Rogue Fable III News

Hello Everyone!

Was off for most of August visiting family and friends and just generally taking a bit of a break. So I’ve been getting back into the swing of things these past few weeks. I was planning on finally settling in to tackling a big expansion to the dungeon with new zones, sub-zones, special levels and eventually about a 50% increase in total size but I decided about halfway through that there was more than enough stuff on my ‘fiddling little problems’ list that I should do a huge clean up before pushing forward.

So this is a pretty massive update of all the little bits and pieces that have been floating around. There are also some bits of the update from the start of this cycle that are in preparation for the dungeon expansion that will be coming up in the next bunch of updates.

So these first few are from the first part of this dev cycle and will be fleshed out more in upcoming updates.

MAX LEVEL TO 20:
Set the max level back to 20 and balanced everything roughly as it was before. I believe that my issues that led to this change will be solved by the upcoming expansion to the dungeon allowing level gains to be spread out a bit more and solving many of the problems with end game power creep. Obviously overall balance is going to continue to be tweaked pretty much until release but for now, since it wasn’t broken before and will likely be improved in future updates, I’m setting it to what we know is at least reasonably stable.

ZONE ORDER:
These were changes in preparation of the dungeon expansion earlier in this dev cycle, before I decided to do all the cleanup, so don’t read too much into it yet. Orc Fortress and Dark Temple are now cycling on tier III. Sewers, core, and ice are now on Branch I and Crypt, Iron Fortress and Arcane Tower are now on Branch II.

I haven’t completely decided exactly how I want to structure things in the expansion but roughly speaking my current thinking is that tier III will be increased in size quite a bit with lots of cycling special levels with themed, challenges and rewards. Basically boss levels, or sub-themed levels, or just tricky challenge levels.

Orc and Temple are fairly similar already so they may end up getting merged together and then split out into a bunch of sub-zones, special levels, etc. that can be randomly composited together for each run all part of one big ‘Dark Fortress’ with a lot of variation game to game. With a bit more room to move around in the mid game the branches can then be made quite a bit more specifically challenging and given their own unique rewards. They will likely also have their own even more highly specific special levels.

Again this is all tentative, still need to sit down and really plan this stuff out.

ENCUMBRANCE:
Added an encumbrance system so that armor has a weight that can be overcome with enough strength. You will incur penalties on armor if the encumbrance is higher than your strength. Basically the idea is to maintain the previous penalties on heavy armor but allow characters that build up their strength to eventually overcome them. Still working out the exact balance on this.

Alright onto all the clean up!

GENERAL MECHANICS:
- Pathfinding now works through portals in the arcane tower
- Chakrams, nets, javelins and bombs have been moved to the consumable bar since that’s quite literally what they are. Will be adding more things like stun bombs, poison darts etc. to this item class in the future.
- Darts have been changed to an infinite ammo weapon, the same as bows, slings etc. giving most of the melee classes a weak ranged option early on.
- Ammo items were basically just a holdover from RFII when all ranged weapons were consumable. The idea here is to firmly split these into either standard ranged weapons or very powerful but consumable items.
- Reduced the spread of electricity in water by 1 tile since it was absurdly overpowered in the swamp and sewers (it’s still a pretty massive spread even after the change).
- Fixed poison staff ticking twice in the first turn (the hit and the first turn of the effect). It now deals damage on the first hit (so you can one shot an enemy without taking damage), but will no longer double tick. Added 1 duration to make up the difference.
- Projectiles now ‘poof’ after their range which effects stuff like misses going on forever.
- Made it easier for projectiles to target past characters and walls at an angle. Previously they were being blocked at even really ‘shallow?’ angles.
- Axes will no longer cleave through fire pots unless you specifically target them.
- Player will gain a random attribute point on 3rd levels (starting at 2). This might get weighted a bit towards your lowest attribute. The idea here is, along with the random skill points from book shelves to maintain a bit of minimum power in your non primary stats so that if you find a nice weapon or talent halfway through the game, you’re not starting from 0 in order to use it.

TALENTS:
- Changed around the way tomes generate their talents to try to provide a mix of passive and active talents. As an example, a magic tome will always try to provide focus or magic mastery (if the player doesn’t have it) along with 2 ability type talents. This should just make it easier to actually make use of a new tomes talents.
- Defense and Melee talents were just merged into a general melee tome that tries to provide fortitude or weapon mastery.
- Removed the tome of power since its talents are now merged into the caster tomes.
- Power shot now works with perfect aim.
- NEW TALENT: Warriors now get Recovery: which is a % based heal and cure on cooldown. Quite firmly establishes them as the tanky, resilient class and recovery is just generally useful for anyone finding the talent.
- NEW TALENT: Storm mages now get Air Strike instead of Thunder Clap which is a physical damage, distantly targetable, cone shaped knock back attack (click once to set origin, click second type for direction). Thunder Clap was either pretty useless or totally abusable since enemies could never resist the stun.
- NEW TALENT: Rogues now get Bear Trap instead of nimble fingers, allowing them to toss out a bear trap at a distance (or set one up before a fight). Nimble fingers was neat but just generally a pain to use regularly since it required a lot of fiddly micromanagement which I’m never in favor of.
- NEW TALENT: Completed changed shield wall which had a relatively obscure effect. I had a hell of a time trying to write the in game description of this and am having trouble writing it now, so any help here would be appreciated. Basically it limits the number of enemies that can attack you in melee per turn, all additional attacks are auto blocked. Goes 3,2,1 based on talent rank. So the final rank would block all but one melee attack per turn.
- NEW TALENT: Hand of Reaping – necromancer sustained talent that adds life drain to your melee attacks.
- Attunement talents renamed to Infusion and immediately restore a portion of mana instead of reducing mana cost of spells. This makes them a solid ‘panic’ button when shit hits the fan. I’m planning on adding some kind of requirement such as fire requiring you to be within a few tiles of a source of fire (always usable in core, never usable in ice caves), ice requiring you to be [x] tiles away from a source of fire (always usable in ice caves, never in core), storm requiring you to be in a wide open position i.e. no walls [x] distance away. That sort of thing.
- Deflect has a longer duration and a longer cooldown so that it can actually last through a fight. It previously had a duration nearly as long as its cooldown which would require constant micro to keep it up in fights. I’m considering just making this a passive that turns your shield blocks into deflects by default.
- Confusions AoE can now be targeted on objects. This was just bugging me where you’d have a 3x3 glyph room with a chest in the middle and you couldn’t cast confuse to cover all the enemies due to the chest.
- Summoned skeletons now have their level modified based on your toxic magic power.

GENERAL BALANCE:
- Reduced number of monsters in zones (balancing against the changes to spawning that unintentionally increased num monsters).
- Monsters will ‘pull up’ their levels a bit if they spawn on a level that is much deeper than their natural level. Due to the way spawning now takes levels into account this also reduces some of the later game hoards.
- Roughly speaking num monsters are now closer to what they were before (slightly higher on average). Sometimes there will be a bit more, sometimes a bit less, but the amount of total exp per level will be consistent.
- Increased duration of food clock a bit which balances against this slight increase in num mobs.
- Reduced damage of hell fire scrolls a bit (still pretty monstrous but no longer a guaranteed, kill everything button). Maybe a new, rare, once per game scroll that is basically the ‘flip the table’ scroll?

ITEMS:
- Rand-Art stats will now only apply to basic armor types. I always found it odd to get an item that reads as say ‘ring of strength’ but actually has some massive reflection bonus or whatever.
- Rand-Arts still need a ton of work in general so this is one of those ‘likely to change in future’ things.
- Rand-Arts can no longer be enchanted since the bonus to multiple stats is pretty extreme. Again this will likely be adjusted in the future as rand-arts gen their stats scaling based on depth.
- Added chainmail to bridge the weight and protection gap between leather and plate.
- Added Crown of Power (+3 STR) to drop off the orc king since he was missing a drop.
- Added Robe of Flames (+3MP, +1rFire) to Cylomar since he was also missing a drop.
- All uniques will eventually need more interesting… unique drops, for now, just trying to temporarily fill some of the holes so they at least reward something.
- Added Elven Chain Mail (lighter ENC) that only drops in Dark Temple (part of future expansion, subject to change)
- Added Heavy Brass Armor (heavy with best protection in game) that only drops in Orc Fortress (part of future expansion, also subject to change).
- Amulet of Extension: increases the range of all ranged weapons.
- Amulet of Recovery: reduces the cooldown of abilities by 20%

MISC CONTENT:
- Corrupted Ent Unique in Under Grove that continuously summons up roots. This is also sort of incomplete and will be the sort of thing likely made much more interesting and stuck on a special level.
- Added a bunch of vaults to Orc Fortress. Guard rooms, archery ranges etc.

USER INTERFACE:
- Characters now display a health bar on screen rather than a number. I’ll likely make this a togglable option in the future since opinions may vary on what’s more clear. For me, flat numbers are very deceiving across the course of the game since damage and hit points keep scaling up.
- Show damage on power shot, power strike, tunnel shot based on equipped weapon.
- Mystic Skull Helm now shows the actual amount of HP its giving you based on # potions.
- Enemies now display their poison damage along with their melee damage.
- Bigger item/ability slots and reduced saturation to make it easier to see the icons + text.
- Better ring sprites for uniques, summons, elites etc.
- Tunnel shot and chakrams now show correct targeting.
- Dialog options now have numbers next to them (you could always use the num keys to quick click them).
- Traps, lava, ice bombs, clouds etc. all now show their damage on mouse over.
- Crit modifier is now displayed on the char screen (this entire stat area needs a complete rework).
- Levitation is now shown on character screen.
- Right click (quick slot attack) will no longer use your primary weapon if the quick slot is out of range or invalid (I killed myself on a crystal golem due to this).
- Tomes now list off what talents they give you when you pick them up (really need a chat log in the future to list this sort of stuff).

BUGS, CRASHES AND MISC:
- Fixed scrolls of fear not working.
- Fixed some tweaky issue with sprint and charge where the character sprite would continue jittering after completing the movement.
- Characters now face correctly when they are semi-visible.
- Summoned monsters no longer follow you up or down stairs.
- Fixed a crash in sewers generation
- Fixed a crash when King Urrazo tried to drop his item.
- Fixed blinking causing double blink messages at the destination tile.
- Resting now stops if your starving.
- Fixed shock occasionally double (or even triple) hitting in water.
- Fixed an issue where spawning or summoned enemies were sending popup text flying towards the top of the screen.

Aaand that’s it for today. Likely a bunch more little bits and pieces I missed (typing this up from a big ol pile of notes), but that should cover most of it. Will be taking it easy for the next few days, keeping an eye out for any bug or crash reports and then getting down to the business of planning out this next update.

Hello everyone!

Quite a large update today. I'm starting what I plan to be about a month or two of basically going over every system, mechanic and piece of content in the game and giving it a complete overhaul and re-balancing.

As of July 22, this will be exactly one year since I started this project and I believe it will likely take about another year to get the game completed so this is pretty much precisely the midpoint of development.

Over the past year, I've added tons of stuff to the game and made a ton of a progress but oftentimes many of the additions were made without a ton of thought or planning since my focus was simply on getting the code working.

During the course of the past few months when I was investigating the direction I'd like to take the game in the future I realized how messy and incomplete much of the existing work was. The pieces are all definitely here and its actually working very well given the chaos of the dev process but I believe that this is a great time to take a step back and consolidate everything we've got so far.

So that's the plan for the next month or so. Basically go back, rethink each feature and push, pull and rework until everything is cleaner, more balanced and just generally working well together. The plan is that, at the end of this period, the entire game should basically be transformed into something much more stable and in line with my vision for the final product. From there, it should be much easier and quicker to move forwards.

In my experience on previous projects this is basically exactly where we should be. The first half of development tends to be quite hectic and messy but you get all the pieces on the table. Then around the midpoint you trim the fat, rework existing stuff and generally unify the existing mess until a solid center is built. Finally, over the course of the second half, you basically build out the game itself from that solid center. In my experience, its this second half where most of the actual content is developed so I'm quite excited right now since I believe once everything is cleaned up in the next month I should finally be able to really get to all the 'cool stuff' we've been discussing since Alpha.

I've got a ton of notes that I'll be compiling that describe roughly what I'm trying to achieve with this rework in regards to each system and also a ton of plans as to how to achieve that. I'll be posting these notes sometime in the next few days just to give everyone an idea of why some of these changes are been made.

Obviously this period will be quite messy with wild swings in balance and quality. The biggest challenge here and what caused so much trouble in the last month is that pretty much everything I'm trying to do right now is completely interconnected i.e. changes in one system completely depend on changes in many other systems in order to 'work'. So since I obviously can't just 'do it all at the same time', many of these changes wont 'work' until another change down the line is made. So just please bear with me, at least for the first few weeks here. I think once we get the biggest tangles dealt with, the rest of it will come apart at an increasingly rapid pace.

Update
As mentioned above I'll be going into much more detail about the plan and rational in a few days but I should mention at least one critical assumption I'm making here. I definitely plan to grow and expand the game once this rework phase is over, but, within the context of this rework, I'll be treating the game as it currently is, with its current scope and length. So rather than balancing in anticipating of some future larger scope I'll be working with the assumption that the game is approximately one hour in length and mostly linear. Its my hope that, if we can get the balance correct within this context, any later expansions will be much easier since I can just 'spread' the balance out.

Leveling and Experience:
The biggest change and one that will be adjusted as we go along is that I've changed the player level cap to 12 and spread out experience, talent, skill and attribute points accordingly.

Basically the issue here is that, given that the game is currently only about one hour in length, 20 level ups is just way to many. First, it breaks the game flow every 3 mins (approximately) and forces the player to fiddle in their character screen. Second, since there are so many level ups, the power gained from each level up has to be kept small to stop high end power creep. This creates the undesired situation where your constantly interrupted from gameplay to make choices that are quite inconsequential.

The goal will be to have a lot less interruptions (level ups), but for each level up to be much more meaningful. I'll be reworking the attribute, talent, and skill system accordingly in future updates, but this is a first stab at tackling this issue. As part of this rework a bunch of changes were made:

• Smoothed out exp for enemies. Previously exp = monster level, so a level 1 rat gave 1 exp, a level 2 goblin brute gave 2 exp etc. Changed it to be 10 + level so that the level 2 goblin brute doesn't give x2 exp.
  
• This smoothing then allows me to make weak, swarmy enemies like rats and maggots give 1/3 as much exp.
  
• Just to give an example of why this makes a big difference. Previously a rat nest, with its 6 rats was worth 7 total exp compared to a level 1 goblins 1 exp. Since the previous spawn system would just spawn say 15 enemies on UD:1, you could get absolutely wild swings in the amount of exp per dungeon level just based on what was spawning.
  
• Regarding the point above: the spawn system now spawns enemies so that their total exp is equal to some desired total based on dungeon depth. This will definitely need some balancing work to get the numbers right but basically this should fix a ton of wild swings in balance. It was previously possible say in the desert to have 15 rats spawn on a level in one run and then have 15 mummys spawn on the exact same level in another run. Not only did this create wild swings in difficulty, but the amount of exp the player would gain would also swing wildly.
  

Player Stuff:
I'll be going into the 'why' of many of these changes in a few days. Much of this is basically temporary quick fixes or preemting much larger changes that will be coming later so these should be treated as temporary iterations that are part of a larger plan. I started trying to explain the rational for each change but it got to long so I'll just list em, and give a more concise overview later.

• Reversed direction of passive talent bonus so that the small +2 bonus is first and the large +4 bonus is last.
  
• Casters now start with power shot instead of attunement which has been removed for now.
  
• Warriors now start with a hand axe instead of a short sword
  
• Generally reducing the number of start talents (big reworks to the way the player acquires talents will be coming to fill the gaps).
  
• Classes now start with -attributes in their non primary attributes rather than a bonus.
  
• Gain 2 skills points per level instead of 1.
  
• Charge can now 'crunch' enemies against walls for crit damage.
  
• Protection can now result in 0 damage (basically makes protections more valuable).
  

NPC Stuff:
About half of the big rework plan is in regards to the player, the other half will be a complete reworking of many enemies and their abilities. Will basically be going over the entire dungeon in multiple passes, working to make enemies more interesting to fight, adding new abilities or filling holes in the spawn table etc. Again, I'll be going into more detail as to the overall goal of these changes in a few days.

• Orbs of Storm for enemy storm mages that chase the player and throw little sparks (has a limited duration like all summons and killing the caster will dispell it).
  
• All archers now have 2 cooldown in order to reduce long range spam.
  
• Reduces all mages projectile damage, again to reduce long range, unavoidable spam damage.
  
• Reduced the cooldown significantly on orbs of fire so that fire mages toss them much more often. Reduced their AoE and damage accordingly.
  
• Will at least note here, that a big part of the changes to NPCs will revolve around reducing a lot of the unavoidable damage (especially projectiles) and replacing it with stuff the player can dodge, run way from, dispell etc.
  
• Elephants, yaks, goats can now charge (this needs better animation/graphics to make it clearer whats happening).
  
• Reduced the hit points of most ranged enemies
  
• Reduced the hit points of all spawners (if the player can get LoS it should be relatively easy to kill a spawner, rather than having to always tank through all its summons).
  
• Storm mages will now use 'shocking grasp' instead of throwing spark projectiles.
  
• Goblin brutes now go berserk as before.
  
• Berserk now increases movement speed (since most berserk enemies are slow, this simply gives them 'normal' movement speed).
  
• Fleeing enemies will now eventually stop (was annoying to chase them down).
  
• Blink frogs have been made fast (the entire blink mechanic is gonna need a rework).
  
• Removed the net portion of spider webs since it tended to just result in immediate, unavoidable deaths unless the player had some powerful consumable. So for now, the player is still unstabled on the web, but otherwise he still has his turn to act i.e. step off.
  

User Interface:
Along with a lot of the balancing and reworking will be drastic changes and improvements to the games UI. I won't be focusing on this quite as much as general mechanics, but I'd still like to chip away at it. Completely reworking the UI and controls will likely be a future phase in itself.

• Shift + Space defaults to rest
  
• When resting, the popup text now indicates if you rested to full HP or full MP.
  
• Mouse now highlights tiles on the mini-map
  
• Popup text now indicates when abilities have charged (completed cooldown).
  
• Enemies now show their ability damage on mouse over.
  
• Clouds now show their damage on mouse over
  
• Big top text now indicates where stairs will take you when standing on them (previously there was no indication when actually standing on the stairs).
  
• When using < or > to fast travel to stairs, you will now get a dialog option when there are multiple stairs.
  

Alright, well that's it for now! Thanks as always for all your support and feedback! Will be posting some of my notes in the next few days.

Just sticking with the small updates for this week, getting everything flowing smoothly again. Will be calling these 1.27.X for this week so that we don't end up with some absurd release numbers.

Definitely a ton of huge improvements, changes and additions coming a week or two from now that I'm very excited about. Most of its all completed on the dev-branch so the implementation should go quite smoothly. For now though, I'm just gonna focus on getting back to regular updates by keeping these small and unlikely to make a mess.

Quick note: you may need to reset your default controls occasionally as I make updates, particularly in the next few weeks when I'll be making some big changes to controls and interface. I don't think it crashes if you have keys bound to stuff that I've moved or changed, but if your keys don't appear to be working, just go into the options and do a 'restore defaults' and that should fix it.

Update 1.27.1:

• Overhauled the popup text system so that they actually queue up correctly without overlapping.
  
• Popup text now follows characters to keep it more obvious what the text is referring to.
  
• Changed the way fire shrooms and traps generate so that they no longer block hallways and are more likely to spawn in large open rooms.
  
• Agroed enemies will now remain visible even when out of sight. I found this just helps keep everything clearer by not having tons of stuff happening 'off screen'.
  
• Quite significantly reduced the bonus on items from enchantment modifiers. +3 items were just absurdly OP, in particular weapons, and oftentimes the game was going from challenging to absurdly easy due to a single modded weapon drop.
  
• Bug Fix? Shift + Space now works to rest just like shift clicking yourself. Not sure if this is a recent bug or if it never actually worked, but its working now :P.
  
• Bug Fix: The players LoS was leaving behind 'visible' tiles which, amongst other things, was causing auto explore to indicate 'nearby danger' due to enemies standing halfway across the map on a 'visible' tile.
  
• Bug Fix: Fixed staff damage scaling (I think I messed this one up with the previous update so its fixed now).
  

Side note with regards to enemies remaining visible while agroed:

A bunch of changes to enemy pathing will be coming (already on dev-branch) to fix issues that I noticed when I made this change. Specifically in regards to enemies not following each other down halls nicely (they think the path is blocked and so often take crazy long ways around). This is a big issue with bolt spells, where narrow hallways should be one of their best use cases but due to this odd pathing its hard to get a good line up. This is the same issue as auto explore getting blocked, so I'll be catching all of these soon.

Feeling much better in general, now that I'm back into the regular swing of things. Just wanted to give a big thanks to everyone for being so supportive and understanding during this period, it was definitely a struggle. I learned a lot though and am eager to get back at it.

So about a week of little micro updates like this, then I'll sit down and figure out which of the many large changes or additions I'd like to bring over first.

Hello everyone!

After driving myself crazy this past month trying to incorporate the hundreds of changes and improvements I'd like to make to the game, pretty much all at once, I've finally decided to just back off, start small, and get the ball rolling again.

In order to reestablish a routine and try to get my schedule back to something approaching normal, I'll be focusing on just tiny little updates for the next week or so, just little things that I have no excuses for procrastinating on or agonizing over.

Once I've gotten back into the swing of things I'll start work on incorporating the larger, more substantial changes and improvements I've got sitting on the dev-branch. So to kick things off:

Update 1.27:
- Improved sprites for a bunch of monsters, cleaning up graphics and trying to narrow in on a more unified art style.

Hello again everyone! Its looking like this update will actually be coming on Friday. Again apologize for the unexpected delay, my goal is to get through this shaky period and hopefully we won't have interruptions like this in the future.

Just to give a brief explanation as to whats taking so long. Pretty much from the beginning of the whole Rogue Fable series of projects I've been able to make progress on the games in a sort of ad-hoc manner.

Until now, I've managed to make decent progress by just focusing on details and short term improvements with only the most general plan as to how everything is going to work together in the final game.

This lack of longer term planning is apparent in both the design of the systems and content in the game and also in the underlying code and tools I use for development.

About two months ago (when this sort of experimental period began) I sort of realized that this was no longer going to work since the game had reached a level of both complexity and size that would require a bit more planning and conscious design.

So the last few months have really just been a wild adventure of really taking stock of everything I've built so far, the direction I'd like the game to go, and coming up with some sort of plan and schedule of how to get there. Since this is by far the largest project I've ever worked on, I'm pretty much learning as I go which makes it difficult to estimate how long things are going to take.

So over the past few months I've been spending a ton of time really taking the time to analyze the game in its current state, identify the problems and issues I have with it, trying to define what sort of long term vision I'd like to achieve, and trying to figure out how to move between these two states.

I've been going over literally every aspect or system in the game, most of which have just sort of accumulated over time, and really taken the time to figure out how I'd like them to work. In many cases (such as opening up the structure of the world), the changes I'd like to make are quite drastic and will hopefully lead to pretty massive improvements.

Doing this has involved not only a ton of design work, but also lots of experiments, on the dev-branch, which have left it a complete mess full of dead ends and abandoned or altered ideas.

I believe this experimental phase was critical at this point in the project, since I now have a much clearer idea of the final vision of the project, and many of these ideas are now present in some embryonic form on the dev-branch.

The current delays are just me fighting with this giant mess, trying to strip out all the bits that are not working while polishing and debugging the bits that are in order to get the game back to a playable state.

If everything goes according to plan, I think I can get this mostly done by Friday with the merge back with the main branch coming a week or two after that, and then its back to normal development, now armed with all the knowledge and experience gained from this phase.

Just as a warning I should point out that my current plan is actually to strip back the dev branch as much as possible, basically bringing it much closer to the 1.26 version, though with some massive changes, improvements, additions and re balancing.

Basically, I'm thinking of these last few months as a bunch of experiments and prototypes that helped locked down the long term vision of the game and expose all the stuff that will need to be implemented to get there. Due to the mess, dead ends and false starts, I'll be stripping back a ton of stuff to get us back to a point of relative stability (1.26). From there, I hope to be able to use the prototypes and experiments as a guide in order to gradually grow the game into its final form.

So yeah, to bring this long rambling explanation to a close:

Thank you everyone, for all your support and encouragement. Its been a tough few months but I think we're nearly past it. Update to the dev branch should be coming this Friday (July 05) with the update to the main branch coming a week later.