Drakefire Chasm (now at v1.3.4)

[getter77]

http://dowhilecompiling.blogspot.fi/p/drakefire-chasm.html

Drakefire Chasm is a seven day roguelike made in the 7DRL Challenge 2012. It has been updated thereafter with new features.
About

You play as a dragon and try to survive in the hostile environment of Drakefire Chasm. As you progress, you become more powerful, gaining new abilities to defeat your foes.

The game uses sort of a rock-paper-scissors mechanic between the dragon's abilities and the enemy types. The key for success is finding which type of attack is the most effective against each enemy.
Features

    Five playable dragon colors
    A talent tree with passive and active, cooldown-based abilities
    15 different enemies
    12 dungeon levels with varying themes
    Dragon orbs for extra one-use powers
    Colorful animations

     Drakefire Chasm is known for its dragon inhabitants. Over the decades, brave and greedy adventurers have dwindled down the numbers of the scalykind, however. Yet some still remain, and the many caves of the Chasm keep drawing treasure hunters even today.


Drakefire Chasm is a seven day roguelike made in 7DRL Challenge of 2012. You play as a freshly born wyrmling, trying to survive and prosper in the old home of dragons. Eat lesser beings, hoard riches, defeat your foes, and finally become a Great Wyrm, the most terrifying and noblest of creatures.

The game has been updated since the 7DRL release to fix bugs and add new features.

Drakefire Chasm is programmed in C++ under libtcod aka The Doryen library.

v1.3 brings:

New features:
  * Two new playable dragon types: Black and White
  * Named adventurers
  * Dragon orbs
  * New dungeon level themes

 UI improvements:
  * 'Enter' can now be pressed to skip all (more) prompts at once

 Fixes:
  * Stealth now properly increases attack damage
  * Lava no longer damages twice when entered (red dragons are still immune)
  * You can no longer start a dungeon level in lava
  * Some effects were able to continue onto the next dungeon level
  * Blast Wave was doing 50% more damage than intended
  * Corrected some errors in memory file creation

[getter77]

v1.3.1

'Tis a fairly small release, though I did finally manage to track down certain targeting bug that has been in the game since the beginning.

I did a handful of balance tweaks as well; many of the weak will abilities got buffed. Ball breath is more viable option to choose now, too. In fact, I beat the game with it while playtesting.

I also renamed the unique adventurers. It was silly to give them names after Warcraft characters with one letter changed even though 11 of the 12 adventurer types are very much inspired by WoW's player classes. It started to annoy me for various reasons and thus they now have somewhat better names.

Ability tweaks:
* Increased the range of Blink by 1
* Increased the range and radius of Ball Breath by 1
* Damage increased by 50%: Ball Breath, Firebolt
* Damage increased by 100%: Acid Fog, Blightbolt, Chain Lightning, Flamestrike, Ice Shard, Stinking Cloud, Thunderclap
* Increased Chain Lightning's jump multiplier by 25%

Fixes:
* Fixed a bug that allowed out-of-range targeting
* Chain Lightning should no longer crash the game nor jump through walls
* Paladin's Lay on Hands was generating its message twice when cast on oneself
* "(more)" text should no longer be able to go offscreen
* Corrected enemy wounded status description for two targeting modes
* Corrected few ability descriptions

Minor changes:
* Changed the names of the named adventurers
* Deathknight's Death Grip now tries to pull its target the shortest distance possible

[getter77]

v1.3.2

Changes and tweaks:
* Adjusted the blue menu theme to be slightly more readable
* 'r' can now be used to activate orbs in addition to 'o'
* Enemies no longer spawn in fov on the non-lair levels after the first
* The black dragon orb's invisibility effect is now removed when attacking
* Added some new level messages
* Valuables no longer spawn in lava

Fixes:
* The number of dragons perished wasn't always being saved correctly
* Malum's Chaos Bolt's message wasn't refering to him by name
* "(more)" text should no longer be able to go offscreen

[getter77]

v1.3.4

The reason I'm releasing a new version of Drakefire Chasm in addition to Rogue Effect is because last week I got an email from Teco who had found v1.3.3 too easy compared to v1.3.1 and was suspecting a bug.

I recalled at some point having watched someone beat the game on YouTube. Some enemies had been getting killed a bit too effortlessly but I had thought that maybe I hadn't watched closely enough and he had had the stats for it. And he had been playing a red dragon after all, which is the easiest one in the early game. Neither had I touched damage values since 1.3.1 so why would it be bugged?

But after Teco's email I started investigating and found out that for some mysterious reason, in the release version, instead of doing 100/50/25% damage depending on enemy type, attacks were always doing 1000% damage against everything. I couldn't get the debug version reproduce this but the release always did it. Eventually I located the problem in the function that determines damage modifier.

It's a really simple function and there was just no way for it to even return a value more than 1.0 -- or less than 0.25 as it then started doing after I started adding debugging messages around. When nothing else worked (I originally had thought I had forgotten simply to clean the project before compiling for release), I rewrote the function slightly differently. And now the release version too seems to work as intended. It's kind of worrying I couldn't determine the exact reason but as long as the game works and is challenging again, right?

* Fixed a damage bug that made the game too easy
 * Ball Breath's range reduced by 1
 * Ball Breath's radius increases now by 1 per 3 age categories (down from Age / 2)
 * Deep Breath now increase Ball Breath's radius/range by 1 (down from 2)
 * Added value of treasure collected to ability screen
 * Corrected a small error in Breath's description

[Legend]

New update no longer runs on win32 (xp)