Posted July 26, 2025 by Tesselation9000
I haven't posted for a month, so this is another big one. Here are the latest haps:
1. Chaos Mode. For debugging purposes, I added a key command that will flip the game over to Chaos Mode, which causes AI to take control of the player. While in this mode, each turn one random enemy of any type, one random item of any item and one random trap are added to the map. Also, one cloud of dangerous gas is added to the map each turn, as well as one active bomb. To increase the chaos, I taught the monsters how to use wands and added that all new monsters generated will start with a random wand in their inventory.
When I turn it on, utter madness is immediately unleashed. Ifreet toss fireballs hither and tither, llamas get caught in spider webs, lightning bolts streak the skies, ghosts chase commoners throughout the towns and explosions go off everywhere. At first it took about 2-5 minutes of this for the game to crash. I thought this might be a good time to try an actually debugger for once, so I loaded up gdb, which quickly proved to be extremely extremely useful.
One common cause of crashes was when something happened over on the edge of the map without the boundary being checked. E.g., a stray projectile would fly off the side and try to read tile data outside the map, causing the game to crash, or an acid trap would cause an acid pool to spill off the side. So far Chaos Mode has been very useful to find these as well as many other kinds of bugs.
2. Some monsters now have a special attack allowing them to swallow another creature whole. Once swallowed, the creature will take acid damage each turn, however it can also automatically strike the creature who has swallowed it. The swallower can still continue to move around, carrying the swallowed creature with it. I added three kinds of enemies who use this attack in slightly different ways:
- The slinker. This green slinky-like thing (inspired by an entity from Marble Madness) will leap at its target from a distance, engulfing it from above.
- The giant frog. This monster can lash out up to 5 spaces with its tongue, catching its target and drawing it into its belly.
- The gigaphage. This monster can engulf targets with a successful melee attack from its pseudopod.
Of course, now I have the job of figuring out how every item and spell functions when used from inside the belly of a monster. This includes a lot of amusing "you can't do that" messages.
3. The wand of magic bubbles. This wand can either directly attack an enemy at short range, or create a floating bubble. The bubble will drift around randomly until colliding with another agent (but not another bubble), causing it to explode over a short radius. The explosion does not cause a lot of damage compared to other wands, however its possible to build up a lot of bubbles in one place and then cause a chain reaction of explosions. They can also be burst with a successful melee attack or ranged attack.
The "gale" spell combines well with the wand of magic bubbles, as it can be used to blow the bubbles in an intended direction, possibly striking targets.
4. Potions and edible items can now become frozen when within the range of cold-based attacks or freezing vapour. These items cannot be drank/eaten while frozen, but will gradually thaw on their own over a long period of time. The player can also hold them over a fire to thaw them quickly. Freezing food can actually be useful, since it will prolong the time until the food spoils. Since there are certain rare rooms where freezing vapour is periodically released, these rooms can be used as meat lockers.
5. Haunting trap. About 40 turns after stepping on this one-shot trap, ghosts will periodically be spawed randomly over a long period of time precisely 10 spaces away from the player. Activating the trap will only give a message to the player if their wisdom score is at least 12. Players with less wisdom will not even know they activating the trap, but may wonder where all the ghosts are coming from. I also added a "scroll of haunting", which works in a similar way.
6. The wand of holy stars. This high-tier wand will create a shining star that will follow around undead or demonic enemies. The star is surrounded by a 4 space radius of holy light that causes damage each turn to all undead/demonic enemies within.