Messages

61

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Zorbus

« on: May 25, 2019, 12:43:06 AM »

Release 13

• Search range is now 2. You don't have to walk close to walls to spot secret doors but can detect them from 2 steps away.
• Heavily reduced the amount of xp gained from skill use (finding secret doors and traps, disabling locks and traps).
• You can now close doors even if there are items in the doorway. Items will be moved towards the creature closing the door.
• Rest until healed / Rest for 100 rounds should be a bit faster now (screen is no longer rendered during the rest).
• New talent: Strengthened Shots. Body-modifier is automatically added to ranged attacks.
• Ranged Elemental Damage talent's damage raised from 1 to 1d2.
• Divine essences no longer give you experience.
• If you pick a locked door while holding it's key, message about unlocking it with a key will no be longer shown.
• Autopilot is stopped if you have disabled auto-use-key setting and a locked furniture blocks the path.
• If a creature is friendly to you, it's also friendly to your recruits and animated/summoned creatures. There was a bug that if you for example had the Animal Friend talent, animals would still attack your animated skeletons.
• Autopilot / autoexplore ignores walking through doors which are known mimics.
• Fixed a bug where lots of devices where missing from the quickslotable item list. Big thanks for Troubler for mentioning this bug!
• Prisoners no longer care if you loot containers in the prison's main area.
• You can press a binded key in the help-screen to get a longer description of the command.
• Target-mode shows the name of a creature under the target cursor with a black background.
• Menus with adjustable numeric values have small arrows as visual clues.
• HOME and END keys can be now used to quickly get to the top / bottom of inventory and other lists.
• Screen can be maximized / minimized with ALT + BACKSPACE.
• Fixed a bug where choosing "Return to main menu" from the game menu didn't go to the main menu if you had restarted with the same character.
• Added a picture (drawn by Zyalin) to the main menu.
• Fixed some typos.

1.The tankards bug seems to extend to all usable items, like healing potions. Only the first few in your menu appear in the quick-select options.
 For example if you drop something, then other things will be available. Eventually you will come around to what you need by dropping things.

I think I got this fixed now.

62

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Zorbus

« on: May 17, 2019, 11:33:50 PM »

Thanks again, Troubler.

No new release yet but some answers:

2.A lot of enemies like to run away after you have knocked them down to low health. One thing that might happen is they run out of sight.
I haven't really tested this, but in the process they may run into someone your guy would be friendly with, and get killed, thus forfeiting all the EXP if you didn't see it happen.
Again, I don't know 100% what happens. But it's a big reason I chase after most enemies who flee. Though it seems like I would get some of that EXP from chasing them off.

If a creature has 10 health points and you damage it for 7 and it then runs away and some other creature kills it, you'll get 70% (7/10) of the XP, whether the killer is friendly or not and whether you see the death or not.

1.The ability to change your characters sprite at the start of the game with left and right is undocumented as far as I know.
This whole time I had been playing with the default sprite not knowing you could change it. Neat easter-egg otherwise.

This is actually mentioned in the Race-screen when the selector is on the name field and in the Character-screen when the selector is on "Create a new character". I think the text has been there from release 1 but I'm not sure. It's easy to miss as the help text is not seen when the selector actually is on the selected race/character.

I'll try to fix those other things in the next release.

Kyzrati (Gogmind developer) streamed the game:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/425931154

There's a feedback friday on the game in Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/roguelikedev/comments/bpmwgs/feedback_friday_45_zorbus/

Elephantman played through the game (spoilers):
https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/the-codex-of-roguelikes.71097/page-74#post-6131680

Nigetai played through the game (spoilers, japanese translated with google translator):
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ja&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fnigetai.blogspot.com%2F2019%2F04%2Fzorbus1-threnders-journal.html

More from Nigetai (spoilers):
https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=ja&sp=nmt4&tl=en&u=https://twitter.com/search%3Ff%3Dtweets%26vertical%3Ddefault%26q%3Dfrom%253Att5074%2520zorbus%26src%3Dtypd&xid=17259,1500004,15700022,15700186,15700190,15700256,15700259&usg=ALkJrhhGRA1LaQHpsTJsSQBnvFaggTdwvQ

63

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Zorbus

« on: May 11, 2019, 10:52:55 PM »

Release 12

• Fixed a memory leak.
• You can quickly get to the nearest stairs down by pressing (A)utopilot and then (D)ownstairs.
• Dodge is now automatically used for defense in combat if it's better than your Melee-skill based defense.
• Some additional combat related stats of equipped weapons listed in the descriptions of the items.

I stress tested the game for several 12-15 hour sessions with autoplay without a crash. Autoplay uses the game AI for the player character to clear all levels and then it starts over again. It's quite fast: it only takes about 4 minutes to go through the game.

http://www.zorbus.net

64

Early Dev / Re: The Red Prison - roguelike based on 5th edition D&D

« on: May 04, 2019, 01:50:16 PM »

Could you add support for arrow key movement?

My keyboard doesn't have numpad and the VI keys are too hardcore. If you have 8-way movement then maybe shift/ctrl + arrows could be used for that.

65

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Zorbus

« on: May 04, 2019, 01:38:16 PM »

Release 11 is out.

• Removed the limit of saving the game only once per dungeon level. You still can't save the game on the endgame level though.
• Pressing A in the autopilot mode cycles through unexplored areas. T cycles through known traps. Autopilot is stopped when a secret door or a trap is found.
• Pressing E autopilots you to the nearest unexplored location directly without going into autopilot mode. The autopilot takes you just to the unexplored tile and does not explore further. As your line of sight and possible lightsource reveals new areas you can press E again to move to one of these. You will be missing a lot of secret doors if you constantly use this command as autopilot does not walk near all walls. It's best to be used in short bursts of movement or for backtracking or finalizing the level exploration.
• Pressing H opens a keyboard image that shows the current keybindings. This can be opened from the main game view and from the keybindings screen. You can press ALT, CONTROL or SHIFT to show bindings that require one of those keys to be pressed.
• If you walk near a furniture container that is opened (chests etc.) or is lidless (altars etc.), it is assumed that you have peeked into it and can then use target mode from any distance to see the container's contents. The items are not shown in the level loot list until you actually loot (bump) the container at least once.
• You can press C in the target mode to cycle through seen containers. Known empty containers are skipped.
• If all 9 map points are set, setting a new one replaces the nearest one.
• "Auto use key" setting. If disabled, you won't automatically use a key on a lock but the dialog that pops up when bumping a locked furniture has the option to use a key among the normal options.
• If you dualwield two throwable items and only the other one has the "returning"-property then the one that doesn't have the property is not thrown.

Big thanks again for Troubler for feedback. 

1.Sometimes I can't put tankards into the quick-select, and sometimes I can. Not sure what causes it.

3.The automatic re-equipping after throwing an item seems to be odd. At least when duel-wielding.
 For example, once I threw a dagger and he put an Urgosh (two-handed) into his main hand and another dagger in the other.
 This only happened once and I couldn't reproduce it.

I tried to reproduce these but couldn't. I will keep them on my to-check list as well as all the other stuff you mentioned earlier.

2.Lost my first character to a crash. When I was traveling back upwards to level 5 from 6. I got a message saying "Out of memory" and the game froze. That was a shame too, since that was my first viable melee-based character. And it happened again going from level 6 to 7 (or 7 to 8?), with another good melee character.
I never ran into this crash before release 9(I've been playing since 6), if that helps any. I also updated from 8 to 9 through the game this time as well. Also playing on Wine.

This is bad. There's a problem with memory fragmentation in the game. I use a lot of memory streams and dynamic arrays. There unfortunately is no quick fix for this. If you play for long sessions it's best to save & quit and restart the game once in a while. I removed the "only save once per dungeon level" thing.

Before each release I stress test the game with an autoplay that explores all levels and then starts again with a new game. Eventually it crashes after doing about 15-20 complete runs of the game. The crash happens when changing a dungeon level when lots of data is written and loaded.

66

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Zorbus

« on: April 28, 2019, 04:55:25 PM »

7.Generally speaking, enemies may refer to the player when talking to another hostile.
   For example, the Mycon said "Why did you do this human?" when fighting a zombie.
   He continued to say this to me, even though he killed the zombie and we were never fighting.

This should be fixed now.

6.The secret boss doesn't drop that essence stuff like all the others do in the end (Though that might be intentional).

Yes, it's intentional.

10.Interestingly I had 100% map exploration of level 3, yet only found 12 out of the 15 hidden areas there. I am not sure how that is.
   If it's determined by opening containers, I have a possible explanation: Often I do not open containers with a guardian in the room.

This was hopefully just a rounding error which should have been fixed now. Hidden areas are counted as found if you just find a way in and explore at least 1 floor tile there. Containers have no effect.

4.I noticed the game has this strange habit of greying out the option to save occasionally. It has only happened a few times and I don't know what it is for.
   All 3 times this happened to me were pretty inconvenient though, particularly since I use wine and the screensaver popping up crashes the game.
   Usually it "clears up" after a while as well, and I can save again, but I don't know what causes that either.

By design, you can only save once per dungeon level and you can't save at the endgame level. It this was not the case then it's a bug.

7.Mimics in the victory/obituary file are listed 3 times, but not as which one (chest, coffin, or door I presume)
   Same for "Wolf" and several other enemy types, it might just be from these kind of cosmetic differences.

Yes, they are separate monster definitions with the same name.

---

Release 10 is out:

• You can loot items from explored floor tiles and checked containers by pressing SPACE. By selecting an item from the list and pressing SPACE or ENTER you will be autopiloted to the item and the item will be picked up. If an item is in a container it will be listed only if you have at least once checked the contents of the container.
• Containers are marked with green corner lines if you haven't yet explored their contents.
• When selecting an autopilot target you can cycle still locked doors and unlooted containers with F.
• In the autopilot mode portals can be cycled with A or TAB so you can press A to start the autopilot mode and then the same key to cycle through the portals and ENTER to pilot to the target location.
• Autopilot is no longer interrupted so easily with neutral creatures or closed doors.
• Duration of the True Seeing -talent increased.
• Obituary file now shows game release number.
• Fixed a bug where a creature could be indefinitely displaced without it getting angry.
• Manual reorganized and info on the new features added.

67

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Zorbus

« on: April 22, 2019, 11:30:05 AM »

Release 9 is out and fixes some issues that Troubler mentioned:

• All bump actions now work also in diagonal directions.
• Fixed a bug where companion/summoned/animated did not always get hostile against an attacker.
• A warning dialog is shown when you try to smash a fungus when there's a myconid nearby.
• Containers in the shop-level are no longer autolooted.
• You can now press [L] to browse locked furniture (doors, chests) in the autopilot mode.
• Character sheet can be displayed with [C] in the level up - menus.
• A lantern is automatically quickslotted if the "auto set quickslots" setting is on.
• Some grammar mistakes and typos fixed.

13.Does lone-wolf bar the simulcruim spell from being useful? I have never cast it, but I don't know if it would act like a summon or "real" character.

Lone wolf -talent does not affect Simulacrum or other cloning methods. Added a note to the talent's description.

9.Theoretical question: Does a dagger in the off-hand still lower melee defense? I'm not really sure what this mechanic is supposed to simulate beyond two-handed weapons being unwieldly.

Each hand / item has their own attack/defense rate. For defense, the item with best defense value is used or dodge-skill if its skill value is higher. I'll have to create some extra character sheet page where these values are listed.

1.The great-flail doesn't seem to count as a "great" weapon in the case of the "great reach" talent

This is odd. I tested this and it worked. Note that the reach attack indicator is not shown if a creature is not aggroed enough to attack you. You can still attack it with [f]ire.

2.Clicking "Return to main menu" sometimes just restarts the game with the same character This button is generally buggy. The character I get sometimes starts with a halberd and platemail as well. (Debug?)

Hopefully this was already fixed in some earlier release. Yes, those items were for the debug character.

1.Some way to instruct allies from a distance would be nice. You can use "Y" to yell, so you should be able to shout commands.

This might be added at some point. Any ideas for what commands to have? Or what kind of UI to have for it?

3.Haven't tested this yet, but if you start out with a mind of 13 or something, and then take the "great mind" perk to raise it, will you get the talent points for the levels that you earned before you got the perk?

No, it doesn't affect previously earned talent points.

8.I was constantly wasting health potions confusing 1 with F1. This was a big pain, I had just turned off auto-quickslots as a result.

You can also change quickslot key bindings to letter keys (H for healing potion) or shift + function key etc.

8.Nightvision sounds nice, but it is so hard to see in the darkness that it was not worth the eye-strain for me. This is a pretty big problem if you want to attempt a stealth-heavy run. As a result I have not as of yet.

Yes, this is annoying. Not sure how to handle this.

68

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Zorbus

« on: April 20, 2019, 03:22:42 PM »

Troubler,
thanks a lot for your post! I read it first before you edited it and didn't notice until now that you had updated it (date of the post didn't change).

I just updated the game to release 8. I'll try to fix the things you mentioned.

Major stuff in release 8:

• If you enable the option "Check for updates on start" from the settings, you'll be informed when a new release is available and asked if you want to update. The check is made when the game is started. Remember that you will lose your saved games if you update!
• Character sheet now shows more detailed information on how the current values of abilities, skills and resistances are calculated (modifiers from equipment and temporary effects are shown).
• Some AI and morale adjustments.

69

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Zorbus

« on: April 07, 2019, 12:50:16 AM »

Release 6

• Intelligent hostile creatures nearby follow player when using stairs.
• You no longer get xp from killing animated/summoned creatures unless they're animated/summoned from a trap. The xp award from creatures with animating/summoning talents is slightly increased.
• You can quick switch ammunition for the current ranged weapon with [Q].
• Equipping / switching ammunition is now a free action (doesn't take time).
• Correct ammunition type is automatically equipped when switching to a ranged weapon if the quiver slot is empty or the ammunition type is wrong.
• Armor penalties on Motion, Stealth and weight reduced. Magical armors and shields are lighter.
• More bullets and arrows created on the 1st dungeon floor. Players also start with 30 bullets now.
• Removed to-hit-penalties from the Multistrike-talent.
• A shield bash attack is made every round if you have the talent.
• Natural Leader -talent raises the max amount of recruits by 2.
• New talent: Lone Wolf. +2 to all abilities but can not recruit creatures. Can animate/summon normally.
• Great Body/Motion/Mind/Spirit -talent descriptions now show your current ability score.
• Closing doors is now little slower.
• If you stumble upon a teleport trap, your autopilot coordinates are set to your former location so you can autopilot back to the former location if you have the map between the points explored.
• Scrolls and elixirs are no longer quickslotted.
• Removed "Save settings" and "Save keybindings" from settings/keybindings-menus. These are now automatically saved when exiting the menus.
• Manual clarification: If you want to attack a friendly creature through the "chat" dialog, you need to have a melee weapon in your active weapon set.

70

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Zorbus

« on: March 31, 2019, 07:18:03 PM »

At least one player has gotten to the endgame and of course there was a bug in there.

Release 5

• Fixed an endgame related bug.
• Fixed a rare but fatal dungeon generator bug which would result in a crash.
• Fixed another smaller dungeon generator bug (sometimes you would see a single oddly colored floor tile in an area).
• "Arrow of Explosion" and "Bullet of Explosion" now actually create a 3x3 explosion on the target.
• Shops have more healing-, endurance- and blink-potions.
• "Create obituary" -setting is now saved to the settings file.
• Obituaries now have usage counts of talents and devices.
• "Offscreen creature warning" -setting is now on by default. Can be changed from the settings.

71

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Zorbus

« on: March 29, 2019, 06:59:49 PM »

Release 4

• Manual updated with clarifications on closing doors, rest until healed, setting traps and other stuff.
• Difficulty finetunings: some creatures removed from dungeon levels 1 and 2, bigger chance of a recruitable creature on the levels.
• Rest until healed -command added (S or NUMPAD_0). Rests until healed or rests 100 rounds if already at full health so you can use it also to regenerate Stamina. Seen hostile creatures interrupt the rest. Can also be interrupted by pressing any key.
• Health bars under creatures change color gradually from green to red as they get more angry at you.
• Doors can now be closed also with ALT+DIR. The floor has to be clear of items.
• Fixed ranged weapon enchantment. Ranged weapons can now be enchantent with "enchant weapon" and "vampiric weapon" -scrolls. When a ranged weapon and ammunition is equipped then elemental damage scrolls target ammunition.
• Inventory now shows the key for dropping items.
• Ability/skill/resistance-modifiers in item descriptions are now color coded.
• Equipment ability requirements actually implemented (mainly for heavy armor, large weapons and large shields).
• When you use target mode on a creature it shows the devices it's carrying (potions, wands etc.).
• Some talent requirements and values finetuned.
• Item price formula finetuned.
• Spirit-modifier adjusts item prices in stores (+-10% per modifier, max +-30%).
• Offscreen creature warning -setting draws red warning arrows in the edges of the map to directions where hostile creatures are seen. Mainly for small screens.

72

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Zorbus

« on: March 27, 2019, 02:04:39 PM »

It looks promising. What does "dungeon feels alive" mean?

My plan was:
Dungeons are themed (both in map layouts and themed content in areas). There are special areas like throne rooms, banquet halls and prisons. There are several factions in the dungeon and also some wild life usually in caverns. Creatures also comment things and act somewhat intelligently.

I have mostly done all that. Whether these things are good or done well is a different story. Some players might prefer plain rooms, corridors and random monsters who never flee or use potions etc.

73

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Zorbus

« on: March 23, 2019, 02:03:07 PM »

Zorbus is a fantasy-themed, graphical, turn-based, role-playing roguelike game. Your goal is to delve deep into a dungeon, find a portal to a mythical place called the Zorbus where a mere mortal can ascend to demigodhood.

The goal is to create a tight, streamlined dungeon crawling experience where the dungeon feels alive. Thematically Zorbus draws influence from the late 70s and early 80s tabletop AD&D campaigns and adventures.

The rule system for the game is slightly influenced by the d20-system used in the 3rd edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Zorbus has experience levels but no character classes (race and gender is selected). On each level-up, you point-buy skills and talents. Talents are mostly combat abilities and spells.

By design, Zorbus does not have a hunger mechanic, item identification, crafting, autoexplore, an overworld map or quests.

More info, online manual and download here:
http://www.zorbus.net

74

Design / Re: "Fun" Maps

« on: January 29, 2016, 10:16:48 PM »

Backtracking in big levels is never fun so consider adding more connections between areas especially if your level generator generates branches fron the center towards the edges.

Different architecture style in dungeons (only straight corridors and rooms vs lots of curved corridors and circular rooms vs lots of special rooms).

Themed levels (goblin town, subterranean pirate cave with underground rivers and so on). You could hint about a themed level coming up by adding for example more goblin encounters to levels before and after the goblin town level.

Special content areas (treasure room, weapon cache, wizard's study and so on).

Special encounter groups roaming the level (group of adventurers, mercenaries...).

Although I have somewhat implemented all of above or at least the possibility to add themed content, I still have the same problem that my levels feel too same-y. My average 96 x 96 sized map has still too many empty areas.

75

Design / Re: Stealth gameplay

« on: March 10, 2015, 09:26:39 PM »

How do you visually inform the player that a monster is not aware of him?

How do tile-graphics-/ASCII-games with stealth elements generally do this?

I'm experimenting with light/darkness/stealth in my game and was thinking of putting a '?'-symbol over / on top of the monster tile indicating that it does not see the player but maybe there's a more elegent and informative way to do it.