Rogue Fable III News

Hello everyone! The day is finally here. I’ve been procrastinating and stressing out about releasing this for over a week now since its basically a giant mess but I figure that ‘giant mess’ is going to be the ongoing theme of this entire transition period so I might as well get it over with now.

Apologies if the following is a bit rambly and incoherent, I'm at that fun stage where I'm exhausted from pushing hard these past few weeks and at the same time, the only thing I want to do right now is keep working at it :P

So first off, lets just reiterate what we’re doing here:

• Given the enormous amount of ideas I have to continue expanding this game (my own and those suggested by you guys), I’ve decided to quite drastically increase the duration of the project and the planned final scope of the game. For an overview of the direction we’l be heading see link
• Early access will continue for another year and a half or so with a tentative final release date some time in late 2020.
  
• In order to most efficiently work towards this larger final vision of the game, I think its critical that we get a bunch of the major components and changes working as soon as possible so that we have lots of time to work on the details.
  
• With this in mind, we’l be passing through what I’m calling a ‘transition period’ where I’ll be forking updates to an opt-in beta branch while leaving the default branch as it is.
  
• The test-branch will be a place of chaos, extreme lack of balance, and hopefully, very rapid development.
  
• When the transition period is complete i.e. the game is not a complete mess, I’ll merge it back onto the main branch and we’l carry on our merry way.
  
• I’m expecting this transition period to take about 8 weeks with the goal being to get the game back to its current ‘playable’ state by the end of June with the rough details of the expanded scope filled in.
  

Transition Period Overview:
The defining plan for this period will be rough, fast, and fluid! I’ll be cutting every possible corner, using placeholders wherever possible, leaving every detail unpolished and just generally focusing completely on the big picture at the expense of the details. I want to be able to add content quickly, move big globs of 'stuff' around, and just generally work at a very high level.

I like to think of this as sketching where you keep everything quick and loose so that you can focus on getting the major ‘gist’ of the whole thing worked out while leaving lots of room for iteration and changes. The goal of this period is to, as quickly as possible, get the major ‘skeleton’ of the whole expanded scope figured out and working. The period will be complete when its possible to start narrowing in and getting into the actual details. With the in mind I have a number of ‘rules’ I’ll be trying to follow during this period:

#1 Completely ignore variety between games, randomness, proc-gen etc. Focus on getting a single, balanced, working example of the world completed. This completely eliminates the hassle of trying to analyse and adjust in the face of constantly shifting proc-gen. It also allows me to very rapidly create content, adjust it, move it around etc. Once a single working world has been achieved, its much more managable to start varying and randomizing the individual elements.

#2 Completely ignore details. Wherever possible, sketch in the bare minimimum required to capture the ‘essential essence’ of a feature, piece of content, region of the game etc. Theres no use going into detail before the big picture is firmly established.

#3 Completely ignore micro balance. Avoid fiddling with stats and trying to get combat balance perfect at all stages of the game. Rather focus on the big picture, macro balance of the game.

#4 Spend a ton of time on quality of life features. This sort of contradicts the points above, but I believe in this case, its absolutely essential to spend a lot of time getting this stuff right. The world is going to be getting very big very fast, and its critical that its easy, intuitive and not annoying to navigate it.
Furthermore, most of the changes really come down to adding a high level strategy layer to the game and in order for this to work, we need a lot of information to be presented clearly in order to make strategic decisions. I don’t want a messy user interface to be obscuring whats actually going on mechanically in the game.

Update 1.28:
To access the test-branch of the game you need to right click on the game name in your steam library and at the bottom of the drop down menu select 'properties'. Then under the 4th, 'Betas' tab enter the password 'secretpassword' and it should give you access to the test-branch. Please let me know if you have trouble accessing it.

This update is essentially a technical proof of concept which includes a lot of the underlying bits of code that will be needed moving forward. Its basically a direct translation of every bit of content, generation, and mechanics that we have so far into a non-linear format with very little adjustment. So obviously this means it doesn’t really ‘work’ as a game yet, but its definitely a solid foundation from which I can now quite rapidly start building so updates to the test-branch should be very frequent moving forward.

To be clear EVERYTHING is basically a placeholder at this point and is subject to drastic change, removal or replacement. I’ve done a ton of design work on paper so I feel like I have a pretty clear picture now of where we’l be going and how I’ll be evolving the game to get there but theres definitely going to be some weird transitory steps along the way that might not make much sense. With future updates I’ll be doing my best to explain my thinking along the way, both to explain what would otherwise be ‘wtf is this?’ moments, and also since you guys have always been super helpful with feedback, suggestions, critiques etc.

For now though, its getting past midnight, and if I don’t finish this announcement quickly I’ll likely just put off this update again. Moving forward though I’m planning on updates very frequently i.e. every day or two, and I’ll be trying to give as much information about whats going into the game, and more importantly why, along the way. Definitely tomorrow I’ll likely have another update along with some more details about the current content and mechanics that have been implemented.

Thanks as always for all of your feedback, suggestions, and support!

Hello everyone! We've been chatting about the following changes for the past week on discord so I figured I'd post a nice summery here for those of you who arn't in the channel.

Based on a number of factors which are described in more detail in the page linked below, I've decided to expand the scope of the game I'm ultimately trying to make with this project. A brief overview:

• The total time in Early Access will be around 2 years. This means the game will be officially released some time in late 2020.
  
• The goal is to ultimately make something of comparable scope to the genre classics i.e. NetHack, Crawl, ADoM etc.
  
• The core design principles will remain the exact same as before: we're making a bigger game not a different game.
  
• There will be a transition period with rapid changes and generally a lot of mess in which development will move to an optional test branch, separate from the live version of the game. You will be able to opt into this test branch from the steam client.
  
• The transition period should take about 2 months after which the game should be stable and balanced enough to be placed back on the live branch and development will then proceed as before but with a significantly expanded foundation, giving us much more room for future growth.
  

A much more detailed description of the above is available on the following page: Link

Given that this project is now going to be quite a bit larger and more complex I will be regularly updating the above page with more details regarding plans, features, core concepts etc.

I've already gotten quite a bit of work done on the initial transition stuff and so will be getting the test branch setup sometime in the next few days with an initial prototype. This first build will really just be a 'tech demo' of sorts with everything from the current game transferred over onto a large, seamless, scrolling map. Though it won't really be 'playable' per say it should at least give a visual idea of what some of the above document is describing.

From there, development on the test branch should be proceeding extremely quickly over the next 2 months so expect much more regular (though much rougher) updates there.

As always I appreciate any feedback and particularly questions you guys have. In this case questions are even more important since A) I want to make sure I'm explaining everything clearly and B) I need to make sure I'm actually considering everything clearly. I'd like to at least have a vague idea of how 'everything' is going to work at this point before we get to deep into this.

Hello everyone! Update for The Sunless Desert here + some bug fixes. Gonna leave this a bit vague as far as new content goes so you can all see for yourself whats down there :P

THE SUNLESS DESERT:
- 2 New uniques w/ their own vaults and special item drops.
- Bunch of oasis type vaults adding a bit of water into the zone
- Bunch of bandit camp vaults.
- Couple of new bandit NPCs

BUGS_AND_CRASHES:
- Fixed those annoying black squares of solid rock in many cave levels.
- Fixed a hard crash: unable to fill cave was the console log
- Got rid of the 'spotted gate' message on normal prison doors.

MISC:
- Campfires will only show on the mini map in the ice caves (I'm starting to use them just generally in other levels).
- Unique enemies will not drop their special items if they are killed while dominated. I believe this is a good trade off and hard choice to make.
- Removed the cave ins that would occasionally occur and wreck parts of levels, was destroying to much stuff and I have much better methods now to handle that sort of thing.

TAKING A BREAK:
After about 9 months of pretty much daily work with only the occasional day off, I've decided to take a break next week before I burn out. So will be taking the entirity of next week off from development and will be returning next Saturday for the discord meetup and will beginning work again then. Next update will then be in about 2 weeks, likely either The Under Grove or Orc Fortress content additions.

Will be keeping an eye on bugs and crashes for the next few days just to make sure nothings horribly messed up but otherwise will be trying my hardest not to think about the project for a week :P.

Well that's it for now! Thanks for your support everyone!

Hello everyone! Pretty much satisfied at this point with all the level gen stuff I've done behind the scenes so will be moving on next week to The Sunless Desert and adding a bunch of stuff there. Should go quite quick and smoothly now that I've worked out a lot of the level gen type stuff behind the scenes. For this weeks update we have the following:

BALANCE CHANGES:
- Weapon damage will now run 0.25 - 1.0 of the weapons max damage. This will stop players with say 20 damage weapons dealing random 1s. This change also applies to enemy physical attacks.
- Changed the fortitude talents hit point bonus from 8,6,6 to 8,6,4 to keep it scaled the same as all other talents.
- Changed focus talent from 3,2,2 to 4,3,2 to keep it scaled the same as fortitude.
- Rings of strength, dexterity and intelligence are now slightly rarer.
- Non attribute stat bonus rings have all had their stat bonus raised to +4 to make them more powerful (for that single stat) than the more general attribute rings.
- Baby slimes spawned by the king slime will not give exp to prevent infinite farming.

ITEMS:
- Added new unique item drops to the Goblin High Shaman and Death Speakers.

LEVEL GEN:
- Once again a lot of difficult to explain improvements here that will mostly start to come to fruition next week as I start to tackle zones in which I can actually start to put in neat stuff. Was definitely having to hold back a lot of ideas for The Upper Dungeon on this one.
- Nonetheless there are some tweaks to generation, some new vaults etc. in The Upper Dungeon.

BUGS AND CRASHES:
- Fixed strafe attack always triggering even when moving away.

FIXES TO RANDOM NUMBER GENERATOR
This one has been slowly driving me crazy over the past few months. As was noted a few months ago by Umbr, it appeared like there was some kind of pattern to the class/race selection of the daily challenge. I had also noticed in my own games that certain vaults or static levels never seemed to be selected for generation despite working totally fine when I forced them to generate.

So after silly amounts of investigation and trying to understand the math behind random number generators I did in fact find what turns out to be a bug in the underlying library I'm using. Basically the first 2 values pulled out of the generator after its been seeded had some kind of relationship to each other. This is not a problem for most things since most generation involves hundreds if not thousands of 'dice rolls' but in many cases, the first 2 dice rolls were actually critically important (for example when choosing a race / class combo on daily challenges). So in conclusion, this should now be fixed resulting in:

- Daily challenge should now be correctly randomized.
- A whole bunch of previously implemented but never actually generated static levels should now spawn (that stupid fortress level that seems to appear all the time in The Upper Dungeon for example should be much rarer now).
- A whole bunch of other stuff regarding generation should now be working as actually intended.

So that's it for now! As mentioned above, will be moving on to The Sunless Desert next week, hopefully getting into the swing of knocking off a single zone per week for the foreseeable future. Goal will be to add just a ton of new content: vaults, enemies, uniques, items, terrain, traps, etc. I'm hoping this should go pretty smooth since I've worked out a lot of code for supporting generation in the past few weeks. As always I'll be on discord tomorrow at 2:00pm PST though were getting a new bed delivered some time that day so might have to pop out to grab it.

Thanks as always for all your support and feedback!

Hello everyone! Just a ton more work on behind the scenes level generation type stuff. Still difficult to explain exactly what the changes are since much of what I'm doing is setting stuff up for future work. I'm planning on doing a big ol write up of how level gen works, once I actually figure it out myself. So that being said, this update looks a little strange:

LEVEL_GENERATION:
- An absurd amount of rewriting, in preparation for more sophistication in the future.
- Some subtle changes to the upper dungeon but again a lot of this work won't be so apparent until the next update.

BUGS_AND_CRASHES:
- Fixed keyboard attacking i.e. bumping into enemies to attack.
- Fixed a bug with hall generation that was leaving halls partially blocked by objects.

I'll be on discord tomorrow at 02:00 PST for anyone who wants to hang out. Will be working on any hot fixes, and catching a few more lingering bugs over the weekend then I figure I've got about one more week of getting this basic level gen type stuff out of the way and finishing up this pass of The Upper Dungeon then I'll be moving on to the next zones in order.