I was short on time this week due to a family health issue.
- Acquired gold and kill tracking. The amount of gold the player acquires and the number of enemies the player kills is now tracked. These stats are displayed when the run ends.
- Tester player class. It’s been a few weeks since I’ve run the automated tests. When I ran them this week, every one of them failed. Yikes! Most of the tests failed because of the recent changes I made to the starting classes, specifically removing items and abilities that the classes shouldn’t have at the start of the game. The automated tests assumed these items and abilities were available. I added a new player class (Tester) that has all abilities, and made that the class used by the automated tests. For obvious reasons, the Tester won’t be available to the player.
- Bug fixes. Resuming automated testing exposed some issues. Fortunately, none of the issues were caused by code defects; they were caused by objects that weren’t properly configured after the Stat Modifier enhancements implemented a few weeks ago.
- Contextual map generation brainstorming. I put a lot of thought into how to arrange map rooms and elements in a more logical fashion. I already have many pages of notes on this topic. I’ve worked through a variety of concepts including procedural history generation, rules for the types of rooms that can be placed next to each other, tying stories to structure, and story hierarchies that span the entire dungeon. A concrete implementation is slowly being pieced together. It’s been helpful to list examples of dungeon levels that the generation would ideally be able to produce, such as a level divided into two sections occupied by opposing factions.
Next week, an initial, though likely rudimentary, contextual map generation implementation is the main goal. I can’t spend much more time on this if I want to complete the demo release by year-end. I also need to complete combat / progression balancing, which is a dependency for finalizing actor and item stats.