KeeperRL (formerly Zagadka)

[miki151]

Wow, thanks for the feedback

You are absolutely right about the invisible walls, they are part of unwanted legacy from years of playing Nethack that I need to get rid of.

My plan is to invest a lot more time in the game while I'm still hooked into it, hopefully making something fun and original. I've been thinking about making a RL for a long time, so now that I have some free time I owe it to myself.

I'm not very fond of complex skill systems and character development in general, so the game will be concentrated more on exploration and interaction with the world. Of course there will be a need to add pre-game choices at some point, but they will be fairly simple.

[Endorya]

But will the player be a fixed melee adventurer? Not that I'm against it, I'm simply trying to figure out what features will it bear. What do you have planned for it?

[miki151]

You'll start with a very basic skill set (melee basically), and learn new skills from the races you stick with. From elves you'll learn magic and archery, from dwarfs sophisticated melee, and from goblins perhaps ambush, backstabbing, and other tricks.

But these plans are not settled, because a lot of it depends on the story and goals in the game and I haven't figured them out yet.

The next thing I'm concentrating on now is NPC intelligence, so they do something more interesting than brownian motion . This will let me add dialogs, like "I've been to that village, to get there you need to travel south-east", or quests: "A dwarf named bla-bla killed my friend, please find and kill him".

[Endorya]

You'll start with a very basic skill set (melee basically), and learn new skills from the races you stick with. From elves you'll learn magic and archery, from dwarfs sophisticated melee, and from goblins perhaps ambush, backstabbing, and other tricks.

But these plans are not settled, because a lot of it depends on the story and goals in the game and I haven't figured them out yet.

The next thing I'm concentrating on now is NPC intelligence, so they do something more interesting than brownian motion . This will let me add dialogs, like "I've been to that village, to get there you need to travel south-east", or quests: "A dwarf named bla-bla killed my friend, please find and kill him".

That really sounds interesting! And I'm glad you learn new skills from other NPCs and not just out of nothing. Drops us a line whenever you have a new version.

PS: Please take care of the invisible walls ASAP

[miki151]

I've uploaded a minor update, with mostly changes under the hood (migrated from Allegro to SFML), and now the game should work much better on slower computers and even wine. Endorya's feature request is also in, and it looks much better indeed, thanks!

[Endorya]

First of all let me say the it is incredibly faster now! In the previous version the character would move about 5 tiles per second, now it moves like 40 tiles a second!

There is still an issue with the space reserved for the turn counting as seen bellow. The bleeding message pushed it away:


It was really neat to see the dead bodies of slain bandits turn to skeletons after a while but what really made my day were the vultures appearing around their carcasses! LOL! This is the type of detail I really enjoy in roguelike games!

Ah! No more invisible walls, now it is perfect! Are you planing to implement food and water requirements?! That would be really awesome. I don't mean like making it as severe as ADOM was in early stages of playing but forcing the player to take some interest on fallen body parts and other corpses would be neat. I always love this survival feature.

[Oryx]

Game looks cool! I'd love to see it with my "ultimate roguelike tileset"

[mrrstark]

I like the look, it sounds cool. I found the dungeon entrance but couldn't go inside...

I tried > . 5 space all the normal keys non-shifted

I noticed that the stairs (>) made the UI say "Dungeon entrance", but so did the space immediately to the left.
The entrance was generated in a mountain patch, sliced by a road. the entrance was on the road

I went further down the road and found another dungeon entrance that I again couldn't use
I noticed this time that pressing the > key (shift + .) spend a turn, so its like it's trying to move me....

[Endorya]

I like the look, it sounds cool. I found the dungeon entrance but couldn't go inside...

I tried > . 5 space all the normal keys non-shifted

I noticed that the stairs (>) made the UI say "Dungeon entrance", but so did the space immediately to the left.
The entrance was generated in a mountain patch, sliced by a road. the entrance was on the road

I went further down the road and found another dungeon entrance that I again couldn't use
I noticed this time that pressing the > key (shift + .) spend a turn, so its like it's trying to move me....

You should open the manual.txt file and have a look at key mapping:

During the game you can use the following commands:
  '5' (number pad) : pick up an item or open a chest
  shift + '5' : pick up an item, choosing how many items to pick if multiple of same type
  'i' : display the inventory
  'd' : drop an item
  shift + 'd' : drop an item, choosing how many items to drop if multiple of same type
  space or '.' : wait one turn
  'a' : use an item that you carry
  'e' : manage equipment (weapon and armor)
  't' : throw an item (after this command you will choose the direction with the number pad)
  'm' : show the message history
  'h' : hide behind an object. Hiding is described further on.
  'p' : pay for items that you've picked up in a shop.
  'z' : change zoom level
  shift + 'z' : zoom out to see the whole world
  page-up and page-down : walk up and down stairs
  control + number pad direction : auto travel on this road, until something interesting happens

[miki151]

Oh, I forgot to emphasize this page up/down mapping in the game, as it's not very intuitive. I'm planning to add more help inside the game so I can ditch the manual.

Game looks cool! I'd love to see it with my "ultimate roguelike tileset"

I keep looking at your 16-bit fantasy sprite set actually. I think it looks really good, would it be possible to try it out first without buying?

[TheCreator]

First impressions... The game looks very elegant, even more than Brogue. Congratulations.

I was a little disappointed to discover that I cannot move without numpad... Laptop owners would not be very happy with that. Good to have the old USB numpad I once bought specifically for roguelikes .

In general, some kind of online keyboard help would be appreciated. Some key binding are rather standard, like I for Inventory, but others are not (how to open a chest?). I know that there's a manual in a text file, but I don't like to open external documents to look for help.

Some text does not fit in the screen. With resolution 1024x768 that can be frustrating. When my character has been wounded, the "bleeding" text overlapped with the friends/enemies list. One of those indicators could really go somewhere else, there's still a lot of screen space to occupy!

The combat was pretty good, but I don't see why my enemies started to bleed when I was only punching them with bare fists. The only way to do that in the real world is to punch somebody in the nose, but that doesn't cause immediate death .

[miki151]

Thanks for the feedback. I can add another key mapping for laptops, it's not a problem. Just tell me which keys you'd like to use for movement. I thought that all laptops have a numpad toggled by the Fn key (macbooks are one exception I know of). I used to play Nethack for many years on a laptop.

The current version has (most of) the key mapping displayed on the bottom of the screen. In the next version I'll upload it will be displayed more conveniently.

I've removed the "bleeding" status as it was not necessary. There might be still overlapping problems, but keep in mind that this is a very early version and I'm not going to put a lot of work into the interface until much later. I'd very much rather talk about mechanics and playability

The combat messages and mechanics are *really* naive right now, so I'm surprised no one commented on it before . I'll try to design something soon, the goal is for it to be more fun than a HP system, but not as complicated as in Dwarf Fortress.

[TheCreator]

I can add another key mapping for laptops, it's not a problem. Just tell me which keys you'd like to use for movement. I thought that all laptops have a numpad toggled by the Fn key (macbooks are one exception I know of).

Yes, that's true. But but this "fake numpad" is anything but a comfortable way to control character's movement . Most of roguelikes support arrow keys that allow to move  in 4 most important directions. The question is how to implement diagonal movement, but that's less important I think.

[AgingMinotaur]

re: laptop movement, as long as you can use the arrow keys for orthogonal, it's okay-ish to have to resort to a suboptimal scheme for the diagonals. vi-keys are always an option, but will leave many scratching their heads. I've also found that being able to use the regular number keys works better than one might expect. Some games allow for diagonal movement if you press Shift plus an arrow key.

As always,
Minotauros

[miki151]

I've uploaded a version with some small fixes, new goodies in the forest and added the arrow keys. Here's a list of things that I want to do before making a public release (besides fixing a few bugs that remain):
- blindness
- poison
- fire
- taverns
- improved mushrooms - addictive and with good and bad effects
- improved fountains - somewhat like in Nethack
- a list with locations that you can travel to (across dungeons)
- titles given by the races for achievements which unlock quests and skill teaching
- a deep main dungeon
- saving the game

Plus the following skills that you can learn during the game:
- knife throwing (goblin)
- crossbow (goblin)
- ambush (elves)
- archery (elves)
- two-handed weapons (dwarfs)
- advanced combat - pushing, switching position (dwarfs)

- digging (dwarfs)
- swimming (elves)
- mushroom knowledge (goblin)

Comments and suggestions are welcome.