another extra is "near death" detection. Simply put if you end up in a really bad situation at some point, the game tries not to punish you even harder on the next dungeon level :giggle:
These changes are subtle, so they keep the game challenging, but they were introduced to make it more fair at the same time.



Boss confusion

Some people found the boss level corpses confusing. I don't know if the new version will work out better (this is not the first time I change this :S ), but now the number of corpses (below the one serving as the story hint) are tied to the unlock progress of the boss entry in the monster book.



I know some other unlocks still need more and better hints too. I'm going to work on these problems in the near future...

Am I still alive?

Yes, pretty much. Due to personal and financial reasons I had to put full-time game development on hold for a long while, but I'm back now and I will be working on my projects in the upcoming months. Before I vanished from the face of the INTERNETZ I teased possible ports and a bigger content update for I Am Overburdened. These are not forgotten and progressing well In a week or two I will reveal more details about my plans.

Until then, have a fun-filled time.
Thanks for reading and take care!

12

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: I Am Overburdened, a silly roguelike (now at 1.1.7)

« on: June 07, 2018, 10:37:45 PM »

Hi there!

Lately I had less free time to post updates about about my games, but I just released a tiny new update for I Am Overburdened and I have some news/plans to share so here comes a short entry

Update

Version 1.1.8 is online, featuring mostly fixes and fine-tunings, but lets see in detail what it has to offer!

Achievement bug fixed



Due to some timing and file-reading mistakes in rare cases some achievements were not unlocked. The boss, monsters and the four artifact unlocking related trophies may have been affected for some players.
Now the problem is solved and I added an extra step to the startup logic of the game so that achievements missed by previous versions will be unlocked automatically (e.g.: if you unlocked all the monsters, but the achievement is missing).

My apologies for each of you who run into this problem.

Item pickup and shop enhancements

Item pickups (especially buying one in the shop) bugged quite a few people, due to not knowing what kind of item one receives. I wanted to leave item collection as a "mystery" and unlocking artifacts being both a reward and a learning process, but I understand the inconvenience of this. To alleviate it a little I added a simple item slot notification when the player moves next to an artifact.



Another hopefully useful addition is the "same item speech" in the shop, which triggered before when you tried to pick up an item you already own, but now it triggers before buying items you have equipped too.



What's next?

Finally the Mac and Linux ports are getting closer to the finish line and the save-game feature is already functional ! It will still take a week or two to stabilize and complete them, but they are next in line and will be out later this month

Anything longer term?

I'm also working on a bigger update. I may have mentioned it before, but it is still too early to show anything in action, however it will see the light of day by the end of summer.

My long term plans are a bit vague at the moment. I think I have clear goals in my mind, but no exact plans on how I could reach them. I want to deliver more updates for I Am Overburdened and I would love to port it to multiple platforms (console and mobile to be exact), but I don't really have the resources nor the contacts to really do it. Will see what the future holds...

As always if you have useful tips for me, any suggestions or critique, I'm all ears.
Drop me a comment or a mail !

Thanks for reading my post and for your continued support.
Take care!

13

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: I Am Overburdened, a silly roguelike (now at 1.1.6)

« on: April 26, 2018, 11:57:25 AM »

Hello everyone!

It's been a while since my last I Am Overburdened update, but finally it is that time again, so in this post I'll showcase the changes in the latest version which went live yesterday.

Update

So I uploaded version 1.1.7. It does not contain many new features or new content, but has some nice additions.



The game has been localized to French ( ...), Danish ( ...) and Romanian ( ...)! These are the first bunch of official translations besides English and Hungarian. I'm hoping the game will reach more players with new languages added. Of course I would like to add even more in the near future and I already started talking to translators to make this happen.

Special thanks to the translators for their work:
Nicolas Fourcroy (French), Victor Fisker (Danish), Fazekas Sándor-Imre and Vezsenyi Ákos (Romanian)



Another addition is the "developer" tools for localization and QA. In the latest build of the game three debug screens can be accessed. Of course these were developed for internal use, primarily to test translations, but I thought they could help anyone who would like to localize the game.

So I cleaned them up and added an option to access them in the release builds too. I also created an official guide how these tools can be used and how new languages can be added to the game.

P.S.: I guess using them could be considered cheating (spoiler alert!), since you can see all the items and monsters the game has to offer even if you have not unlocked or seen them previously.

Sale







To promote the new languages and the game itself a bit, currently it is 40% off for two weeks, so you can get it for 2.99$ (may vary based on region).

You can buy it at Steam or at itch.io.

   

Thanks everyone for reading my change-lists. I'm not sure when, but sooner or later more posts will follow
Take care!

14

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: I Am Overburdened, a silly roguelike (now at 1.1.4)

« on: March 01, 2018, 01:29:46 PM »

Hello there dungeon crawlers!

I know it's been a while since the last update, but the latest one 1.1.6 is relatively small regardless . I'll go into why this is the case but lets start with the list of changes and additions first !

Changes

• 
  Now the game supports a much wider range of controller devices. With older joysticks and game-pads it tries to emulate the mapping of the Xbox 360 controller automatically. In the "Controls" menu you can re-map your buttons if the game fails to capture a sensible layout. If you had to use x360ce before you probably don't need it anymore !
• 
  Pressing Left Ctrl + R in the dungeon restarts the run immediately without confirmation now. I forgot about this modification, but many of you requested it multiple times so I finally added this hot-key.
• 
  A little balance fix: the skill of the Zombie was tweaked heavily. Their regeneration now only triggers if you can damage them for a given minimum amount (5), so you won't hit a wall going against these monsters regardless of your build having high defense/health/dodge but low damage. I hope this is another step in the right direction for making the game feel challenging, but fair.

Another tiny extra is the InputGuide. It's an official documentation containing all the relevant information about possible control mechanisms, hot-keys and default button mappings. I'll do my best to keep it up-to-date if something changes and I'll provide localized versions too in the future!

So as I mentioned it is not a huge list, but took some time to deliver. The reasons behind this are the larger features I'm working on. I'm currently juggling between several longer-term projects and they take up all my time. These are: organizing and delivering official localizations, more robust tools and guidelines for translators, the "save and continue later" feature, porting the game to other desktop operating systems (Mac & Linux) and I'm also working on a "secret" big update, but that is all I can tell about this as I want it to be a surprise plus I'm super unsure when I will be able to finish and release it.

I'm hiding in my room, working in silence, but development on I Am Overburdened is still going strong !
You can check the Trello board or follow me on Twitter for more frequent updates.

Thanks for taking the time for reading my post and for checking the game.
Stay tuned!

15

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: I Am Overburdened, a silly roguelike (now at 1.1.2)

« on: January 29, 2018, 09:10:34 PM »

Hi there!

I've just released another update for I Am Overburdened.
It is now at 1.1.4. and received quite a few enhancements since the first major update .

And a big +

Currently it is 35% off for a week as a special promotion so you can get it for 3.25$ (may vary based on region).

You can buy it at Steam or at itch.io.

   

Latest additions

Elite variant



There is a new "decoration" in the inn. If you complete the game twice on normal or on nightmare difficulty you unlock the skull candle. Once lit, there will be one tougher "elite" monster on each dungeon level. If you completed it before the candle will be unlocked automatically.



I don't consider this a new difficulty as it is a variant working on both levels, but if someone finds nightmare too easy or too painful with normal not being a challenge any longer it can spice them up .

Ease-of-use



The most requested UI enhancement was inventory screen access through the in-game inventory bar. Plenty other UI and mouse control enhancement found their way into the game (e.g.: the handling of speech bubble fade-out effects are not instantaneous when using the mouse).

Effects beef-up



Both the battle effects and the level entry (player spawn) got a little more love. The later one especially got many complaints. Hopefully from now on the player will be instantly recognizable when reaching a new dungeon level.

Fixes & fine-tuning

There were some annoying problems which were fixed with this build. Rendering and input handling works correctly when the application is not in focus and there was a more serious item skill problem too (dodge wasn't canceling some penalties & de-buffs even though at the end not suffering the hit causing them) which is history now !

The future

As always I have quite a few plans for the future of the game! I would like to add more variants (like the Elite or the Treasury) in the near future and for the next big update: saving. Don't worry no save scamming, this is a roguelike after all . This feature would only allow you to suspend and close the game any time and be able to continue later on where you left off. I already started work on this major addition.

Sadly I don't have the capital to pay for professional localization yet, but who knows how this promotional week turns out, fingers crossed !

Thanks for taking the time for reading my post and for checking the game.
Take care!