The Red Prison - roguelike based on 5th edition D&D

[Slash]

This is looking very good!

[pat]

Thanks! I've been working this week on more magic items, specifically flaming and frost weapons. Flaming weapons are particularly useful because it can let you open up another hand because they also replace a torch for lighting.

Here's a gif of me finding a pretty great frost spear +2 and trying it out before deciding to test out whether it would work if I threw it at my allies (spoiler: it did).



* Added flaming effect for enchanted weapons. Also adds a separate illumination so the item functions as an always-lit torch whether in the player's inventory or on the ground.

* Made it so that illuminated items in inventory must be equipped to cast light.

* Added ability for conditions to apply extra damage when they are used to hit which is necessary to give effect to flaming (and other conditions). Created generic function to apply different damage types if target is still alive after primary damage is applied.

* Finished flaming weapons - illumination on being equipped and 2d6 extra fire damage on successful hit. Should work for ranged, thrown and melee weapons.

* Finished frost weapons - 1d6 extra cold damage on successful hit.

* Added extra check into condition effect processing to take into account immunities.

* Added colour over ride variable for items with special conditions so that they show up clearly on the GUI so that players don't miss them.

[pat]

Changes for this week include a number of UI tweaks to make things work smoother with some more user friendliness. I've also started work behind the scenes on a broader arc of advanced dungeon/quest generation. I've built the system for displaying conversations and the like for players as they run into NPC's of importance and I'm currently going through the process of how I want that aspect of the game to be fleshed out.

I think the leading approach at this stage might be to have a portion of the dungeon on a level inaccessible until the player speaks to a quest giver who tasks the player with killing a tough mob of monsters, recovering a treasure or another task along those lines. I want to make it so that choices have some complexity, ie. you might be able to decide to forego the treasure and turn on the quest giver, and that's the part I'm taking some care to plan.

[pat]

Players now get a choice of 50 graphical avatars. You can select one on character generation or you can change at anytime throughout the game via F3.

[pat]

New version released with changes this week including:

* Implemented spell macros. Made a menu accessible through F2 which lists spells and allows the player to press a number and assign a spell accordingly. Made it so these are saved and loaded with the rest of save game data so that can be kept throughout the whole game.

* Changed 'F' and 'M' so that it checks for last target and if none, then closest hostile. Streamlines ranged and magic gameplay a lot!

* Made it so that only the player and allies can be knocked out. It was just annoying as it was without any benefit - there were no circumstances where you would realistically want to heal or revive a neutral or hostile and monsters would rarely be in a position to do it either.

* Fixed bug where equipping enchanted ammunition gave bonuses to melee combat. Made it so that quiver slot is the one exception for added enchantment bonuses for equipment.

* Fixed bug where function which returned whether an actor could see another actor through darkvision didn't take into account the effect of distance. It's now properly restricted to 4 squares.

* Fixed bug where a monster might see an enemy and could still do ranged attacks or magic attacks despite that enemy moving out of sight.

* Began work on custom avatar for players. Implemented basic menu for selecting player avatars and allocated the standard ones for premade character templates. Added 50 avatars and completed menu for selecting and added F3 as key binding for this in-game so player has complete control at all times to change.

* Changed avatar selector to a red box to make things clearer after user feedback.

* Allowed NPC's swap places with an unconscious ally (including the player) to continue fighting rather than waiting for their ally to die first in close quarters combat. This required fixing a host of small bugs in my ai code which weren't noticeable until now, shifting the has_swapped flag from the ai component to the main object component to recognise the fact that the player object doesn't have an ai and allowing for an exception for swapping places when the player is involved - the player must be incapacitated to be swapped. If that exception wasn't in place, then NPC's would swap with the player all the time which was annoying but now they'll only do it and override the player if the player goes down.

* Fixed bug in companion ai where a null value was passed after conversion when it shouldn't have been.

[pat]

* Added info screen to display player's traits and proficiencies by pressing '@'. It still needs to be crossreferenced to the game docs but at least players can see what weapons etc they can use at a glance.

* Added graphical tile to spiritual weapon.

* Added red heart icon to top right corner of ally's graphical tile.

* Updated area of effect animation for bearlibterminal. Allows for a transition between two colours with increasing and decreasing alpha values with 3 random characters to be displayed.

* Rewrote explosion effect animation for bearlibterminal.

* Rewrote ray effect animation for bearlibterminal.

* Implemented new bolt effect animation. Draws a line between caster and target and draws a projectile with a fading trail behind it.

* Implemented projecile effect animation. Draws a '*' along the path of the projectile so the player knows what's going on in combat with ranged attacks.

[pat]

Because I’ve been updating so regularly, to make distribution easier, The Red Prison is coming to Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1074040/The_Red_Prison/

[pat]

New version up: https://patjw.itch.io/theredprison



Major changes are the inclusion of level 3 wizard spells fireball and lightning bolt, the introduction of a character level cap of 10 to reduce the scope of the game to something more feasible for now, and the reworking of composition of various graphical tiles so that objects can be stacked on screen as well as a few other better looking effects.

Full change log:

* Implemented fireball spell. 3rd level wizard spell with radius of 3 squares, dexterity check for all targets in that radius with 8d6 damage on failed save and halved for successful save.

* Updated spellcaster AI so that mage companions can use the fireball spells if they are far enough away to be safe and no allies will get caught in the blast.

* Fixed bug where enemy archers projectiles weren't being animated.

* Fixed bug where actors out of sight would overwrite door squares.

* Added a 1 in 3 chance of kobolds, orcs and bandits in mobs to have a lit torch.

* Increased chance of spellcasters using shocking grasp and inflict wounds in combat to 50% per turn.

* Fixed bug where AI spellcasters weren't properly using spell slots.

* Fixed issued in compiled version where second console window opened for no reason.

* Added level cap of 10 so that focus can be put on those class features under the cap.

* Implemented lightning bolt spell - 3rd level wizard spell with a ray sent from caster, dexterity check for all targets in the way with 8d6 damage on failed save and halved for successful save. Still not finished because it needs to keep going until it hits a wall and this currently doesn't happen.

* Added transparency to custom tiles. Changed actors to be printed on another level to background and to effects so that they can be visually merged properly for a better graphical effect. Made a whole host of changes behind the scenes to do with different layers - now background is layer 0, actors, items and effects are layer 1, special effects are layer 2, and menus are layer 3. Items now stack on ground (!!!).

* Fixed bug in character creation where menus for high elf cantrip selection didn't clear properly.

* Fixed bug where last spell caused a crash when you hadn't cast anything yet.

[Joonas]

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.

[pat]

Yeah sure, I’ll take a look at that and see what I can do.

[pat]

User feedback told me the font was too small (although it's exactly the same as Incursion) so I've made an unholy combination of a bunch of different fonts through the game with the help of BearLibTerminal to fix the issue:

[Tzan]

If the last 2 images show the text as it appears on the actual game, then its much easier to read.
Good change!

[pat]

This week was spent entirely on playtesting, UI fixes and bugsquashing yet again. I had a few people playtesting for me and it was really helpful to try and find a few odd things that were going on, particurly with areas of the game that I don't often replay. I'm pretty happy to say that I haven't had a crash or other issue come up in the last few hours of playtesting and my playtesters are saying the same. I even implemented an autoplay mode on top of autoexplore which doesn't quite manage to play without issue yet but manages to automate a lot of the game which was helpful.

This is great timing because the game unlocks on Steam Early Access in about 22 hours from now: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1074040/The_Red_Prison/

 It should be an interesting experience and I'm curious about how it's going to go because the game is still relatively immature but there's still a fair bit of content worth playing in my opinion. It'll always be free on all platforms and I've currently got about 50 wishlists for the game and I'll be trying to monitor things to make sure things don't horribly wrong once people are playing through Steam and I'll be keen to see what the stats end up looking like, which is something I have no idea about currently.

Moving forward from here, I think I'll keep trying to release unstable builds regularly on itch.io but perhaps hold back on the content which hasn't been tested from Steam so that version is always stable. I've started planning for the next arc of development which is the addition of more dungeon features, encounters and complex traps. And what I mean by complex traps is something like the player exploring an old church and stumbling onto a pressure plate which locks the door and releases a group of ghouls. I don't think I'll implement traditional traps which just cause damage but hopefully they'll all incorporate the environment like that and make for some fun!

Full change list:

* Implemented a rough autoplay for testing purposes. It's commented out in public builds but it combines autoexplore with invincibility and autofight.

* Fixed bug with error in tile setting for chimera.

* Fixed bug with accidental doubling up of fighting styles at level up to 10 for fighters.

* Fixed bug with shocking grasp causing crash.

* Fixed bug with displaying armour character in non-default font in bearlibterminal.

* Updated character creation so that you can restart at any time and continue creating a character.

* Fixed number of player avatars with overly transparent backgrounds.

* Added heavy armour proficiency to all clerics to reflect that they are all Life domain.

* Made sure that previous saved games are deleted upon player death.

* Fixed bug where converted bandit archers would not use ranged attacks as allies.

* Updated character creation so if you press escape on the first menu, you're back to the main menu.

[pat]

I had some really frustrating issues with the Steam Early Access launch where I had done everything right and the game was scheduled for release over the weekend. It announced to everyone that had wishlisted it that it was out but the store page didn't have a download link... there was a workaround through the steamdb website but it was really annoying to be unable to do anything about it until business hours Pacific time.

Turns out the issue was completely on Steam's end and the game was in a "unique release state" for unknown reasons which have now been fixed. So after all that, it's free for download on Steam at: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1074040/The_Red_Prison/

[pat]

New versions up on Steam and Itch.io with bug fixes and improvements to autoexplore amongst other things. Full changelog:

* Fixed bug which caused crash when pressed esc while targetting spiritual weapon.

* Fixed bug which caused crash when trying to set spell macros but not having any spells to choose from.

* Fixed problems with autoexplore dealing with doors - now the game just opens all doors when passing by them.

* Added additional stop to autoexplore whenever a new object is seen.

* Fixed bug which caused a crash when casting misty step and cancelling during casting.

* Made change to make sure that no bug would show up during casting and cancelling spiritual weapon.

* Amended healing prayer message to make it clear that up to 6 targets can be chosen.

* Amended aid and bless message to make it clear that up to 3 targets can be chosen.