Update 24/07/13

Spears, daggers and clubs have been added. Spears and daggers have their own attack animations separate from the regular animations most weapons use. Also bugfixes!

Update 01/07/13

Apologies for a lack of updates, but work on the game slowed to a crawl due to real life issues.

Since the last update a new type of monster was added, the Curators. They're designed as a replacement to the skeletons so they basically offer the same challenge, but they can't normally be permanently killed. They only take a single hit to knock down but they'll get up after 30 seconds. You have to find the book that acts as their phylactery and set fire to it with a lit torch.

I also added clumsy attack animations for when you don't meet the stat requirements for a weapon. You can still do damage with a clumsy attack, if you somehow manage to hit with that animation, but it can never penetrate armour so it's pretty useless.

By far the biggest thing I added though was saving and loading of the game. Not exactly the most exciting feature, but it had to be done at some point. I spent 3 weeks working on it but that was on a very part-time basis. By far the majority of implementing this was fixing the bugs it caused but I think I got them all in the end, and managed to fix every crash-related bug that I'm aware of in the process. Now I'll have to add something new so it can cause brand new bugs, and so the cycle continues.

Update 21/05/13

Added framework for character creation. It's just the first screen, there's two other screens after this still to be created (skills and companions) and the race/classes/gods don't have their models or abilities yet either (which will be a long time coming because they'll need modelling work beyond my meagre skills, and the abilities are just something that'll get implemented piecemeal over the course of the game's development). It's just stats and flavour text. I also added basic support for languages.

I added leather armour and redid the plate armour, although they both still need some work as they're not even at the low standard I set for my placeholder art.

I also did some more work on item descriptions.

Also bug fixes and general tweaks to gameplay, the usual.

Update 11/04/13

Today was spent adding item descriptions, and also trying to fix a really annoying bug to do with NPCs changing map levels and their items getting bugged and crashing the game when they do. I still haven't fixed it after about 6 hours. Oh well, writing stupid item descriptions made up for it.

Update 10/05/13

This week started with some additions to the sound system, such as random pitch on footsteps, background ambient noise, and button clicking sound effects.

Most of the work was done on the AI systems though. It won't be apparent until more tasks are added, because currently there's only a searching task, rally allies task, and hit stuff with a melee weapon task, but the underlying system allows for some smart decision making.

It also allowed for me to add in a friendly AI human really easily. You can control him by pressing enter and typing a command, but since the talking system isn't properly implemented yet all he knows is "follow" and "stop following". The AI looks for keywords in sentences and acts according to those, so you can construct any kind of sentence you like and so long as it contains the keywords somewhere the game knows what you mean. The sentence in the picture below is valid, for example.

Later on you'll be able to issue complex commands, including asking NPCs to explore areas of the dungeon you haven't been to yet or to otherwise move to faraway locations, but for now he's pretty dumb. I don't expect you'll be able to keep him alive past a single fight either, but you have to start somewhere!

Update 03/05/13

I've done some work on improving some of the more egregious animations, added a health indicator, some tweaking with the inventory to make it easier to shuffle items about, allowed players to switch between targeted enemies with the scroll wheel, and bug fixing.

Update 30/04/13

I did a pass on a whole bunch of polish, which includes stuff like smooth dampening of the camera for certain actions and transitionary periods between attacking and moving. Nothing grandiose, but it feels a lot better to control.

Ragdolls were removed until I can properly implement them and there are placeholder death animations now instead.

Shield bashing was implemented. Shield bashing does no damage but knocks a target down. A target that has been knocked down can be hurt with weapons that would normally be ineffective, such as swords against a skeleton.

Also new attack animations for 1 handed weapons.

Shield bash into 3-hit combo