-The cave in shake option is not remembering the selected setting. It’s defaulting back to "on" after quitting and relaunching the game.
-I incurred damage that caused me to drop to low enough health that the blood pulse effect turned on. However, the last damage noise (the sound effect that played when I took that damage) continued to play over and over until I healed enough for the blood pulse effect to go away. I wish I had more specifics.
-I found an Amulet that did nothing. Just said "Amulet". It had a size, type, and value, but that’s it. I have a screenshot if you’d like to see it.
-I was wearing an enchanted scalemail breastplate which granted me +20 STR. I triggered a magic disenchanting trap that removed the +20 STR enchantment from my armor, but my character sheet still showed me having the +20 STR. Not sure if I still actually had the enchantment when I shouldn't, or if the character sheet never updated and was showing the wrong STR value. The amount of gold I could carry still matched my STR however, so I think I got to keep the enchantment.
-My level 22 character was allowed to walk into a "Cave Columns" square and was instantly killed. I should not have been allowed to enter the square. :(
QoL Requests:
-------------------------------
-I would love to be able to drop items from my inventory without needing to answer the (Y/N) prompt. This one is not a big deal because I created an AutoHotKey script to bypass the prompt for me, but this would be a nice option to have.
-I also created a command in that same script that allows me to go straight to choosing what items I want to pick up off the ground when I press “g”. This saves me from having to take two actions (activating the “pick up items?” prompt and then hitting “y”) every time I want to pick something up. It feels way less tedious. Again, I’ve already solved this for myself, but an option to bypass this prompt would be nice for others. In fact, an option to permanently disable any (Y/N) prompt would be nice (without having to change the option that disables all prompts because I like the combat ones).
-It would be nice if the merchants/smugglers didn’t move around so much. Sometimes I try to land on their square to interact with them and it takes me like four tries because they are moving every single turn. It’s a very small annoyance, but an annoyance nonetheless. If you still want them to wander around the map as much as they do now, maybe always have them stop moving when your character enters any of their surrounding squares? Then once the player moves more than 1 square away they can continue wandering? Idk just a thought.
-I know you mentioned that the "inventory full when trying to pick up an item" issue is a bugger to solve, but could you make it so that when trying to pick up an item you don't have space for, it takes you to your inventory screen and asks you which items you would like to drop to make room? I know this isn't easy to solve, just trying to come up with ways to make it a bit less frustrating.
The Cave In Shake Effect was saving in the saved game, not the preference file. Meaning if you quit the game and on your return started a new game it would no longer remember (though it would if you loaded an old game). This has been fixed! Thank you!
Alright, solved the mystery of the amulet. Previous to the last update, Rings/Amulets of Elemental Protection (etc.) and Rings/Amulets of Lycanthrope Protection (etc.) were 2 distinct enchantments (suffix 23 and 24 respectively). With the introduction of more sub-types of monsters in the last update (Spiders, Demons, etc.) and the creation of 6 new enchantments that protect you from those specific monster types, I didn't want the player constantly finding suffixed jewellery that was specific to these sub-types - so I consolidated all of them to suffix 23. Now if it finds suffix 23, it generates a new random number from 1 to 7. On a 1 it leaves it as suffix 23 (Elemental protection), but on a 2 through 7 it rewires the suffix to be 300 to 305. The problem was the variables hasprefix and hassuffix that it was temporarily storing the prefix/suffix in while it generates it was of type char which can't store a number as high as 300. Now hasprefix and hassuffix are of type int, allowing them to properly store the numbers. Bug fixed.
Fixed the problem where the Magic Draining Beam Trap could remove an enchantment from an armour piece and that enchantment wouldn't disappear if it provided a benefit to a Primary Attribute.
The Cave Columns bug is an ongoing issue. I tried to solve it in the last update and may have made it worse. You're allowed to enter them if you have the Spelunking perk or if you are under the effects of a Wallpass spell/effect. If the latter and the wallpass runs out while you're in a Cave Columns, you'll die on the next turn. It seems easy to fix in my head, but the code there is really tangled. I'll have to spend a lot of time revisiting to figure out how to fix it. I'll let you know if I think I've achieved success.
I like the idea of the merchants stopping if you move adjacent to them... I'll have to communicate it to the player in the manual because it could get a merchant killed if you're banking on the fact it may move out of a monster's way last second, but I think it's a good idea. I'll try to implement that. Also going to implement the auto-center on your character idea. Not sure I have time for any of the above today. We'll have to see!
Again, amazing game. I'm having so much fun - wish I would have found out about this game years ago. As someone who has started and stopped halfway through developing my own roguelikes like a dozen times, kudos!
Pretty sure this is a bug:
----------------------------
-I had Lycanthropy, and game crashed immediately when I turned into a werewolf upon entering a new floor. I heard the howl, but the screen turned black and it dumped me to the desktop. It still recorded the death properly on the high scores list and listed the correct cause of death.
Not sure if these are bugs or not:
----------------------------
-I had two of my first three runs ended by far out of depth monsters. The first one happened on dungeon level 8 when I encountered a level 26 enemy. It was not a champion or some crazy summons for failing a check. It was just roaming around and pounded me into the ground lol
-Encountered a level 22 Nightmare and level 24 burrowing worm (among others) on dungeon level 4. It was a Legendary Land, so perhaps this is just how Legendary Lands are. But if it's typical to run into monsters that are 20 levels OOD in Legendary Lands, I'll never EVER go into any Legendary Land again lol
-Had a blunderbuss (can't remember the name - some sort of exotic missile weapon) and it showed Dex and Health requirements (both of which I met), but every time I tried to equip it, it said my Int was too low, but did not show any Int requirement. I read the item description like 10 times, nowhere did it mention an Int requirement. I spent a couple levels raising my Int up to 20 and it still said my Int was too low. Maybe all exotic weapons have an Int requirement that's unspoken?
Requests:
----------------------------
-I would love an option to have the map always stay centered on my character. I constantly click to move and then immediately hit "u" to center. Click, u, click, u, click, u, click u. I probably hit u 400 to 600 times each map lol. Would love if the map just stayed centered. I do know about scrolling with arrow keys and right-clicking to center the map on where you click but I find both to be very cumbersome.
-To help alleviate above problem, I went into the rebind keys menu to change "Center Screen" from u to right mouse click. Unfortunately you can't rebind anything to right mouse click. Would love to be able to do that.
-I typically play most of the time with the character screen up, and often hold onto skill points for various reasons. But every time I need to see how many skill points I have I need to switch to one of the skill menus. And often when I do, I realize I had more skill points than I thought. There's room to display the current amount of skill points you have on the character screen right below where it shows how many attribute points you have. I think it would be nice to list them there.
Suggestions:
----------------------------
-When an item drops and you don't have room in your inventory to pick it up, it's a tedious process of clicking again and answering prompts to view the item that just dropped, and if you want to pick it up, then exit that screen, move to your inventory, drop an item there, go back to interacting with the space, accept the prompt to pick up items, and then select the ones you want to keep (and this gets worse with multiple items). This is just a suggestion on how you might be able to improve it (although you may have already considered this and decided against it): Allow players to pick up items they don't have inventory slots for, but give them "Encumbered" status that prevents them from moving. Once they go into their inventory and drop all items they don't have room for, they can move again. I think this would *greatly* streamline the process.
-I already paid for the game when I downloaded it, but often when it comes to these types of projects, I like to give more to the dev every so often. I went back to the itch.io page and there is no donate button. I guess I could re-purchase the game (if itch.io will let me)? A donate button would be nice!
The Lycanthropy thing sounds like a bug. I've never seen it happen, but I'll investigate. The most recent update did add 1 new Lycanthrope - the Were-Dragon. I'm betting the bug has something to do with that, but I'll have to check.
The level 26 enemy on Level 8 CAN happen, but it would be rare. Events could cause monsters to appear out of depth, but certain rare map tiles can too. For instance a Sewer Grate can spawn Goblinoids of any level at any level, and a Toothy Cave can do the same for Giant-types. These types of squares have a low chance each turn of spawning a new monster of the appropriate type, and when they do, a small chance of then sealing forever. If they don't seal forever on their own, you can try to seal them if you can find the square. But probably not a bug, just a situation that can arise.
The Nightmare and Giant Worm would be native to Ilastra. Not all Legendary Lands have such scary inhabitants, but some do. The entry text does give a warning: "While the dungeon's inhabitants are, for the most part, of low strength, the wizard who lives there has summoned a few particularly nasty pets." Most Legendary Lands have great rewards balanced by pretty steep risks, but since they are pre-designed, you can at least learn which ones you deem worth it after you've visited them.
The Blunderbuss issue sounds like a bug too. I'm looking at the code right now, and it SHOULD have said, "DEX required: X INT required: X" (Where the INT requirement BTW would be 70% of the DEX requirement). Based on the code, not sure how it output Max Health required... Obviously a bug I'm overlooking somewhere... I'll have to keep an eye open.
You're not the first person to mention the desire to have the map stay centered after an auto-move. It wouldn't be hard to implement, (I think), so I'll look into it for the next update.
I'm not sure the Skill Point reposition would work. Even if there's open space, other stuff goes there sometimes, under the right circumstance. But I'll check and see if I'm wrong.
It would be really hard within the current system to rework the inventory. There's a lot going on under the hood... (for instance, and offhand, if your equipped Weapon is Inventory item 96, it means you don't have a Weapon equipped - no inventory can ever expand beyond 95 slots)... I'll keep it in mind, but it won't be a priority right now.
I very much appreciate your desire to contribute more to the project! I'll look into a donation button. Not sure how that works. The truth is, after 29 years of working on the game, it's only in recent months that I opened up the possibility of people donating even when they download.
Thank you for the bug reports! I'll dig into the lycanthropy one literally this instant!
The lycanthropy bug should now be fixed (on my end). It was actually caused by a minor improvement I forgot to mention elsewhere - if you turn into a werebeast now, instead of showing your graphic as a dead version of your race and class, it should replace it with a live version of the appropriate werebeast. (It was looking for those graphics in the wrong folder).
The bug did NOT, as I had initially thought, have anything to do with the new Were-dragon, but while investigating that code, I discovered a bug there too! The were-dragon couldn't ACTUALLY cause Lycanthropy. This too has been fixed on my end. I'll try to get a bug fix update with these (and maybe a few other improvements) before another 3 months goes by! (Maybe this week, time permitting).
Awesome, thanks so much for taking the time to read my feedback and for the information. I definitely won't be forgetting the name Ilastra any time soon!
BTW, when looking into keeping the map centered after an auto move, I noticed it actually does do this if you only move one square at a time. If you click one square right or up or whatever, it will move your character one space and update the map so it's centered again. So you've already got the functionality in there, just might need to have it do that always instead of just when moving one space :)
Oh one last thing about the OOD depth monsters. I just started a new game, spawned in as a Centaur Assassin on level one, and literally two squares from my starting spawn there is a LEVEL 24 monster named Vetala with genius Int, 184 Att, and 97 HP. She chased me down, killed me in two hits and I died with a score of zero lol
I'm sure these OOD monsters are rare, but daaaaaaamn I'm getting unlucky...
Did you notice any unusual terrain nearby? That early it would have had to have spawned from what would probably be a Dead Side Gate on, like, turn 1. If it was there literally from the getgo, like on your first turn, unless there was an Event that brought it in (Undead Uprising, maybe?) I can't think of any way it would be there.
Hi! Just started playing this game and it's amazing! I've been playing roguelikes for 30 years and this is becoming one of my favorites after just a few hours. I could name 30 different aspects I love right off the top of my head. I've got some things written down from my first few playthroughs (bugs, questions, etc)......where's the best place to leave feedback? Not sure what the character limit is here.
Hey, thanks for posting that! I really enjoyed watching it :) I'll answer a few of the questions you posed and share some observations in the comments on the video itself!
Just bought the game, so still learning my way around the interface. I play with mouse and keyboard. A few questions:
Does it have a combat log anywhere so you can re-read earlier messages?
Is it possible to add an option to exit the map again using TAB? I tend to want to tab in and out, and now I have to go to another button like C to go back to the main view.
When I clicked BACK in character creation, it did not go back until I clicked OK first. Intentional or bug?
Scrolling the map with arrow keys is inconvenient when my right hand is on the mouse. How do other players using the mouse scroll it?
No combat log. I could add Tab to just toggle back to the last tab you were on. I'll make a note and try to get to it. The Back button issue you describe sounds like a bug. I'll have to look into it. You can right click any square to center the screen on the square you clicked, which is how you can scroll with mouse. If you hold the button down it will continue to scroll, with the speed essentially controlled by how far from the center of the screen you've got the mouse pointed.
Wanted to join in on the praise for the game, it's one of the only RL's that takes me away from DCSS (I hate to say but most have boring loot and bad enemy count/variety, at least compared to the randarts and creatures there) and I actually love the graphics. Love the great variety that's in game too and it feels like you're always in danger. Shout out for the events in general too, gave me my favourite RL death so far. Do wonder if my computer doesn't like it for some reason though( I wouldn't think any roguelike should be too hard on any modern computer but this game does have high power usage according to my task manager)
Thanks so much for the words of encouragement! It's a passion project, so always gratifying to know it's reaching an audience that enjoys it. As for the "computer doesn't like it" that's undeniably my fault - I'm not a coder by trade, so everything I know about coding is learned by trial and error in my spare time, so nothing is optimized the way a professional might do. I do have some plans to address some of this in the nearish future (probably not the next update, but the one after that). I'm curious to know what the Event was that lead your favourite RL death!
There seems to be a file termination error on the 1.30.18 complete .zip archive, I've tried re-downloading three times and it gives the same error (it finishes the extraction eventually but can't find some files on startup and fails to launch).
I suspect there's nothing missing because it's been downloaded dozens of time and no one's said anything - must be some weird error in the general transfer to you. If you send me your email at stopthesaturnians@gmail.com I can WeTransfer you copy I'm playing - hasn't been updated much, I don't think. Just let me know here if you've done so, because I never check that email and might forget otherwise!
This has honestly been one of the best roguelikes I have ever played, I have no idea how I haven't heard from it until now. I love how all the monster, items and skill have a purpose and even low level spells are incredibly useful in late game
I just had my first victory as a randomly rolled mouserling soldier and it was pretty damn fun.
I just have a couple bugs to report: 1. When you click on the reorganize button and you have a large inventory (like 28~30 slots by having expert travelling and a sack) if you are scrolled down on the inventory it will unequip items from the top of the list and not equip them back. 2. Not sure if this is a bug but I have lost a character that got greasy and slipped on to a stalactite tile, getting impaled.
Congratulations on this fantastic game, I will for sure keep my eye on it for future updates!
Ah - BOTH of those are bugs! I thought I'd fixed the sliding into Stalagmite deal a while back, but evidently not... I'll have to look into them. Thanks for the bug report and glad you're enjoying the game!
I've been searching for the slide from grease into stalagmites bug. I cannot find any loophole that would allow sliding from grease to put you into stalagmites in the first place... I'll keep looking, but I'll be up front and say I'm not sure how to fix this one right now.
Wait, I MIGHT have just fixed it. Truth is, I've been dicking around with the code, and I just changed something that might have been the cause, but I'm not entirely sure I didn't add that something previously while dicking around with the code. So... MAYBE fixed?
It took me about 20 serious attempts but now I can finally claim the word: Victorious!!! For some reason Xaskazien did not have max health but its fate was sealed anyway.
You did an awesome job with the dungeon (cavern?) generation, the kind that could only be achieved with years of fine-tuning. One small blemish would be the rare occurrence when you start a floor on a monster's tile, triggering a combat round. That just feels wrong so hopefully that's a bug and not intended!
QoL/idea: Toggleable "As long as it remains in your inventory" items. That can be highly desirable (Enchanted Arrows) and would blend well with certain effects and traps.
Already starting a new quest, the game is definitely a keeper!
Congratulations! (Out of curiosity, what race/class/religion combo won it for you?)
Xaskazien could have been missing health from passing through dangerous terrain, falling in a pit, etc.
Immediate combats on descending should be quite rare, but aren't a bug. It would be easy to put in a catch to ensure it doesn't happen, but I don't really see a reason to do that... I like the possibility, at least.
Enchanted Arrows do exist! (As do Armour Piercing Arrows). They're not toggleable - if they're in your inventory and you're using a bow, they automatically take effect.
Best of luck with your next go around! I'm about to dive into another playtest, myself
I played as a Viean Centaur Archer. The challenge was just right for this kind of game. In other words, it was devilishly hard! Fortunately, Vie played a decisive role against Xaskazien's damaging spells. Also, I was lucky to find a very good bow and... enchanted arrows. What I meant earlier is, those special inventory items should be toggleable. Seriously, can you really afford to waste such a great effect to finish off a low HP monster? So I dropped them when overkill, which takes me back to the rather slow inventory management. I also had two different Halo items but didn't know which one would activate first...
I really like how there exist some defensive tactics, items or skills against everything: hidden pits and traps, enemies blocking corridors, cursed scrolls or bad potions... pretty much everything except taking a hit from an unexpected monster and possibly being killed right after you descend! Unlike the other thousand causes of death the game can throw at you, this won't be the direct consequence of a move or action you CHOOSE to take. It's all about taking calculated risks, so IMO that goes against the perceived spirit of the game. That sure will bring unnecessary frustation, and doesn't seem to add anything interesting gameplay wise...
My next hero is already dead, strangled by Severed Hands while running away. Here comes his avenger!
After hours of deadly exploration, I must say this is one mighty impressive game! Plenty of old school yet refreshing ideas and interesting gameplay mechanics, like the combat resolution on the same tile... And so much content it dwarfs most other titles of the genre. Plus excellent graphics, sound effects and an awesomely fitting soundtrack... really impressive! Anyway, some quick QoL suggestions and one question that come to mind:
Since new items are automatically taken and the inventory tends to alway be full, there should be a faster way to swap items and/or access the "Retrieve" window. Perhaps also even a way to use items (potions/books) without actually taking them. IMO the game's only real issue so far, as sometimes it can become quite tedious...
An option to keep the view screen centered on the character after moving with the mouse would be nice too.
And ideally, the button that opens the map should also take you back to the last opened tab. Btw, in my current map I found a small bug (the kind that doesn't try to eat the hero for a change): The boat is not visible without a line of sight, however it's still possible to querying it!
Finally, the question: What exactly is "Yorick's Dimension Hopping Trunk"? There is no mention of it in the manual...
Thank you for the comments and thanks for the bug report! That boat query bug I've already addressed behind the scenes recently. We're still about 2 months out from the next release, but it's already going to be ungodly huge in size, including a lot of major QOL improvements.
You're not the first person to mention the desire to use items from the ground... I'll have to think about it. It's doable within the framework of the existing code, but it might be tricky to implement... I'll have to give it thought. Re-centering on the character after a mouse move, on the other hand, shouldn't be hard at all... after I've finished today's workload, I'll look into it.
There are 2 magical trunks that can appear in the game: Melgrim's Teleporting Trunk and Yorick's Dimension Hopping Trunk. Melgrim's has a 10% chance of appearing on any level, though Yorick's only has a 1% (and can be purposefully conjured via a Vestonian miracle, too). With Melgrim's, anything you drop in the trunk will still be in it if the trunk shows up again later in your game - so it's a way to set aside things you don't have space to carry but which MIGHT come in handy if you're lucky later. With Yorick's, anything you drop in the trunk will still be there when the trunk appears, even in separate games. So if you find something awesome that's not of use to your current character, you can drop it in there in the hopes that some future character will find and benefit from it. (Yorick's also includes whatever items I've dropped in it before uploading here, so if you want a pure game that only contains your own stuff, you can reset it via the high score screen by clicking "Reset").
You might want to explain Yorick's Trunk in the manual. I've never found any, but I actually did reset the highscores to hide my laughable first attempts, and I was not sure what to do when it asked about it, hence my question. Unfortunately(?) the story will never tell what you've dropped in there, but it's nice to be able to reset it separately from the scores.
Very glad you're already working on the next update! Currently my randomly chosen Paladin keeps taking improvised junks he is not allowed to use, which exacerbates the inventory issue. Well, it's ok as he contracted too many diseases and will not survive much longer!
Anyway, thank you for the explanation, I really appreciate it!
Extremely fun game, but I had a weird glitch occur that killed my run. Basically time froze for everyone but me. I was basically invulnerable to all forms of hazard damage, but could not interact with anything in the dungeon, but could use spells/items. I think what caused it is that I opened one of those book shelves that are located on the wall, while simultaneously standing on a recharging station. I ignored the recharge station because I had nothing to recharge and dropped the spell book on the ground and tried to move away from both and it's right around then that the dungeon just froze up.
Huh. That's a weird glitch! Thanks for letting me know. I'll take a look at Recharge Stations and see if I can find anything... Not sure what would have caused this though!
If you're using an older version of the game, there was a glitch where you could open the Recharge screen from a Recharge Station and then walk away, leaving it open, and that could cause all kinds of problems. Fixed that in the last version (or perhaps the one before) though.
I should be using the newest version, at least I think so. I only started playing recently, I do think that is what caused it, but I think the item on the ground may have lent a hand in the glitch occurring. Well either way, it might have just been a fluke or something, I don't know.
God this game is so great and addictive, one of the very best traditional roguelikes out there. I've been looking for a real varied while challenging experience for so long, I'm so happy it exists and is still actively developed.
It is currently trending on the Roguelikes Discord. People are getting really passionate (and expert 😛) about it and opened a channel to share their experiences on the game.
Would love to see you there, VirtuaSinner, and read your inputs and thoughts!
Yes. Fire the game up in full screen, go into the Options menu, and left click the Windowed/Full Screen toggle. When you leave the Options it will save your preference so next time it will launch in Windowed.
Weird - it was just a stack laying there? Or did you do something and then they appeared? Never seen that before. The one potion you drank was probably a Sleeping Draught.
Oooooh. Yeah, you updated, skipping steps. Absolutely that'll cause mess ups. Just download the full version. If updating, you have to update step by step.
Trying to play this on a laptop with no numpad and it looks like there's no way to move down with wasd - s activates stealth mode. I'm not sure if this is a bug or I'm not understanding something.
Gah! You're right! WASD was implemented (though I never use it), and since I FORGOT it was implemented, I rewired the s key for stealth to be mnemonic, instead of the y key which used to be stealth. Sigh. I'll fix it on the next pass! In the meantime, you can, however, still use the mouse to move - click any square that you can see a path to to move there by the shortest, most direct and safest path. Or click any square horizontally or vertically adjacent to your character to move to that square.
Has anyone tried to run this on Wine in Ubuntu? It works great up until I finish the character creation. Then I get 2/3 through the loading screen and it crashes:
Got to 13!wine: Unhandled page fault on read access to 000003F8 at address 7BC73D9D (thread 0009), starting debugger...
0031:fixme:dbghelp:elf_search_auxv can't find symbol in module
Anyway I am still trying to figure out how wine works to try to debug it or I will just set up VirtualBox. Maybe after I get a little work done. Just asking in case anyone has run it with Wine before. Really nice character creation screen though.
OK so I am just using VirtualBox with this tiny Win 7 iso https://archive.org/details/Tiny7#reviews. Just need to make sure to increase the resolution in Windows to at least the minimum by right clicking and going to Screen Resolution. Or actually it should be 1024x768 really.
Yes it seems to be working perfectly. Except something about my Ubuntu resolution when I change it to 1024x768 or my monitor, the screen is slightly moved to the bottom and almost cuts off the bottom edge. But I can still read the text and I think I can fix that by messing with my monitor or Ubuntu display settings. Anyway its only a few pixels.
I only played for a few minutes so far but I do appreciate the amount of thought and roguelike experience that has gone into this just from initial reactions. The wheel of fortune that spawned right next to me was a nice touch. It was funny because I gave it all of my gold. Also it is nice that there is a portal or whatever thing to create a new dungeon level easily in case people don't like the one that was generated or whatever.
I actually want to go back to the manual and the character creation screen for at least like 30-60 minutes before I go back to a dungeon again though.
Having a bit of trouble playing "of xaskazien." When I boot the game, I only get the inmost 60% of the screen, hence the "of Xaskazien", the rest is occluded. I get the feeling it is scaling itself far past the meat-space parameters of my screen. I'd love to give this a shot, but I can't find anything on the 'web to help me with this. Any ideas?
It runs in a straight 1024*768, 4:3. Any scaling would be done by your graphics card. I know, for myself, I have an NVidia graphics card. If I go into the settings, under Adjust Desktop Size and Position, there's a scaling setting with 3 options: Aspect Ratio, Full Screen and No Scaling. I leave mine set to Aspect Ratio, to ensure that 4:3 games/videos play at that format, otherwise it stretches the game to fill the full screen. Unless you're playing on a 4:3, the game should appear centered, with black, empty space to either side. Could it be something to do with that? If that doesn't solve it, the other option would be to play in Windowed mode, but that option can only be set in game, though it saves the preference thereafter - so if you're still having problems, PM me, and I'll generate and mail you a new preferences file that would default to Windowed mode.
(I suppose the other potential culprit would be if your computer is set to a lower resolution than 1024*768 - the game runs only in that resolution, so your environment would have to be at that resolution or higher).
Just to be clear. It's a windows PC, just the format of the computer it's umpc. But it's an Intel m3 with intel HD 615 graphics, 8GB ram windows 10 and a max resolution of 1280
I'm just guessing that there must be something different in the processor of a portable machine. But truthfully, I have no idea. I've coded it on a Windows PC (desktop), seems to work on most Windows desktops and laptops, but I have absolutely zero knowledge about why it would or wouldn't work on one machine vs. another. Sorry, man.
Hello. I think he said his vertical max was 720, but you are looking for 768. Maybe there is a way to give an option for a lower resolution or something.
Anyway this is a random question but is there a way to donate to this game or buy it or something? For example if someone is requesting a new graphics mode or something, maybe they could buy you a coffee or something at least.
Hey! Thanks for the new patch.. Just wanted to stop by and show you someone streamed your game recently! Overall they really enjoy it and will probaly stream it again! https://www.twitch.tv/videos/465956603
I've been exclusively playing a Half-orc Barb of Hornan, great beginner combo I'd recommend for any new players.. Anyway, I just wanna suggest maybe buffing Hornan's Summon Orc Champion prayer? When its most effective is the first few 1-3 dungeon levels, but its cost makes it so you're not able to actually use it consistently on those floors compared to something cheaper and more appropiate like Strike prayer.
Summons as a whole from my limited experience using Hornan's prayer and wands seem rather weak and quickly become useless 4+ dungeon levels in, thoughts?
Hey, thanks for the feedback. I’m always tweaking and balancing, so good to keep an eye on what other people are experiencing. Coincidentally, the perks I’m just finishing coding are for the
Warlock class, which is a spellcaster devoted to summoning. I have a Female Centaur Warlock who worships Talltioward on the go, and my fearful eye has been kept on whether or not summoning is overpowered. But through this
playthrough I think I’m realizing it’s okay, at least for now. Let me answer your question with some detailed thoughts.
Firstly, very cool that you’ve found a race/class combo you like. I hadn’t thought about it, but a Barbarian is a perfect starting class, since it pretty effectively removes spellcasting from
the table, allowing a player to learn other core mechanics first. I think if someone asked for a beginner combo in the future, an Agnostic Half-Orc Barbarian might be my recommendation, since that would also remove Miracles
from the list.
If you’re exclusively playing the same character type, though, it’s important to bear in mind that the experience of other characters would vary widely, making certain things more or less useful. As an example, Hornas’ Striking miracle you mentioned, which costs only 10 Faith Points and allows you to automatically hit on your next swing - I can see how this would be especially devastating for a starting Barbarian
character to use. The Barbarian starts with the most powerful weapon among all starting characters - the Small Axe. This is to compensate for their total lack of spell access, but bear in mind its massive damage of 1 to
15, and contrast this with other classes who would start with weapons that do either 1 to 3, 1 to 4, 2 to 4 or 1 to 6, and it immediately becomes clear that Striking serves the starting Barbarian better than any other class. The Small Axe also comes with a massive -18 to hit penalty, so automatically hitting overcomes a big obstacle to its use. A character starting with a Pitchfork, by contrast, has +6 to hit, so Striking, while still useful
in many circumstances, is maybe not as necessary to land that blow.
Now let’s look at Summoning spells as a whole. The purpose of summoning is, generally, to bring into play a monster that will go and kill other monsters for you, so let’s compare it to another
common way to use magic, which is with direct damage spells. Invisible Hammer, in terms of raw numbers, is the most powerful Low Power direct damage spell, doing 8 to 15 physical damage at a cost of 35 Spell Points. In the
early game, this is an insanely powerful spell that can kill most monsters with a single application. But it does have some drawbacks - firstly, it’s only useful against a single monster. Once you’ve cast it,
the spell points are gone, and you may now be defenseless against other monsters. Secondly, it only works against the monster in your square, meaning to cast it, you have to first engage in a single round of combat, possibly
taking damage, possibly even being killed before getting a chance to cast it. And thirdly, it always does physical damage, limiting its effectiveness against monsters with physical resistance, most notably various types of
Golems who would be unaffected.
For 35 Spell Points, you could instead (provided you had access) cast the Summon Minor Fiend spell. This summons a low level Diabolic monster (a monster that would most commonly reside on Dungeon Levels
1 through 10). There are some key advantages to this vs. the Invisible Hammer spell. Firstly, depending on what you summoned, it might be able to kill multiple enemies. On a particularly early dungeon level (say Dungeon
Level 1 through 5), there’d be a decent chance the summoned monster would outclass everything else on the level, and could rampage through killing literally every enemy without you ever having to face them, while you
still reap all the EXP rewards. Secondly, you don’t have to (in fact, can’t) cast it in a square with an enemy, so you don’t have to put yourself at risk in order to cast it, the way you would with most
direct damage spells. Thirdly, the potentially summoned monsters are varied, some having attacks other than physical attacks, so while an Invisible Hammer spell could never affect a Golem, your summoned monster might be able
to.
There are drawbacks to Summon Minor Fiend, of course, and that’s that it doesn’t scale as you level up. It’s extremely useful early on, but as you progress deeper in the dungeon, it becomes
obsolete. Because of its wide variation in what gets summoned, it’s even possible to use it on Dungeon Level 1 to bring into play a lowly Demonic Larvae, and have that get killed by the first thing it meets, doing no
damage whatsoever, so it’s risky. Invisible Hammer isn’t going to kill anything with a single cast beyond a certain depth, either, but it will still do some damage. (Of course, even the Demonic Larvae could get lucky and get a single hit on a Dragon before it dies, but it’s not as sure a thing as Invisible Hammer).
So they both have advantages and disadvantages to balance each other out.
Finally let’s compare Summon Orcish Champion to Summon Minor Fiend. With the Miracles, I always did my best to
correspond Faith Point costs to the Spell Point costs of an equivalent spell, if one exists, and right away we see that Summon Orcish Champion costs 40 Faith Points instead of Summon Minor Fiend’s 35 Spell Points, so
it had better be more powerful, but not too much more powerful. Summon Minor Fiend brings in a monster of random power (again, between level 1 and level 10) with a median of 5.5. Orcs are
a level 6 monster, so we’re pretty in line. But the Summon Orcish Champion miracle doesn’t just summon an orc, it summons a buffed up orc, a little more powerful than the average orc, putting its 40 point cost
right about on the money.
Like Summon Minor Fiend, Summon Orcish Champion only really has application in the early dungeon levels, but can be devastating there. Again, bear in mind that not every character can go toe to toe with
enemies (even lowly enemies) and expect to live the way a Half-Orc Barbarian can. For some (like my Centaur Warlock), summoning monsters to do the dirty work, while fleeing or luring enemy monsters back to where the summoned
monster lurks may be the only way to survive
I can see where you're coming form, and it all makes sense to me. Looking at it this way summons themself do seem to be in a good spot, what seems to be more of the issue is that 40 Faith is extremely hard to come by whereas your character can start with the spell points needed to cast a summon spell, and by the time you have it; summoning an Orc Champion isn't as useful as it should be.
I'll keep an eye on the miracle as I continue to playtest. I don't want Faith to become common - it's meant to be a luxury you need to parse out rarely, unlike spell points which are a far more universal currency (except when it comes to Barbarians :P)
So I've been completely addicted to Caverns since I made my last comment here, its the most fun I've had playing a roguelike since I first discovered them.
I was wondering if you could slightly reduce or maybe give us an option to increase/decrease the map scroll speed with the arrow keys?
I'll look into it. In the meantime, you can also use the mouse, btw. Just right click a square to centre the screen there. If you hold the right mouse button, you can scroll the map around, with the speed dependent on how far the mouse is removed from the centre of the screen.
Glad to hear it! Thank's alot! I'm currently sitting on a level 5 Half-orc Barbarian and just wanted to chime in and say the new Perk system is really cool and I love the flavor it adds to the game! Machoism giving me the occasional EXP from taking damage is really unique and my favorite perk so far.
Hello Mr.Dev, I was wondering what a good beginner race/class combo would be? common sense would say whatever swings the heaviest weapon and takes the most hits, but I wanted your opinion first. Thank you for developing such an awesome and free RL!
I usually randomize everything, to be honest. I would avoid anything with low starting health for a beginner. So no elvish assassins, say. Maybe a Dwarven Warrior? Pretty basic.
P.S. I'm working on a massive new update. It's been slow going, but in addition to adding more content and gameplay improvements than any previous updates, it also fixes a couple of critical bugs. I'll get it out ASAP!
Hmmm... Not sure what would cause this. There's been about 500 downloads and you're the first to mention. Have you tried more than once with the same result?
I there a way to prevent yourself from attacking monsters? I don't like accidentally killing monsters that are faster than me that will make my god angry but it keeps happening.
There are ways to minimize the risk, but no way to just not fight. You can unequip your weapon before encountering them, to ensure you do less damage if you do hit. You can keep your distance where possible (especially from Animal intelligence monsters, as they won't generally approach if you don't get close). You can take steps to discourage them from chasing you like Confusing or Paralyzing them... that's about it, at present.
Might be a neat idea to add a toggleable "Pacifist" button or something where you can turn off your side of the fight, though. Never occurrred to me before. I'll look into it.
Thanks for the idea. I've implemented a new key/button that toggles on or off your swinging at enemy monsters, so you can turn off your side of the combat if you're engaging a monster you don't want to kill (though they'll keep hacking at you). Will be include in the next upload in a couple days.
Sounds awesome! Would it be too much to make a per monster configurable option or something? So maybe for example its default settings are set not to kill monsters in the categories which your god will hate you for killing?
Interesting idea. Hadn't considered it. At present, it'll just be a toggleable option. Won't have time to implement something more complete before the next release. I'll bear it in mind for later.
Scratch what I said. It was too good an idea to pass up, so I've implemented it. You can now toggle your Combat State to Fight, Don't Fight, or Selectively Fight, and can select specific monster types to add or remove from your Selectively Fight list at any time. While set to Selectively Fight, you won't swing at any monster types you've specified in the list. The game defaults to Selectively Fight, with any monsters your deity would prefer you not to kill automatically chosen. (It also defaults to adding Golems to this list, since you won't be able to hurt them in combat at start of game, and trying will just wear down your weapon, though you can remove them or any other monster types from the list at any time).
This stuff seems amazing, but there's a few things I wanna talk about.
1) IMO, fonts are quite bad. I know that it's stylized like this, but it makes stuff much harder to read, for me at least.
2) Why you can move only in 4 sides? Why not use classic 8-sides movement system on numpad which is used in most of roguelikes?
3) Bar buttons should be down here, not on the right side., in my mind. Also, if you moved them, you could make them larger.
4) Why not add high-res suppor instead of making it 1280x720? I mean, yeah, it's in long time development, but...
Anyway, don't take this like I didn't liked the game! It still seems amazing for me, especially when it's so full of different content. I really like it, and hopefully it will be worked on more!
Hey, Fenos. Thanks for the comments. In specific response:
1) The fonts initially used in the game were a deliberate attempt to match (as closely as I could) the fonts I'd used in the original Caverns. However, a lot of people complained that they were hard to read, so it now defaults to something much easier to read (at least in most instances), with the option to toggle back to the gothic fonts if a player wishes. The character creation menu still uses stylized fonts for the large lettering, because the feedback I was getting was that at that scale everything remained legible, even in that style. But if enough people raise this as an issue, I'll switch the fonts on that page, too. Wouldn't be too tricky an issue to address, I don't think. In terms of changing the "new", smaller font (the one I already switched to to make things legible), if that was also deemed hard to read, the one problem would be that since screen co-ordinates remain absolute, and there's finite room to print things in the supplied text boxes, I would have to find something that remained pixel perfect in alignment with the old font. If a printed sentence grew even one or two pixels longer as a result of changing fonts, it could mess up all outputted text and take dozens of hours to realign everything manually (if that was even possible).
2) Initially movement was in all 8 directions for player and monsters. But I hated allowing either to move diagonally between walls or other impassable obstacles (where wall corners abutted, for instance). Imposing the restriction there ended up being a pain in the ass programming-wise, but even more so in gameplay, because players were getting confused as to why they couldn't do so, so I culled it back to 4 directions, and I've since grown used to it in game. I've been playing some Moria lately, and I'll admit when first coming back to Caverns it was jarring for me to have only 4 directional movement, but it wore off quickly, so changing it isn't a high priority. Players who aren't used to roguelikes also find the 4 directional movement easier to grasp, so there's an upside.
3) Not sure what you mean by "Bar buttons" or "down here." If you mean the clickable buttons to change sidescreen tabs, that's the only screen real estate available where they won't overlap anything important. At the bottom of the screen they would need either impinge on the view screen or the Situation Panel. Are those the buttons you're referencing?
4) When I first abandoned Caverns in favour of starting Caverns 2 (in 2010) I was still using a 4:3 monitor. I had recently programmed another tile based game called "The Zombie Nightmare of Fillibree County" and it used 1024*768. Since this was a marked improvement over the original Caverns' 640*480, I just went with it. Today I'm working on a 4K monitor and if I could go back in time, I'd make a different choice. But, cards on the table, I'm not a savvy enough coder to know how to allow players to choose their resolution. And I suppose there may well be some players still out there with 4:3 monitors, so 1024*768 might not be the worst choice... And further cards on the table, screen positions are hard coded - i.e. the game checks absolute X,Y coordinates for the mouse and places things at hard coded specific X,Y coordinates, etc. Changing the resolution now, even just to a new, single specified resolution, would mean months of work. And since the graphics aren't going to be scalable, it would really yield little fruit. Unless I get around to programming COX 3 in 10 or 20 years, this one almost certainly won't change.
Glad you're enjoying the game! The one thing I can promise is even more content... in time.
← Return to game
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Hi again! Some additional observations:
Bugs:
-------------------------------
-The cave in shake option is not remembering the selected setting. It’s defaulting back to "on" after quitting and relaunching the game.
-I incurred damage that caused me to drop to low enough health that the blood pulse effect turned on. However, the last damage noise (the sound effect that played when I took that damage) continued to play over and over until I healed enough for the blood pulse effect to go away. I wish I had more specifics.
-I found an Amulet that did nothing. Just said "Amulet". It had a size, type, and value, but that’s it. I have a screenshot if you’d like to see it.
-I was wearing an enchanted scalemail breastplate which granted me +20 STR. I triggered a magic disenchanting trap that removed the +20 STR enchantment from my armor, but my character sheet still showed me having the +20 STR. Not sure if I still actually had the enchantment when I shouldn't, or if the character sheet never updated and was showing the wrong STR value. The amount of gold I could carry still matched my STR however, so I think I got to keep the enchantment.
-My level 22 character was allowed to walk into a "Cave Columns" square and was instantly killed. I should not have been allowed to enter the square. :(
QoL Requests:
-------------------------------
-I would love to be able to drop items from my inventory without needing to answer the (Y/N) prompt. This one is not a big deal because I created an AutoHotKey script to bypass the prompt for me, but this would be a nice option to have.
-I also created a command in that same script that allows me to go straight to choosing what items I want to pick up off the ground when I press “g”. This saves me from having to take two actions (activating the “pick up items?” prompt and then hitting “y”) every time I want to pick something up. It feels way less tedious. Again, I’ve already solved this for myself, but an option to bypass this prompt would be nice for others. In fact, an option to permanently disable any (Y/N) prompt would be nice (without having to change the option that disables all prompts because I like the combat ones).
-It would be nice if the merchants/smugglers didn’t move around so much. Sometimes I try to land on their square to interact with them and it takes me like four tries because they are moving every single turn. It’s a very small annoyance, but an annoyance nonetheless. If you still want them to wander around the map as much as they do now, maybe always have them stop moving when your character enters any of their surrounding squares? Then once the player moves more than 1 square away they can continue wandering? Idk just a thought.
-I know you mentioned that the "inventory full when trying to pick up an item" issue is a bugger to solve, but could you make it so that when trying to pick up an item you don't have space for, it takes you to your inventory screen and asks you which items you would like to drop to make room? I know this isn't easy to solve, just trying to come up with ways to make it a bit less frustrating.
Thanks for reading!
Thank you so much for the reports! Looking into the bugs immediately!
The Cave In Shake Effect was saving in the saved game, not the preference file. Meaning if you quit the game and on your return started a new game it would no longer remember (though it would if you loaded an old game). This has been fixed! Thank you!
Alright, solved the mystery of the amulet. Previous to the last update, Rings/Amulets of Elemental Protection (etc.) and Rings/Amulets of Lycanthrope Protection (etc.) were 2 distinct enchantments (suffix 23 and 24 respectively). With the introduction of more sub-types of monsters in the last update (Spiders, Demons, etc.) and the creation of 6 new enchantments that protect you from those specific monster types, I didn't want the player constantly finding suffixed jewellery that was specific to these sub-types - so I consolidated all of them to suffix 23. Now if it finds suffix 23, it generates a new random number from 1 to 7. On a 1 it leaves it as suffix 23 (Elemental protection), but on a 2 through 7 it rewires the suffix to be 300 to 305. The problem was the variables hasprefix and hassuffix that it was temporarily storing the prefix/suffix in while it generates it was of type char which can't store a number as high as 300. Now hasprefix and hassuffix are of type int, allowing them to properly store the numbers. Bug fixed.
Thanks for the details - as a hobbyist/amateur programmer, I always find these interesting!
Fixed the problem where the Magic Draining Beam Trap could remove an enchantment from an armour piece and that enchantment wouldn't disappear if it provided a benefit to a Primary Attribute.
The Cave Columns bug is an ongoing issue. I tried to solve it in the last update and may have made it worse. You're allowed to enter them if you have the Spelunking perk or if you are under the effects of a Wallpass spell/effect. If the latter and the wallpass runs out while you're in a Cave Columns, you'll die on the next turn. It seems easy to fix in my head, but the code there is really tangled. I'll have to spend a lot of time revisiting to figure out how to fix it. I'll let you know if I think I've achieved success.
I like the idea of the merchants stopping if you move adjacent to them... I'll have to communicate it to the player in the manual because it could get a merchant killed if you're banking on the fact it may move out of a monster's way last second, but I think it's a good idea. I'll try to implement that. Also going to implement the auto-center on your character idea. Not sure I have time for any of the above today. We'll have to see!
Thanks so much for looking into all of these!
Again, amazing game. I'm having so much fun - wish I would have found out about this game years ago. As someone who has started and stopped halfway through developing my own roguelikes like a dozen times, kudos!
Pretty sure this is a bug:
----------------------------
-I had Lycanthropy, and game crashed immediately when I turned into a werewolf upon entering a new floor. I heard the howl, but the screen turned black and it dumped me to the desktop. It still recorded the death properly on the high scores list and listed the correct cause of death.
Not sure if these are bugs or not:
----------------------------
-I had two of my first three runs ended by far out of depth monsters. The first one happened on dungeon level 8 when I encountered a level 26 enemy. It was not a champion or some crazy summons for failing a check. It was just roaming around and pounded me into the ground lol
-Encountered a level 22 Nightmare and level 24 burrowing worm (among others) on dungeon level 4. It was a Legendary Land, so perhaps this is just how Legendary Lands are. But if it's typical to run into monsters that are 20 levels OOD in Legendary Lands, I'll never EVER go into any Legendary Land again lol
-Had a blunderbuss (can't remember the name - some sort of exotic missile weapon) and it showed Dex and Health requirements (both of which I met), but every time I tried to equip it, it said my Int was too low, but did not show any Int requirement. I read the item description like 10 times, nowhere did it mention an Int requirement. I spent a couple levels raising my Int up to 20 and it still said my Int was too low. Maybe all exotic weapons have an Int requirement that's unspoken?
Requests:
----------------------------
-I would love an option to have the map always stay centered on my character. I constantly click to move and then immediately hit "u" to center. Click, u, click, u, click, u, click u. I probably hit u 400 to 600 times each map lol. Would love if the map just stayed centered. I do know about scrolling with arrow keys and right-clicking to center the map on where you click but I find both to be very cumbersome.
-To help alleviate above problem, I went into the rebind keys menu to change "Center Screen" from u to right mouse click. Unfortunately you can't rebind anything to right mouse click. Would love to be able to do that.
-I typically play most of the time with the character screen up, and often hold onto skill points for various reasons. But every time I need to see how many skill points I have I need to switch to one of the skill menus. And often when I do, I realize I had more skill points than I thought. There's room to display the current amount of skill points you have on the character screen right below where it shows how many attribute points you have. I think it would be nice to list them there.
Suggestions:
----------------------------
-When an item drops and you don't have room in your inventory to pick it up, it's a tedious process of clicking again and answering prompts to view the item that just dropped, and if you want to pick it up, then exit that screen, move to your inventory, drop an item there, go back to interacting with the space, accept the prompt to pick up items, and then select the ones you want to keep (and this gets worse with multiple items). This is just a suggestion on how you might be able to improve it (although you may have already considered this and decided against it): Allow players to pick up items they don't have inventory slots for, but give them "Encumbered" status that prevents them from moving. Once they go into their inventory and drop all items they don't have room for, they can move again. I think this would *greatly* streamline the process.
-I already paid for the game when I downloaded it, but often when it comes to these types of projects, I like to give more to the dev every so often. I went back to the itch.io page and there is no donate button. I guess I could re-purchase the game (if itch.io will let me)? A donate button would be nice!
That's it for now - off to some more YASDs!
I'm so glad you're enjoying it!
The Lycanthropy thing sounds like a bug. I've never seen it happen, but I'll investigate. The most recent update did add 1 new Lycanthrope - the Were-Dragon. I'm betting the bug has something to do with that, but I'll have to check.
The level 26 enemy on Level 8 CAN happen, but it would be rare. Events could cause monsters to appear out of depth, but certain rare map tiles can too. For instance a Sewer Grate can spawn Goblinoids of any level at any level, and a Toothy Cave can do the same for Giant-types. These types of squares have a low chance each turn of spawning a new monster of the appropriate type, and when they do, a small chance of then sealing forever. If they don't seal forever on their own, you can try to seal them if you can find the square. But probably not a bug, just a situation that can arise.
The Nightmare and Giant Worm would be native to Ilastra. Not all Legendary Lands have such scary inhabitants, but some do. The entry text does give a warning: "While the dungeon's inhabitants are, for the most part, of low strength, the wizard who lives there has summoned a few particularly nasty pets." Most Legendary Lands have great rewards balanced by pretty steep risks, but since they are pre-designed, you can at least learn which ones you deem worth it after you've visited them.
The Blunderbuss issue sounds like a bug too. I'm looking at the code right now, and it SHOULD have said, "DEX required: X INT required: X" (Where the INT requirement BTW would be 70% of the DEX requirement). Based on the code, not sure how it output Max Health required... Obviously a bug I'm overlooking somewhere... I'll have to keep an eye open.
You're not the first person to mention the desire to have the map stay centered after an auto-move. It wouldn't be hard to implement, (I think), so I'll look into it for the next update.
I'm not sure the Skill Point reposition would work. Even if there's open space, other stuff goes there sometimes, under the right circumstance. But I'll check and see if I'm wrong.
It would be really hard within the current system to rework the inventory. There's a lot going on under the hood... (for instance, and offhand, if your equipped Weapon is Inventory item 96, it means you don't have a Weapon equipped - no inventory can ever expand beyond 95 slots)... I'll keep it in mind, but it won't be a priority right now.
I very much appreciate your desire to contribute more to the project! I'll look into a donation button. Not sure how that works. The truth is, after 29 years of working on the game, it's only in recent months that I opened up the possibility of people donating even when they download.
Thank you for the bug reports! I'll dig into the lycanthropy one literally this instant!
The lycanthropy bug should now be fixed (on my end). It was actually caused by a minor improvement I forgot to mention elsewhere - if you turn into a werebeast now, instead of showing your graphic as a dead version of your race and class, it should replace it with a live version of the appropriate werebeast. (It was looking for those graphics in the wrong folder).
The bug did NOT, as I had initially thought, have anything to do with the new Were-dragon, but while investigating that code, I discovered a bug there too! The were-dragon couldn't ACTUALLY cause Lycanthropy. This too has been fixed on my end. I'll try to get a bug fix update with these (and maybe a few other improvements) before another 3 months goes by! (Maybe this week, time permitting).
Awesome, thanks so much for taking the time to read my feedback and for the information. I definitely won't be forgetting the name Ilastra any time soon!
BTW, when looking into keeping the map centered after an auto move, I noticed it actually does do this if you only move one square at a time. If you click one square right or up or whatever, it will move your character one space and update the map so it's centered again. So you've already got the functionality in there, just might need to have it do that always instead of just when moving one space :)
Thanks again
Oh one last thing about the OOD depth monsters. I just started a new game, spawned in as a Centaur Assassin on level one, and literally two squares from my starting spawn there is a LEVEL 24 monster named Vetala with genius Int, 184 Att, and 97 HP. She chased me down, killed me in two hits and I died with a score of zero lol
I'm sure these OOD monsters are rare, but daaaaaaamn I'm getting unlucky...
Did you notice any unusual terrain nearby? That early it would have had to have spawned from what would probably be a Dead Side Gate on, like, turn 1. If it was there literally from the getgo, like on your first turn, unless there was an Event that brought it in (Undead Uprising, maybe?) I can't think of any way it would be there.
Hi! Just started playing this game and it's amazing! I've been playing roguelikes for 30 years and this is becoming one of my favorites after just a few hours. I could name 30 different aspects I love right off the top of my head. I've got some things written down from my first few playthroughs (bugs, questions, etc)......where's the best place to leave feedback? Not sure what the character limit is here.
Right here is fine. Not sure if there is a character limit, but if you need more you can always leave more replies.
I'll likely try to make a better video when I get the chance, but for now:
Will likely upload this later in early March.Hey, thanks for posting that! I really enjoyed watching it :) I'll answer a few of the questions you posed and share some observations in the comments on the video itself!
Better video when I had a chance to make it:
Hopefully your game will get a bit more attention come March.
Nice! Thanks for posting these :)
Currently only unlisted, I'll actually be scheduling them in March.
Just giving you a chance to see them before then.
Continuation to death for you:
Nice! Just gave it a watch and left some comments on the video!
Just bought the game, so still learning my way around the interface. I play with mouse and keyboard. A few questions:
No combat log. I could add Tab to just toggle back to the last tab you were on. I'll make a note and try to get to it. The Back button issue you describe sounds like a bug. I'll have to look into it. You can right click any square to center the screen on the square you clicked, which is how you can scroll with mouse. If you hold the button down it will continue to scroll, with the speed essentially controlled by how far from the center of the screen you've got the mouse pointed.
Wanted to join in on the praise for the game, it's one of the only RL's that takes me away from DCSS (I hate to say but most have boring loot and bad enemy count/variety, at least compared to the randarts and creatures there) and I actually love the graphics. Love the great variety that's in game too and it feels like you're always in danger. Shout out for the events in general too, gave me my favourite RL death so far. Do wonder if my computer doesn't like it for some reason though( I wouldn't think any roguelike should be too hard on any modern computer but this game does have high power usage according to my task manager)
Thanks so much for the words of encouragement! It's a passion project, so always gratifying to know it's reaching an audience that enjoys it. As for the "computer doesn't like it" that's undeniably my fault - I'm not a coder by trade, so everything I know about coding is learned by trial and error in my spare time, so nothing is optimized the way a professional might do. I do have some plans to address some of this in the nearish future (probably not the next update, but the one after that). I'm curious to know what the Event was that lead your favourite RL death!
I got crushed by a 92 damage rolling boulder trap. My BRAWN was not sufficient to survive. I failed the roll to dodge. My tears flow in rivers.
:)
Hello.
There seems to be a file termination error on the 1.30.18 complete .zip archive, I've tried re-downloading three times and it gives the same error (it finishes the extraction eventually but can't find some files on startup and fails to launch).
I suspect there's nothing missing because it's been downloaded dozens of time and no one's said anything - must be some weird error in the general transfer to you. If you send me your email at stopthesaturnians@gmail.com I can WeTransfer you copy I'm playing - hasn't been updated much, I don't think. Just let me know here if you've done so, because I never check that email and might forget otherwise!
Apparently it was an issue with the specific PC I was downloading on, it works fine on another, so all good now, thanks for the transfer offer anyway!
This has honestly been one of the best roguelikes I have ever played, I have no idea how I haven't heard from it until now. I love how all the monster, items and skill have a purpose and even low level spells are incredibly useful in late game
I just had my first victory as a randomly rolled mouserling soldier and it was pretty damn fun.
I just have a couple bugs to report: 1. When you click on the reorganize button and you have a large inventory (like 28~30 slots by having expert travelling and a sack) if you are scrolled down on the inventory it will unequip items from the top of the list and not equip them back. 2. Not sure if this is a bug but I have lost a character that got greasy and slipped on to a stalactite tile, getting impaled.
Congratulations on this fantastic game, I will for sure keep my eye on it for future updates!
Ah - BOTH of those are bugs! I thought I'd fixed the sliding into Stalagmite deal a while back, but evidently not... I'll have to look into them. Thanks for the bug report and glad you're enjoying the game!
I've been searching for the slide from grease into stalagmites bug. I cannot find any loophole that would allow sliding from grease to put you into stalagmites in the first place... I'll keep looking, but I'll be up front and say I'm not sure how to fix this one right now.
Wait, I MIGHT have just fixed it. Truth is, I've been dicking around with the code, and I just changed something that might have been the cause, but I'm not entirely sure I didn't add that something previously while dicking around with the code. So... MAYBE fixed?
It took me about 20 serious attempts but now I can finally claim the word: Victorious!!! For some reason Xaskazien did not have max health but its fate was sealed anyway.
You did an awesome job with the dungeon (cavern?) generation, the kind that could only be achieved with years of fine-tuning. One small blemish would be the rare occurrence when you start a floor on a monster's tile, triggering a combat round. That just feels wrong so hopefully that's a bug and not intended!
QoL/idea: Toggleable "As long as it remains in your inventory" items. That can be highly desirable (Enchanted Arrows) and would blend well with certain effects and traps.
Already starting a new quest, the game is definitely a keeper!
Congratulations! (Out of curiosity, what race/class/religion combo won it for you?)
Xaskazien could have been missing health from passing through dangerous terrain, falling in a pit, etc.
Immediate combats on descending should be quite rare, but aren't a bug. It would be easy to put in a catch to ensure it doesn't happen, but I don't really see a reason to do that... I like the possibility, at least.
Enchanted Arrows do exist! (As do Armour Piercing Arrows). They're not toggleable - if they're in your inventory and you're using a bow, they automatically take effect.
Best of luck with your next go around! I'm about to dive into another playtest, myself
I played as a Viean Centaur Archer. The challenge was just right for this kind of game. In other words, it was devilishly hard! Fortunately, Vie played a decisive role against Xaskazien's damaging spells. Also, I was lucky to find a very good bow and... enchanted arrows. What I meant earlier is, those special inventory items should be toggleable. Seriously, can you really afford to waste such a great effect to finish off a low HP monster? So I dropped them when overkill, which takes me back to the rather slow inventory management. I also had two different Halo items but didn't know which one would activate first...
I really like how there exist some defensive tactics, items or skills against everything: hidden pits and traps, enemies blocking corridors, cursed scrolls or bad potions... pretty much everything except taking a hit from an unexpected monster and possibly being killed right after you descend! Unlike the other thousand causes of death the game can throw at you, this won't be the direct consequence of a move or action you CHOOSE to take. It's all about taking calculated risks, so IMO that goes against the perceived spirit of the game. That sure will bring unnecessary frustation, and doesn't seem to add anything interesting gameplay wise...
My next hero is already dead, strangled by Severed Hands while running away. Here comes his avenger!
After hours of deadly exploration, I must say this is one mighty impressive game! Plenty of old school yet refreshing ideas and interesting gameplay mechanics, like the combat resolution on the same tile... And so much content it dwarfs most other titles of the genre. Plus excellent graphics, sound effects and an awesomely fitting soundtrack... really impressive! Anyway, some quick QoL suggestions and one question that come to mind:
Since new items are automatically taken and the inventory tends to alway be full, there should be a faster way to swap items and/or access the "Retrieve" window. Perhaps also even a way to use items (potions/books) without actually taking them. IMO the game's only real issue so far, as sometimes it can become quite tedious...
An option to keep the view screen centered on the character after moving with the mouse would be nice too.
And ideally, the button that opens the map should also take you back to the last opened tab. Btw, in my current map I found a small bug (the kind that doesn't try to eat the hero for a change): The boat is not visible without a line of sight, however it's still possible to querying it!
Finally, the question: What exactly is "Yorick's Dimension Hopping Trunk"? There is no mention of it in the manual...
Keep up the great work!
Thank you for the comments and thanks for the bug report! That boat query bug I've already addressed behind the scenes recently. We're still about 2 months out from the next release, but it's already going to be ungodly huge in size, including a lot of major QOL improvements.
You're not the first person to mention the desire to use items from the ground... I'll have to think about it. It's doable within the framework of the existing code, but it might be tricky to implement... I'll have to give it thought. Re-centering on the character after a mouse move, on the other hand, shouldn't be hard at all... after I've finished today's workload, I'll look into it.
There are 2 magical trunks that can appear in the game: Melgrim's Teleporting Trunk and Yorick's Dimension Hopping Trunk. Melgrim's has a 10% chance of appearing on any level, though Yorick's only has a 1% (and can be purposefully conjured via a Vestonian miracle, too). With Melgrim's, anything you drop in the trunk will still be in it if the trunk shows up again later in your game - so it's a way to set aside things you don't have space to carry but which MIGHT come in handy if you're lucky later. With Yorick's, anything you drop in the trunk will still be there when the trunk appears, even in separate games. So if you find something awesome that's not of use to your current character, you can drop it in there in the hopes that some future character will find and benefit from it. (Yorick's also includes whatever items I've dropped in it before uploading here, so if you want a pure game that only contains your own stuff, you can reset it via the high score screen by clicking "Reset").
You might want to explain Yorick's Trunk in the manual. I've never found any, but I actually did reset the highscores to hide my laughable first attempts, and I was not sure what to do when it asked about it, hence my question. Unfortunately(?) the story will never tell what you've dropped in there, but it's nice to be able to reset it separately from the scores.
Very glad you're already working on the next update! Currently my randomly chosen Paladin keeps taking improvised junks he is not allowed to use, which exacerbates the inventory issue. Well, it's ok as he contracted too many diseases and will not survive much longer!
Anyway, thank you for the explanation, I really appreciate it!
Extremely fun game, but I had a weird glitch occur that killed my run. Basically time froze for everyone but me. I was basically invulnerable to all forms of hazard damage, but could not interact with anything in the dungeon, but could use spells/items. I think what caused it is that I opened one of those book shelves that are located on the wall, while simultaneously standing on a recharging station. I ignored the recharge station because I had nothing to recharge and dropped the spell book on the ground and tried to move away from both and it's right around then that the dungeon just froze up.
Huh. That's a weird glitch! Thanks for letting me know. I'll take a look at Recharge Stations and see if I can find anything... Not sure what would have caused this though!
If you're using an older version of the game, there was a glitch where you could open the Recharge screen from a Recharge Station and then walk away, leaving it open, and that could cause all kinds of problems. Fixed that in the last version (or perhaps the one before) though.
I should be using the newest version, at least I think so. I only started playing recently, I do think that is what caused it, but I think the item on the ground may have lent a hand in the glitch occurring. Well either way, it might have just been a fluke or something, I don't know.
God this game is so great and addictive, one of the very best traditional roguelikes out there. I've been looking for a real varied while challenging experience for so long, I'm so happy it exists and is still actively developed.
It is currently trending on the Roguelikes Discord. People are getting really passionate (and expert 😛) about it and opened a channel to share their experiences on the game.
Would love to see you there, VirtuaSinner, and read your inputs and thoughts!
Join here if you have time 😊 https://discord.gg/Hq8wPcs
Thank you so much for sharing this! I'll check it out as soon as I'm done work today!
Got doomed early to mid-game by a nigh impossible map, esp as a Tree. Oh well. Was a fun anyway!
Yikers! Bad luck!
Trying to figure out windowed mode for Win10. Is it possible? Tried the usual shortcut -window switch & keyboard shortcut to no avail
Thx!
Yes. Fire the game up in full screen, go into the Options menu, and left click the Windowed/Full Screen toggle. When you leave the Options it will save your preference so next time it will launch in Windowed.
Oh, not sure how I missed that. The main screen doesn't have Options, I'll dig through the options again inside the Cavern
Yeah, you do have to actually start a game first.
Weird - it was just a stack laying there? Or did you do something and then they appeared? Never seen that before. The one potion you drank was probably a Sleeping Draught.
Huh. I'll have to look into it... never seen that before, though.
Oooooh. Yeah, you updated, skipping steps. Absolutely that'll cause mess ups. Just download the full version. If updating, you have to update step by step.
Trying to play this on a laptop with no numpad and it looks like there's no way to move down with wasd - s activates stealth mode. I'm not sure if this is a bug or I'm not understanding something.
Gah! You're right! WASD was implemented (though I never use it), and since I FORGOT it was implemented, I rewired the s key for stealth to be mnemonic, instead of the y key which used to be stealth. Sigh. I'll fix it on the next pass! In the meantime, you can, however, still use the mouse to move - click any square that you can see a path to to move there by the shortest, most direct and safest path. Or click any square horizontally or vertically adjacent to your character to move to that square.
This has been fixed in today's update. Thank you so much for pointing this out. Can't believe I missed it
Hi. Where I can download COX 1? The Windows version. is not possible from the website http://codedread.com/games.php#COX
Thanks
All versions of Caverns 1 are included in the bonus folder that comes with Caverns II. So if you've downloaded this, you've already got it!
Has anyone tried to run this on Wine in Ubuntu? It works great up until I finish the character creation. Then I get 2/3 through the loading screen and it crashes:
Anyway I am still trying to figure out how wine works to try to debug it or I will just set up VirtualBox. Maybe after I get a little work done. Just asking in case anyone has run it with Wine before. Really nice character creation screen though.
OK so I am just using VirtualBox with this tiny Win 7 iso https://archive.org/details/Tiny7#reviews. Just need to make sure to increase the resolution in Windows to at least the minimum by right clicking and going to Screen Resolution. Or actually it should be 1024x768 really.
Did it work?
Yes it seems to be working perfectly. Except something about my Ubuntu resolution when I change it to 1024x768 or my monitor, the screen is slightly moved to the bottom and almost cuts off the bottom edge. But I can still read the text and I think I can fix that by messing with my monitor or Ubuntu display settings. Anyway its only a few pixels.
I only played for a few minutes so far but I do appreciate the amount of thought and roguelike experience that has gone into this just from initial reactions. The wheel of fortune that spawned right next to me was a nice touch. It was funny because I gave it all of my gold. Also it is nice that there is a portal or whatever thing to create a new dungeon level easily in case people don't like the one that was generated or whatever.
I actually want to go back to the manual and the character creation screen for at least like 30-60 minutes before I go back to a dungeon again though.
Awesome! Thrilled to hear it's working out! Hope you continue to enjoy it :)
Wow! Thank you, so much! Really appreciate it :)
Having a bit of trouble playing "of xaskazien." When I boot the game, I only get the inmost 60% of the screen, hence the "of Xaskazien", the rest is occluded. I get the feeling it is scaling itself far past the meat-space parameters of my screen. I'd love to give this a shot, but I can't find anything on the 'web to help me with this. Any ideas?
It runs in a straight 1024*768, 4:3. Any scaling would be done by your graphics card. I know, for myself, I have an NVidia graphics card. If I go into the settings, under Adjust Desktop Size and Position, there's a scaling setting with 3 options: Aspect Ratio, Full Screen and No Scaling. I leave mine set to Aspect Ratio, to ensure that 4:3 games/videos play at that format, otherwise it stretches the game to fill the full screen. Unless you're playing on a 4:3, the game should appear centered, with black, empty space to either side. Could it be something to do with that? If that doesn't solve it, the other option would be to play in Windowed mode, but that option can only be set in game, though it saves the preference thereafter - so if you're still having problems, PM me, and I'll generate and mail you a new preferences file that would default to Windowed mode.
(I suppose the other potential culprit would be if your computer is set to a lower resolution than 1024*768 - the game runs only in that resolution, so your environment would have to be at that resolution or higher).
I get this error trying to open the game:
C:\Rogues\Caverns of Xaskazien 2>"Caverns of Xaskazien 2.exe"
Couldn't set 1024x768x32 video mode: No video mode large enough for 1024x768
My device it's a portable handheld with 6" screen, but it has a 1280x720 resolution. Some idea about how to solve this?
Unfortunately, no. It's designed for a Windows PC only. There must be some aspect to a handheld device that it just can't grasp.
Just to be clear. It's a windows PC, just the format of the computer it's umpc. But it's an Intel m3 with intel HD 615 graphics, 8GB ram windows 10 and a max resolution of 1280
I'm just guessing that there must be something different in the processor of a portable machine. But truthfully, I have no idea. I've coded it on a Windows PC (desktop), seems to work on most Windows desktops and laptops, but I have absolutely zero knowledge about why it would or wouldn't work on one machine vs. another. Sorry, man.
Hello. I think he said his vertical max was 720, but you are looking for 768. Maybe there is a way to give an option for a lower resolution or something.
Anyway this is a random question but is there a way to donate to this game or buy it or something? For example if someone is requesting a new graphics mode or something, maybe they could buy you a coffee or something at least.
https://clips.twitch.tv/VibrantCrypticLocustNerfRedBlaster Streamed Xaskazien win by Dynast! Tons of enemies are willing to walk into dangerous terrian though, you might need to check into that.
Ha! That's probably a holdover bit of legacy code from when Xaskazien was 100 percent immune to heat damage. His resistances are randomized now.
Having watched the full video (found it here: https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Caverns%20of%20Xaskazien/videos/all), I think you're right - maybe I'll try doubling their hesitation to enter dangerous squares.
Also spotted 8 errors in the game via his stream! Free playtesting! Hopefully I can repair them soon.
Thanks for calling my attention to it, and thanks to Dynast for playing and recording!
Hey! Thanks for the new patch.. Just wanted to stop by and show you someone streamed your game recently! Overall they really enjoy it and will probaly stream it again! https://www.twitch.tv/videos/465956603
Another Xas vod is up! has some good game discussion in it
Thank you! I'll check that out!
Also, there will be a new patch along potentially. I've been AFK for a while, recovering from an injury. But hopefully that's almost done.
Ah, man, I missed it! It's already gone. Thanks though!
I've been exclusively playing a Half-orc Barb of Hornan, great beginner combo I'd recommend for any new players.. Anyway, I just wanna suggest maybe buffing Hornan's Summon Orc Champion prayer? When its most effective is the first few 1-3 dungeon levels, but its cost makes it so you're not able to actually use it consistently on those floors compared to something cheaper and more appropiate like Strike prayer.
Summons as a whole from my limited experience using Hornan's prayer and wands seem rather weak and quickly become useless 4+ dungeon levels in, thoughts?
Hey, thanks for the feedback. I’m always tweaking and balancing, so good to keep an eye on what other people are experiencing. Coincidentally, the perks I’m just finishing coding are for the Warlock class, which is a spellcaster devoted to summoning. I have a Female Centaur Warlock who worships Talltioward on the go, and my fearful eye has been kept on whether or not summoning is overpowered. But through this playthrough I think I’m realizing it’s okay, at least for now. Let me answer your question with some detailed thoughts.
Firstly, very cool that you’ve found a race/class combo you like. I hadn’t thought about it, but a Barbarian is a perfect starting class, since it pretty effectively removes spellcasting from the table, allowing a player to learn other core mechanics first. I think if someone asked for a beginner combo in the future, an Agnostic Half-Orc Barbarian might be my recommendation, since that would also remove Miracles from the list.
If you’re exclusively playing the same character type, though, it’s important to bear in mind that the experience of other characters would vary widely, making certain things more or less useful. As an example, Hornas’ Striking miracle you mentioned, which costs only 10 Faith Points and allows you to automatically hit on your next swing - I can see how this would be especially devastating for a starting Barbarian character to use. The Barbarian starts with the most powerful weapon among all starting characters - the Small Axe. This is to compensate for their total lack of spell access, but bear in mind its massive damage of 1 to 15, and contrast this with other classes who would start with weapons that do either 1 to 3, 1 to 4, 2 to 4 or 1 to 6, and it immediately becomes clear that Striking serves the starting Barbarian better than any other class. The Small Axe also comes with a massive -18 to hit penalty, so automatically hitting overcomes a big obstacle to its use. A character starting with a Pitchfork, by contrast, has +6 to hit, so Striking, while still useful in many circumstances, is maybe not as necessary to land that blow.
Now let’s look at Summoning spells as a whole. The purpose of summoning is, generally, to bring into play a monster that will go and kill other monsters for you, so let’s compare it to another common way to use magic, which is with direct damage spells. Invisible Hammer, in terms of raw numbers, is the most powerful Low Power direct damage spell, doing 8 to 15 physical damage at a cost of 35 Spell Points. In the early game, this is an insanely powerful spell that can kill most monsters with a single application. But it does have some drawbacks - firstly, it’s only useful against a single monster. Once you’ve cast it, the spell points are gone, and you may now be defenseless against other monsters. Secondly, it only works against the monster in your square, meaning to cast it, you have to first engage in a single round of combat, possibly taking damage, possibly even being killed before getting a chance to cast it. And thirdly, it always does physical damage, limiting its effectiveness against monsters with physical resistance, most notably various types of Golems who would be unaffected.
For 35 Spell Points, you could instead (provided you had access) cast the Summon Minor Fiend spell. This summons a low level Diabolic monster (a monster that would most commonly reside on Dungeon Levels 1 through 10). There are some key advantages to this vs. the Invisible Hammer spell. Firstly, depending on what you summoned, it might be able to kill multiple enemies. On a particularly early dungeon level (say Dungeon Level 1 through 5), there’d be a decent chance the summoned monster would outclass everything else on the level, and could rampage through killing literally every enemy without you ever having to face them, while you still reap all the EXP rewards. Secondly, you don’t have to (in fact, can’t) cast it in a square with an enemy, so you don’t have to put yourself at risk in order to cast it, the way you would with most direct damage spells. Thirdly, the potentially summoned monsters are varied, some having attacks other than physical attacks, so while an Invisible Hammer spell could never affect a Golem, your summoned monster might be able to.
There are drawbacks to Summon Minor Fiend, of course, and that’s that it doesn’t scale as you level up. It’s extremely useful early on, but as you progress deeper in the dungeon, it becomes obsolete. Because of its wide variation in what gets summoned, it’s even possible to use it on Dungeon Level 1 to bring into play a lowly Demonic Larvae, and have that get killed by the first thing it meets, doing no damage whatsoever, so it’s risky. Invisible Hammer isn’t going to kill anything with a single cast beyond a certain depth, either, but it will still do some damage. (Of course, even the Demonic Larvae could get lucky and get a single hit on a Dragon before it dies, but it’s not as sure a thing as Invisible Hammer).
So they both have advantages and disadvantages to balance each other out. Finally let’s compare Summon Orcish Champion to Summon Minor Fiend. With the Miracles, I always did my best to correspond Faith Point costs to the Spell Point costs of an equivalent spell, if one exists, and right away we see that Summon Orcish Champion costs 40 Faith Points instead of Summon Minor Fiend’s 35 Spell Points, so it had better be more powerful, but not too much more powerful. Summon Minor Fiend brings in a monster of random power (again, between level 1 and level 10) with a median of 5.5. Orcs are a level 6 monster, so we’re pretty in line. But the Summon Orcish Champion miracle doesn’t just summon an orc, it summons a buffed up orc, a little more powerful than the average orc, putting its 40 point cost right about on the money.
Like Summon Minor Fiend, Summon Orcish Champion only really has application in the early dungeon levels, but can be devastating there. Again, bear in mind that not every character can go toe to toe with enemies (even lowly enemies) and expect to live the way a Half-Orc Barbarian can. For some (like my Centaur Warlock), summoning monsters to do the dirty work, while fleeing or luring enemy monsters back to where the summoned monster lurks may be the only way to survive
I can see where you're coming form, and it all makes sense to me. Looking at it this way summons themself do seem to be in a good spot, what seems to be more of the issue is that 40 Faith is extremely hard to come by whereas your character can start with the spell points needed to cast a summon spell, and by the time you have it; summoning an Orc Champion isn't as useful as it should be.
Maybe this is more of an issue with Faith gain?
I'll keep an eye on the miracle as I continue to playtest. I don't want Faith to become common - it's meant to be a luxury you need to parse out rarely, unlike spell points which are a far more universal currency (except when it comes to Barbarians :P)
So I've been completely addicted to Caverns since I made my last comment here, its the most fun I've had playing a roguelike since I first discovered them.
I was wondering if you could slightly reduce or maybe give us an option to increase/decrease the map scroll speed with the arrow keys?
Thrilled to hear it :)
I'll look into it. In the meantime, you can also use the mouse, btw. Just right click a square to centre the screen there. If you hold the right mouse button, you can scroll the map around, with the speed dependent on how far the mouse is removed from the centre of the screen.
Fixed it! It'll be in the next update, early to mid-August :)
Glad to hear it! Thank's alot! I'm currently sitting on a level 5 Half-orc Barbarian and just wanted to chime in and say the new Perk system is really cool and I love the flavor it adds to the game! Machoism giving me the occasional EXP from taking damage is really unique and my favorite perk so far.
Awesome! Glad to hear! I'll have more of the races and classes add back in with new perks in the next update :)
Erm, you do realize that bright pink on pink is not readable, right? :) I'm talking about the page design.
Interesting. It looks fine on my screen. I'll see if I can casually tweak it without making it look weird.
Looks good now, thanks!
Hello Mr.Dev, I was wondering what a good beginner race/class combo would be? common sense would say whatever swings the heaviest weapon and takes the most hits, but I wanted your opinion first. Thank you for developing such an awesome and free RL!
I usually randomize everything, to be honest. I would avoid anything with low starting health for a beginner. So no elvish assassins, say. Maybe a Dwarven Warrior? Pretty basic.
P.S. I'm working on a massive new update. It's been slow going, but in addition to adding more content and gameplay improvements than any previous updates, it also fixes a couple of critical bugs. I'll get it out ASAP!
I download Caverns of Xaskazien 2 Ver. 0.78.94 and when it 91% get error
Hmmm... Not sure what would cause this. There's been about 500 downloads and you're the first to mention. Have you tried more than once with the same result?
Linux port possible?
I wouldn't even know how, in truth. If it's a simple process and someone can direct me to info on that process, perhaps.
Are you using Unity?
No. C++.
it depeneds on the used libreries. If they are avaible on windows and linux. Do you plan to release this game as open source?
No.
I there a way to prevent yourself from attacking monsters? I don't like accidentally killing monsters that are faster than me that will make my god angry but it keeps happening.
There are ways to minimize the risk, but no way to just not fight. You can unequip your weapon before encountering them, to ensure you do less damage if you do hit. You can keep your distance where possible (especially from Animal intelligence monsters, as they won't generally approach if you don't get close). You can take steps to discourage them from chasing you like Confusing or Paralyzing them... that's about it, at present.
Might be a neat idea to add a toggleable "Pacifist" button or something where you can turn off your side of the fight, though. Never occurrred to me before. I'll look into it.
Thanks for the idea. I've implemented a new key/button that toggles on or off your swinging at enemy monsters, so you can turn off your side of the combat if you're engaging a monster you don't want to kill (though they'll keep hacking at you). Will be include in the next upload in a couple days.
Sounds awesome! Would it be too much to make a per monster configurable option or something? So maybe for example its default settings are set not to kill monsters in the categories which your god will hate you for killing?
Interesting idea. Hadn't considered it. At present, it'll just be a toggleable option. Won't have time to implement something more complete before the next release. I'll bear it in mind for later.
Scratch what I said. It was too good an idea to pass up, so I've implemented it. You can now toggle your Combat State to Fight, Don't Fight, or Selectively Fight, and can select specific monster types to add or remove from your Selectively Fight list at any time. While set to Selectively Fight, you won't swing at any monster types you've specified in the list. The game defaults to Selectively Fight, with any monsters your deity would prefer you not to kill automatically chosen. (It also defaults to adding Golems to this list, since you won't be able to hurt them in combat at start of game, and trying will just wear down your weapon, though you can remove them or any other monster types from the list at any time).
It works great! Thanks for implementing this.
Thank you for the idea!
This stuff seems amazing, but there's a few things I wanna talk about.
1) IMO, fonts are quite bad. I know that it's stylized like this, but it makes stuff much harder to read, for me at least.
2) Why you can move only in 4 sides? Why not use classic 8-sides movement system on numpad which is used in most of roguelikes?
3) Bar buttons should be down here, not on the right side., in my mind. Also, if you moved them, you could make them larger.
4) Why not add high-res suppor instead of making it 1280x720? I mean, yeah, it's in long time development, but...
Anyway, don't take this like I didn't liked the game! It still seems amazing for me, especially when it's so full of different content. I really like it, and hopefully it will be worked on more!
Hey, Fenos. Thanks for the comments. In specific response:
1) The fonts initially used in the game were a deliberate attempt to match (as closely as I could) the fonts I'd used in the original Caverns. However, a lot of people complained that they were hard to read, so it now defaults to something much easier to read (at least in most instances), with the option to toggle back to the gothic fonts if a player wishes. The character creation menu still uses stylized fonts for the large lettering, because the feedback I was getting was that at that scale everything remained legible, even in that style. But if enough people raise this as an issue, I'll switch the fonts on that page, too. Wouldn't be too tricky an issue to address, I don't think. In terms of changing the "new", smaller font (the one I already switched to to make things legible), if that was also deemed hard to read, the one problem would be that since screen co-ordinates remain absolute, and there's finite room to print things in the supplied text boxes, I would have to find something that remained pixel perfect in alignment with the old font. If a printed sentence grew even one or two pixels longer as a result of changing fonts, it could mess up all outputted text and take dozens of hours to realign everything manually (if that was even possible).
2) Initially movement was in all 8 directions for player and monsters. But I hated allowing either to move diagonally between walls or other impassable obstacles (where wall corners abutted, for instance). Imposing the restriction there ended up being a pain in the ass programming-wise, but even more so in gameplay, because players were getting confused as to why they couldn't do so, so I culled it back to 4 directions, and I've since grown used to it in game. I've been playing some Moria lately, and I'll admit when first coming back to Caverns it was jarring for me to have only 4 directional movement, but it wore off quickly, so changing it isn't a high priority. Players who aren't used to roguelikes also find the 4 directional movement easier to grasp, so there's an upside.
3) Not sure what you mean by "Bar buttons" or "down here." If you mean the clickable buttons to change sidescreen tabs, that's the only screen real estate available where they won't overlap anything important. At the bottom of the screen they would need either impinge on the view screen or the Situation Panel. Are those the buttons you're referencing?
4) When I first abandoned Caverns in favour of starting Caverns 2 (in 2010) I was still using a 4:3 monitor. I had recently programmed another tile based game called "The Zombie Nightmare of Fillibree County" and it used 1024*768. Since this was a marked improvement over the original Caverns' 640*480, I just went with it. Today I'm working on a 4K monitor and if I could go back in time, I'd make a different choice. But, cards on the table, I'm not a savvy enough coder to know how to allow players to choose their resolution. And I suppose there may well be some players still out there with 4:3 monitors, so 1024*768 might not be the worst choice... And further cards on the table, screen positions are hard coded - i.e. the game checks absolute X,Y coordinates for the mouse and places things at hard coded specific X,Y coordinates, etc. Changing the resolution now, even just to a new, single specified resolution, would mean months of work. And since the graphics aren't going to be scalable, it would really yield little fruit. Unless I get around to programming COX 3 in 10 or 20 years, this one almost certainly won't change.
Glad you're enjoying the game! The one thing I can promise is even more content... in time.
Just want to say thank you!
Thank you for playing!