Rogue Fable III News

Just a bunch of bug fixes, should have some more tomorrow. Thanks everyone who's been reporting these! The following is now all fixed:

• Fixed shield wall always activating and making you effectively immune to melee.
  
• Equipping a Charm of Fire was causing a hard crash.
  
• Strafe attack was attacking Crystal Golems (or other reflective enemies) with range attack.
  
• Crossbow sprite was missing.
  
• Tough and fast elites were not getting the appropriate bonuses.
  
• Merchant was not spawning in his little throne room vault.
  
• The chest that spawned in the ant hill vault was causing a hard crash when opened.
  
• Trying to sprint while constricted was causing a soft lock.
  
• Same idea w/ bear traps.
  
• There was a missing portal in one of the Arcane Tower end levels.
  
• Changed the description of Swiftness to indicate it adds movement points.
  
• Additional levels of swiftness add more movement points.
  
• Thurg the High Shaman will no longer blink your inferno orbs next to you (he was treating them as allies).
  
• Inferno orbs will no longer get pulled along w/ the player across portals and stairs.
  
• Dungeon Sense talent is no longer up-gradable as it provided no new bonuses. I'll likely be doing something with this in the future.
  
• Simply comparing items that causes a change in Max Mana Points was causing charms to lose their charges.
  
• Using Fire Strike was setting the player mana to NaN (not a number).
  

Tomorrow I'll be adding command + click to range attack for macs (since they don't have a right click button by default). I'm curious to see if Fire Strike was the only thing causing NaN mana or if there is some other situation so keep an eye out for it and let me know please!

Hello everyone! Didn't have enough time to finish this one to the extent that I had planned but since I'm going to be quite busy in the next week or two with holiday and family stuff I figured I'd upload what I've currently got and finish up the remaining bits in the new year.

The gist of this update is to clean up, rework and generally improve all aspects of character development and many of the core game mechanics. The project has now reached the point that I have enough of a mass of code and content that I feel like I can quite quickly and easily move stuff around and start trying to get everything into something at least vaguely resembling a finished form. This will be a continuing work in progress, likely with some missteps and experimentation along the way but generally speaking I'm feeling pretty good about many of the changes made with this update.

There's a ton of stuff I haven't gotten to yet which I'll try to note along with the updates and, as is generally the case, the balance continues to be in a constant state of flux which will be hammered out pretty much as one of the last things before the final full release. Based on my current estimates this should be approximately 6 months from now. But as mentioned above, there's enough stuff I am happy about with this update, and enough solid improvements that should hopefully make up for the lack of final polish and refinement. So, on to the update!


I'll do my best to explain the big changes in some kind of logical order but since they all sort of rely on, and are balanced against, each other it will probably be more clear by just jumping into the game and trying it out.

[h2]Major Updates:[/h2]
Removal of Skills and Skill Points
Previously the game had 4 major systems of character development: attributes, skills, talents and equipment as well as a number of minor systems like enchantment scrolls, using potions to raise max stats etc. My thinking here is that I'd rather have less systems overall but have each individual system be deeper and more meaningful. So by removing skills we get:

• Just a generally more streamlined character development process. Tell me the values of your 3 attributes, your talent set and your equipment and I know exactly what sort of character you have.
  
• The power gain from skills has been shifted to attributes, talents, and equipment making the choices you make in each system much more meaningful. Simply put the raw 'power' of each attribute, talent point, and piece of equipment has been increased.
  
• You are no longer able to 'build around' the RNG of the dungeon by just stacking points in any stat your lacking. This was a unique issue with skills since all characters started with all skills. There are a bunch of changes described below that will mitigate this somewhat.
  

Attribute Arch-Type Concept:
While not mentioned explicitly in game, I'm basing a lot of my design around the concept of Attribute Arch-Types. Basically, at the highest level, a character is defined by their Strength, Dexterity and Intelligence. You can imagine these 3 attributes occupying the 3 points of a triangle. Characters will start somewhere on this 'graph' based on their starting class and race and will 'move around' on it over the course of the dungeon. Your exact talent set and equipment load out will have a huge effect on what sort of specific 'build' your running but at the highest level, characters that have similar Arch-Types should play somewhat similarly and there should be a lot of cohesiveness between the talents and equipment that fall into that Arch-Type. Generally speaking:

• Strength based characters are very tanky with high hit points, melee damage and the ability to wear the heaviest armor.
  
• Dexterity based characters are very mobile and are able to setup fights from advantageous positions (stealth), move around and re-position themselves easily (movement points), and attack from range (range power).
  
• Intelligence based characters are spell casters with access to the most powerful abilities in the game.
  

Of course, every character is going to end up as some mixture of these so its possible to talk generally about characters falling into a STR/DEX arch-type (likely some kind of mobile melee fighter), DEX/INT arch-type (some kind of fast moving, kite heavy spell caster), or STR/INT (a walking fridge that hurls flaming balls of death). My main design goal here (likely not quite achieved yet), is that if you tell me just your characters STR, DEX, and INT I'll have at least a general idea of what sort of build your running. Just to be clear, none of this is explicit inside the game itself, this is more like a 'meta' design idea underlying a lot of the specific elements of character building.

Movement Points:
So following along from the attribute arch-types above, I was looking for some kind of concept that would help to unify DEX based characters and eventually settled on movement speed as a good candidate (actually a lot of this stuff has been simmering away in my notes for the better part of the last year). The idea is that a character with a focus in DEX should be highly mobile, able to move about the battle field easily, re-position to take out key targets like healers, quickly run away from dangerous melee enemies and just generally out maneuver everyone. In the extreme case of a pure DEX build a character should be squishy as hell, somewhat lacking in raw damage output but capable of simply avoiding the majority of damage, while taking out priority targets quickly.

My first attempt at this was to just handle speed the way that the majority of rogue-likes do it i.e. variable movement speed, fractional turn lengths etc. Basically if I'm 10% faster then an enemy then I'll take say 10 steps for every 9 he takes. This didn't work for me for a number of reasons:

• Its difficult if not impossible to predict and plan around.
  
• Since enemies tend to move towards you, even with a high speed you'd always just end up surrounded.
  
• You couldn't really position yourself to take out key targets like healers in the back line, since again, your still taking turns with the enemies who are going to swarm around.
  
• Its just generally the sort of arcane, obscure stat soup that I'm trying to avoid with Rogue Fable.
  

So the 2nd iteration, which I feel actually works incredibly well is the concept of Movement Points. Basically you gain movement points from DEX, from the new talent Athletics, and from any item or effect that would have previously given 'movement speed'. All characters now have the intrinsic ability to 'sprint' or 'fast move' by holding shift, which consumes movement points but does not end your turn. This does a very good job of handling what I envision a 'fast' character to play like:

• Priest standing in the back line and healing his allies? Sprint around his tanks and nail him in a single turn hopefully insta killing him.
  
• Poisonous snake or beefy ogre about to maul you in melee? Sprint away in a single turn to a point of safety.
  
• Bunch of enemies clumped together in such a way that a spell or ability could hit them all at once? Sprint to just the right tile which will let you pull off that perfect blast.
  
• Cloud of gas filling the room? Sprint through it to safety, since you don't end your turn, you won't take any damage.
  
• And of course lots more clever stuff like this.
  

I'm still working out exactly how to handle 'slow' both the effects of cold and the ogres intrinsic so this is one of those things that is still on the TODO list that I didn't have time to finish for this update. Generally though I'm quite pleased with how this one is working.

Something that's important to note here which plays into the Arch-Type concept, is that this makes movement speed specifically and DEX in general a universally useful stat, for all character builds. One of the things I'm trying really hard to do is to make all attributes, talents and equipment at least somewhat useful to all builds, so that there are actual choices to make rather than just ignoring half the stuff in the game since it has no effect on your build.

Charms and Wands Rework:
The issue here was:

• Wands were just behaving as a stack of scrolls, which isn't particularly interesting. I'm always looking for ways to try to get each 'system' in the game to be generally unique and orthogonal to all the others.
  
• Charms were just sort of an odd slot that was originally intended to be something you swapped around based on the situation but this never quite worked out.
  
• Mana points were basically useless to any character that wasn't intending to make use of magic talents.
  

So the new system is as follows: Wands and charms now both go onto the consumable hot bar but 'use' some amount of your max mana. Wands and charms now both recharge slowly over time giving you a decently strong ability on cooldown at the cost of your max mana.

This helps to completely differentiate them from actual consumables (which should generally be very powerful fight ending or escape options). It effectively gives you a bunch of 'slots' that you can juggle these items around based on the challenges your encountering. It makes mana points at least somewhat useful for all builds.

What I haven't finished yet is that charms should generally not be targetable abilities but rather powerful persistent effects likely filling the role that sustained abilities are currently filling. So rather than having to spend talent points on something like Flame Shield there would be a Charm of Flame Shield with the same effect at the cost of your max mana. Lots of interesting effects are possible here, and I'd generally like them to be more sophisticated then the simple stat bonuses on normal equipment.

Talent System:

• Talents now have attribute rather than level requirements. These are currently quite lenient and generally you should be able to get talents at roughly the same levels as before unless your doing something odd with your build but the idea here is really just to reinforce that idea of attribute arch-types. It should not be very difficult for a warrior to put a few points into say INT and take advantage of the lower level spells, but a pure STR build should not be able to pick up an end level spell and just instantly learn it due to his high character level.
  
• Talents are a lot stronger in general and scale much better with increasing rank.
  
• FUTURE TODO: given the new restrictions I'll be working in the future to make the higher tier talents even more powerful since their requirements are now more difficult to meet.
  
• Tomes now always drop in a mini-vault in which you can choose between 2 tomes.
  

Weapon Slots:
Yeah, the quick slot thing has being annoying me pretty much since its inception. It was originally just sort of a band aid over the previous wielding system and has had all sorts of oddities associate with it ever since. I mean you could do all sorts of nonsense like wield a two-handed sword in the quick slot and still make use of a shield if your actual primary weapon was one handed. Nonsense I tell you!

So the new system is pretty simple and streamlined:

• All characters have a melee slot and a range slot.
  
• Left clicking attacks with your melee, right clicking attacks with your range.
  
• The auto attack hotkeys work as expected.
  
• You can FINALLY use abilities with both melee and range without any inventory fiddling.
  
• Swapping weapons with your inventory uses 1 turn. In fact, swapping any piece of equipment now uses 1 turn.
  
• You can wield a shield as long as your melee weapon is 1 handed (ranged weapons no longer really have a 'handedness'). This is still a wee bit odd but is basically how most RPGs and MMORPGs handle it so I can live with this.
  

Simplified Encumbrance:
Just generally trying to make it clearer since the old system was not particularly obvious:

• Max ENC is determined by your strength
  
• Each piece of equipment has a weight which adds linearly.
  
• Exceeding the max incurs penalties to movement points and mana points
  

Scaling Health and Mana Regeneration:
HP and MP regen now scales as your maxes increase (though a little bit slower). So the issue here was actually a bit subtle since unless your paying attention to the number of turns you might not notice it. Basically resting to recover hp and mp was taking WAY more turns at higher levels since regen rates didn't scale. The dungeon had to compensate for this by dropping a ton of food so you didn't feel like you were running out. So despite resting taking hundreds of turns at high levels it generally didn't really pressure you any more than at the start due to all the food drops. The effect of this however was that abilities with long cooldowns, that are designed to only really be available once every floor or two, were suddenly always ready due to the massive rest time.

So simply put, HP and MP regen now scales up with your max HP and MP so that rest times are fairly uniform across the game. I'll be balancing food drops accordingly in the future, right now its likely that there's going to be way more food then necessary.

Dungeon Gating:
Some kind of gating has been in the plans pretty much since the start of the project, and so as a placeholder I've added a simple 'rune' system with 'runes' dropping in the branches and in the orc kings throne room (3 total) of which 2 are required to unlock the gate into Yendor. This is mostly just so that I can balance around the assumption that the player does in fact need to tackle at least some of these side levels and branches.

In the future this simple gating mechanic will be replaced by a number of more interesting situations with potentially multiple solutions. Just some examples:

• A massive wall of fire in Yendor jetting up from The Core which can be removed by dong 'something' in The Core. Alternatively a character could stack rFire and health and just face tank the damage. A super fast character might be able to sprint his way through most of it. A spell caster might be able to 'negate' the clouds by summoning other clouds on top of them.
  
• Some kind of massive clockwork construct sitting atop the down stairs in Yendor that can be disabled by destroying something in The Iron Fortress. Alternatively have a massive fight and burn some consumables and just brute force him down.
  
• Huge toxic pool in Yendor that must be crossed with the water pouring out from a pipe. Doing 'something' in The Sewers to put a stop to it. Alternatively: levitate, face tank w/ resistance, make a bridge of ice using cold magic etc.
  

So once again, runes are there just so I can balance around the future 'scope' of the game, but will be replaced with something more interesting in the near future.

Monsters:

• Some monsters are now flagged as 'armored' and will have protection based on their level.
  
• Golem Unification: all golems are now armored, slow, high damage melee units, capable of grabbing (constricting).
  
• Slime Unification: all slimes now split.
  
• FUTURE TODO: where it makes sense, I'd like to do this sort of unification with certain 'classes' of enemies that share some kind of predictable base set of properties and abilities + extra stuff for each particular type.
  

Items and Equipment:

• Significantly more item drops in general to take up some of the power lost from skill removal. There should be enough stuff dropping that the player has multiple choices in each equipment slot to make.
  
• Many of the simpler items (stuff that tends to just give some stats) are now roughly divided into 'tiers' so that you can actually get meaningful upgrades deeper in the dungeon. Of course many items remain 'special' in the sense that they do 'something' that isn't really comparable to any other item.
  
• Added a TON of new items, including armor sets to most of the deeper dungeon branches. Eventually I'd like to have whole sets of items that are unique to each zone so that the random selection of zones in each 'run' has a significant effect on what sort of equipment you'l have available. Of course this will remain balanced against the giant pool of general items that drop everywhere.
  
• Blunt weapons now ignore protection on enemies rather than doing knock back which should really be a more powerful magical effect on special weapons.
  

Specific Talents:
This is one area I didn't get nearly enough time to work on and so will have to wait for the next update. I'm currently working over the entire talent list trying to generally buff everything up, make it more generally useful, make each classes starting talents synergise better etc. So the exact starting talent sets of the classes and the talents that drop in each tome are definitely WORK IN PROGRESS.

• NEW_TALENT: Killing Strikes, passive, attacks will insta kills enemies below a certain % of HP.
  
• NEW_TALENT: Gather Mana, ability, replaces the various elemental infusion talents with the intention of being useful to a wider variety of characters.
  
• NEW_TALENT: Rage, replaces the barbarian intrinsic rage (he starts with it though). One of my goals is to have nothing be intrinsic to classes since they are intended to be a 'starting kit' rather than something that locks you into a role for the entire game. Races will be the place where these sort of intrinsic, game altering, effects will be placed.
  
• NEW_TALENT: Discord, ability, enchanter starts with this in his set now. Deals some light magic damage but makes the target take 200% damage from all sources for the duration. Combined with confusion this gives enchanters a nice way to focus down priority targets.
  
• NEW_TALENT: Inferno Orb, ability, summons a stationary, unkillable inferno orb which attacks nearby enemies every turn until poofing.
  
• NEW_TALENT: Flame Strike, ability, a smite targeted bolt spell allowing you to easily hit enemies hiding in the back line.
  
• NEW_TALENT: Dominate, ability, allows you to 'permanently' charm a monster but costs max mana to sustain the effect, similar to how necro skeletons currently work.
  
• NEW_TALENT: Cyclone Strike, ability, hits every enemy around you and knocks them back. Replaces powerstrike.
  

User Interface:
Generally the UI is another one of those things that will be a continuous rough work in progress until the last months of development since I don't want to spend a bunch of time making it pretty only to have some underlying mechanic or system change. That being said, this update also adds or improves:

• Better talent panel that more clearly shows the current stats of a talent vs the change in stats when you upgrade.
  
• Hovering over a talent upgrade button, attribute button, or holding a piece of equipment over a slot will now show the changes in stats that will occur.
  
• Attribute points are now spendable in the character menu so you don't have to stop mid fight and make a hard decision.
  
• Merchant window now displays your equipment and inventory as it appears on the character screen rather than one big unsorted list.
  
• The damage of your current melee weapon and range weapon are now prominently displayed. Also the damage of any ability or item you are currently targeting.
  

Conclusion:
Likely a bunch of other little bits and pieces I missed in my notes, but that should be most of it. As I mentioned at the top, a lot of this is still 'work in progressy' and there's a ton of stuff I intended to get done that will have to wait until next time but overall, based on my own play throughs, everything is working pretty solidly. As always I appreciate all your guys feedback, especially for an update like this with so many big mechanical changes. Thanks as always for all your support and of course Merry Christmas everyone! I hope you all have a fantastic holiday and I'll see you with the next update in the new year!

Just a big bunch of bug fixes with this one. Wanted to clear out some of these issues before moving onto the next major update.

First major fix, that was seriously effecting a small number of people: There is some kind of issue that is causing save files to corrupt which made the game load to 99% then freeze. Console window would display something along the lines of 'failed to parse a token at [X]'. Reinstalling would sometimes not fix this issue since depending on how the reinstall works, it might not clear the save files. So the game will now at least popup a window letting you know whats occurred and direct you to the directory where you can delete the offending file, and point you to the pinned bugs and crashes thread here in the forums where you can leave some information. I've never seen this occur myself so will need help tracking down the source of this issue from anyone who is effected.

Bugs and Crashes:

• Disengage will now correctly show invalid targeting when an ally is behind you.
  
• Fixed the numbering on the text options after death (was previously 2, 3)
  
• Fixed an issue where it was possible to sprint through an enemy standing in a doorway. In fact, all pathfinding was apparently treating an open door + character as 'passable' so this likely fixed many other underlying issues.
  
• Lunging will no longer trigger traps in the path (assume the player is leaping over them).
  
• Items in the quick slot are now taken into account by the loot generator. It was previously possible to have say a +1 bow in the quick slot and then have the loot generator create a +0 bow.
  
• Fixed strafe attack attempting to trigger when reloading the game, teleporting, going up and down stairs or pits etc. This was causing a hard crash.
  
• Ring of storms now correctly adds storm focus.
  
• Fixed stairs spawning in the skeleton vault in the upper dungeon. Also falling into it from pit traps.
  
• Fixed: could not descend pits when levitating.
  
• Using a scroll of domination on a previously charmed enemy will now override the charm correctly (an old one!).
  
• Fixed energy shroom tea, potions of levitation, etc. not giving the status effect.
  
• Fixed the exploding walls trigger in one of the Yendor end levels.
  
• Items will no longer spawn on the portals in the Arcane Tower, rendering them unlootable.
  
• Charge crunch will now correctly crit the enemy.
  
• Fixed piranhas spawning on shock reeds in some Swamp vaults.
  
• Heavy brass boots now have a price (not 1gp).
  
• Targeting at max range of tunnel shot will now show the correct targets (was previously showing nothing, though it still worked as expected).
  
• Fixed targeting traps with projectiles weapons, consumable projectiles, spears, staves etc.
  
• Stopped vines from spreading onto lava (an old one)
  
• Guaranteed a path around the lava in one of The Core entrance vaults to stop your allies from getting stuck.
  
• Wishing well was reported as not spawning on OF:2. Apparently it was always spawning on OF:1, so I've now just set it to spawn with the library.
  
• Enemies will no longer initiate slow charges if there is a pit in the way.
  
• Spears no longer trigger damage shields (another old one)
  
• Fixed a hard crash when the unique ogre shaman in The Ogre Caves, tries to blink one of his allies.
  
• One way stairs now work with the stairs button (default s)
  
• Quitting the game after victory (by x-ing out the window) but before pressing OK will no longer leave a save game which you can continue (a VERY old one!).
  

User Interface and Misc:

• Fixed the description of protection. Protection was actually working, just a visual issue here.
  
• Added a proper screen fade transition when descending pits.
  
• Spiky shields now correctly show the damage shield stat in their description.
  
• Fixed the spacing on the ( and ) in skill text descriptions.
  
• Damage shields now show up in Status Effects window.
  
• Life Tap now shows up in Status Effects window.
  
• Added description to the reflection status effect.
  
• Inferno Rings and Rings of Thunder now use the basic damage shield system rather than creating actual fire / shock which can often kill the player. While I liked that these were unique I think its a bit silly to have a defensive, passive item, that is trigger by enemies, that can potentially kill the player. This sort of an effect would likely make more sense as some sort of short term, powerful buff spell that the player has no knowingly activate and only lasts for a short amount of time.
  

Big thank you to everyone who's posting these bug reports! Its making it nice and easy to track these things down and get them fixed. I'm going to try to make it a habit of spending an extra week or two after each major update to clear out as many of these as possible.

Next major update will be reworking the way that character development works i.e. the whole skill, talent, attribute, requirements etc. system. This should actually be reasonably quick (a few weeks) since the code is fairly trivial and the design is mostly worked out on paper. So rather than spending a ton of time trying to get it all perfectly balanced by myself, I think the next update will likely be one of those 1.32.[x] type things with a bunch of mini updates as we collectively figure out how to balance and adjust it.

I'll be watching this thread and discord for the next few days just to make sure the fixes didn't introduce any new horrible crashes (always a possibility!) then I'll be moving on! Thanks as always for all your support and feedback!

Just a quick hot fix to deal with a few critical crashing issues:

1.30.2

• Switching to text based hit point display will no longer break the game i.e. crash on startup.
  
• Charm now works again
  
• Fixed crash with the Swamp Siren (she kept 'luring' the player onto occupied tiles)
  
• Fixed crash when mousing over hell portals
  

1.30.3

• Fixed javelins (and other throwing weapons) consuming double ammo
  
• Fixed another crash regarding hp text (would occur when changing levels, also occurred on the main menu when the background would switch).
  
• Fear now working correctly on enchanter
  
• Fixed Elemental Magic Focus ex. Fire Focus, exceeding the III cap and displaying incorrectly.
  

I'm thinking of devoting the next update (a quick 1-2 week one) to taking an axe to the overgrowth of bugs and crashes reported here on Steam and Discord. I figure its been awhile since I focused on 'stability' and I think its nice to take some time every few updates to consolidate our gains by cleaning everything up and getting it all working as smoothly as possible.

Thanks for bearing with me while I work these issues out!

Hello everyone! Absolutely massive update today, probably the largest I've ever done in terms of sheer content. As is generally the case, some of this stuff falls into the "changes or additions in preparation for future changes or additions" so I'll try to make it clear when this is the case. Also, as always, a ton of bug fixes, quality of life improvements and general polish. With that out of the, on to the update!

Dungeon Expansion:
This is the biggest piece of the update and also the piece that falls most into the "preparation for future updates category". I'll be slowly increasing the size of the game in the next couple of updates so this is mostly just laying out the backbone for this expansion.

• Extended the length of tier III zones (Orc Fortress and Dark Temple) to 6 levels. This gives more room for the entrance vaults, special levels, special branch levels etc. described below.
  
• Temporarily removed The Dark Temple from the random rotation (it needs a whole set of content to bring it up to the level of The Orc Fortress, which will be coming next update).
  
• Added entrance vaults for The Sewers, The Core, and The Ice Caves into The Orc Fortress with appropriately themed terrain and monsters. (Entrance vaults for the 2nd set of branch zones coming next update.
  
• Added a special 'gate' level to Orc:5. Basically a big, challenging fight. There are only 2 of these right now in random rotation, but I'm planning on adding lots more including ones that are linked to the branches. These branch linked ones would be things like giant walls of fire that are disabled by destroying some Totem or Altar in The Core.
  
• Added new "special branch levels": The Ogre Caves and The Archery Range. Again, the plan here is many more of these in rotation, and many variations of each.
  
• Added new special branch level: The Orc Kings Hall. Same idea as above, will need more types and more variations within the type in the future.
  

The idea with these special branch levels is to eventually have a whole set of these per zone that randomly select. I'll be using these special levels to insert highly specific, and highly challenging levels that will tend to require some additional consideration on the part of the player of what order to tackle them in. This could be stuff like bosses, environmental challenges, or just big fights with a specific enemy type. These will sort of merge with the existing concept of the "end levels" that the branches already have and will become the highest level areas outside of The Vaults of Yendor. In the future there will be some sort of gating mechanism requiring the player to clear say half of the special branches in order to gain access to Yendor.

Looking forward, once I have enough of these special branch levels created, I'll be pulling some of the code over from the experimental test branch so that rather than a confusing mess of upstairs/downstairs, I can layout each zone on a flat plane with levels connected north, south, east west, while maintaining the ability to insert stairs where it makes sense. Note that we would be maintaining the overall layout of the dungeon i.e. linear with branches in the mid-game. This change would simply effect the layout of levels within a zone. I think this will:

• Generally make the dungeon layout more readable.
  
• Give the player more options (within a zone) as far as which level to tackle next.
  
• Open up the possibility of gating within a zone ex. finding the switch in one level to unlock a gate in another.
  

For now though, with the increasing complexity in layout, I'm definitely starting to notice the lack of a 'world map' and quick travel system in my own play throughs. So this will be a priority for the next update.

New Level Content:
Tons of work here, tons of work still to be done. I'm maintaining a big spread sheet of content counts for each zone so the following 'stuff' is mostly centered in the zones that needed it most. Rather than listing out every single thing (its a massive list) I'll let you guys discover these for yourselves and leave it at:

• 28 new special vaults spread across the zones. Lots of tricky little challenges and traps here.
  
• 13 new static levels spread across the zones. Some are just 'generic' layouts that the generator would otherwise be unable to produce. Some are, like the vaults, tricky challenges.
  

New Monsters:

• Dark Temple - Arcane Archer: fires a volley of 3 slow moving arcane projectiles. Will likely do a number of different elemental themed versions of this later.
  
• Yendor - Fire Lich: powerful undead spell caster that can flame shield his allies (making them resistant to fire) and has a powerful new spinning flame attack (not sure how to describe it :P).
  
• Yendor - Storm Lich: similar to the fire lich but storm themed.
  
• Yendor - Vault Chaos Priest: end game priest type that casts group heals and torment (deals 50% of the players remaining HP). I've been immediately burning everything I have to get a quick kill whenever I run into one of these suckers.
  
• Ice Caves - Gnoll Warrior: mostly used in special vaults right now
  
• Ice Caves - Gnoll Archer: mostly used in special vaults right now
  
• The Ice Caves - Frost Vortex: uses a cold melee attack and has a powerful cold based damage shield.
  
• The Core - Fire Vortex: uses a fire melee attack and has a powerful fire based damage shield.
  
• The Sewers - Sewer Rat: spawns in swarms, has a poisonous bite.
  
• Enemies in The Orc Fortress, Yendor and The Dark Temple will tend to start spawning more in groups in the later levels.
  

New Uniques:
A lot of my focus moving forward is going to be going into uniques, bosses, and rare monsters that only spawn in specific special levels, so this is just the tip of the ice berg really. Also working to make sure all the uniques have special drops, have a number of different vaults they can spawn in, sometimes spawn in unique special levels etc. Will omit some of the details here so everyone can be "discover" them for themselves :P

• The Under Grove: Centaur King
  
• The Swamp: Witch Doctor
  
• The Swamp: Swamp Siren
  
• The Arcane Tower: The Arch Magi of Flame
  
• The Arcane Tower: The Arch Magi of Storms
  
• The Ice Caves: Grax The Frost Shaman
  
• The Orc Fortress: The Crystal Captain
  
• The Ogre Caves: Thurg the High Shaman
  
• The Archery Range: The Archery Captain
  
• Added drops and new vaults for: Corrupted Ent, Spider Queen, Kasic the Mosquito Prince.
  

Mechanics:

• The player will now take damage when falling voluntarily jumping down or being knock down a pit (not trap pits). Damage is 50% of your remaining hit points and will never kill you.
  
• Added a new enemy "meta-ability": curses. A curse will be some detrimental effect that will be maintained until you either kill the caster, or break LoS for a few turns. Currently only being used for The Archery Captains "Bulls Eye Curse" but will be adding more of these later.
  
• Enemies can now have elemental damage melee attacks. Used for fire and frost vortices, slimes, etc.
  
• Enemies can now have elemental damage shields. Used for fire and frost vortices, slimes, etc. These also now scale in damage in accordance with the monsters level.
  
• Reduced LoS distance from 8 => 7. This is in preparation for a future rework to stealth mechanics but generally just means the player tends to be a little further inside rooms when he 'spots' enemies.
  
• Tomes will now go into the player inventory and must be 'used' to make the talents available. This helps to keep the available talent list from becoming cluttered with talents you don't want and also allows you to sell tomes.
  
• Enemy trample attacks will now crunch crit the player if you have your back against a wall, making positioning critical.
  
• As part of cleaning up the character stat menu: Reflection has been removed as a base stat and made a tiered 'status effect'. Reflection I = 20%, Reflection II = 30%, Reflection III = 40%.
  
• Resistance also moved from stats to status effects.
  
• Removed the +fire magic +storm magic etc. from items and talents and replaced with a tiered status effect i.e. Fire Focus I, Storm Focus I etc. with a % based bonus to magic power. Again this helps declutter the stats menu and also makes focus effects more valuable all the way to end game.
  
• Hidden enemies will now alert their hidden buddies resulting in a proper 'Ambush!'.
  
• Charging enemies will eventually come to a stop after passing the player (I'm intending to have them damage themselves if they run into a wall before stopping).
  
• Charging enemies can now fall down pits.
  
• Flying characters can now pass over platform walls (I'm thinking of some kind of dex based mechanic to allow characters to climb these as well).
  

Balance:

• Increased the hitpoints of higher level enemies to keep up with increasing player power caused by all the new unique items, special levels, additional levels etc. Balance, as always, will continue to be one of those ongoing things, so I'll be continuing to adjust this as I build up the dungeon.
  
• Reduced the number of monsters in some of the later levels to reduce absurd swarms and balance against the increasing power of individual enemies.
  
• Piranhas are now 'fast'. There are a couple 'fun' swamp vaults to take advantage of this.
  
• Slimes are now resistant to toxic waste.
  
• Turtles now deal all critical hits when they are hiding in their shells.
  
• Trap door spiders now spawn in groups and, using the new agro mechanic, will actually ambush together.
  
• Charge now requires at least a single tile run up and has had its base range reduced by 1 (there was no real need to upgrade it to get more range).
  
• Reduced the scaling on consumable (wands, scrolls etc.) damage at high levels since it was getting out of hand.
  
• Storm orbs are now shock resistant. Higher level monster casters have resistance to their element.
  
• Duelist now starts with a Small Sword w/ 5DMG and upgraded the rapier to 7DMG in order to align this weapon class with the others.
  
• An enchanted wand now has a lot more charges then it did before (part of a long term project of trying to get a +1mod on the different item types to be roughly equal in value).
  
• Player will now receive a talent point EVERY level after level 10. This is just a minor, temporary tweak to char build since I'm intending to do a massive rework of this in the next update.
  
• Disengage and Lunge are quite a bit weaker now to start (they were crazy OP compared to other talents), but scale to the same damage when adding ranks. Also, a short term tweak before the char build rework.
  
• Opening doors now takes a turn.
  
• Chaos Portals now spawn an imp every 3 turns and have a longer duration (makes them a much higher priority to kill quickly).
  
• Slimes now split to 75% of their total HP (instead of 50%). Generally makes them a lot more nasty to deal with.
  
• Bloats now shoot bolts of toxic gas (still burst into gas upon death).
  
• Smite now deals 'Magic Damage' which is not blocked by Protection.
  
• Water now reduces fire damage by 75% instead of 50%. Fire magic will be getting a bit of boost in raw damage with the upcoming character build rework to compensate.
  
• Wolf spawners now spawn 3 wolves instead of 2.
  
• Lava and toxic waste damage now scales correctly with dungeon level. This generally results in higher damage.
  

User Interface:

• Now using bitmap fonts everywhere to reduce a slight blurriness on text that has been driving me crazy for a looong time.
  
• Reworked the character menu a bit, just cleaning things up a bit. The character menu interface is going to definitely be one of those constant work in progress things pretty much up until release. I'm very hesitant to devote to much time to this right now before the char build system gets finalized. That being said, its quite a bit cleaner and less cluttered now.
  
• Detrimental status effects like constrict, curses, charms etc. will now highlight the 'casting npc' when you mouse over them. This makes it easy to see who you need to kill in order to remove the effect.
  
• Mousing over the poison status effect now shows the total amount of damage it will deal.
  
• Added the option to switch back to text based HP (instead of bars). Note you will need to restart the game for these changes to take effect.
  
• Fixed: canceling a scroll of domination or blinking would previously lose the scroll.
  
• Lots of enemy abilities now have better descriptions when mousing over the monster.
  
• Lots of player abilities now have better descriptions when mousing over the ability.
  

Misc

• A giant list of bug fixes that I'll omit so that this post isn't an extra 100 lines long.
  
• A bunch of little tweaks and improvements to graphics, spell effects, sounds etc.
  
• A whole bunch of behind the scenes improvements that will allow me to make more interesting vaults, static levels etc. This mostly involves triggers, bits of scripting etc. to add special traps or encounters.
  

Well that's it for now! The next update will be focused on a big rework to character development, classes, builds etc. that I've been thinking about for awhile. I'll also be getting The Dark Temple up to spec with its own set of special levels, new uniques etc. Will likely also start working through some of the special levels for other zones, adding new uniques and monsters along the way. So generally: lots more dungeon content and some changes to character development.

As always, thank you everyone for your support and encouragement! I've being going pretty hard for the last 6 weeks so will be taking it easy for the remainder of the week (if I can manage to contain myself) and then its back to work for the next one!