- Reenabled traps. Basic traps (hidden until detected or sprung, cause a harmful effect in the cell such as fire and poisonous gas) were developed around four years ago. But, they haven’t been incorporated into maps because I’ve focused elsewhere. They needed a couple of adjustments to get working again (fire traps were converting the player into flames).
- Reenabled cracked and illusionary walls. This is another feature that was added early on but was set aside to focus on other things. The way these are added to the map has changed. Originally, there was a map generation process step that randomly converted some doors to cracked and illusionary walls. Now, they’re defined in room types.
- New room types: Old Battlefield, Dump. These are designed for large open spaces that were previously not being populated by the map generator.
- More informative tooltips. Some tooltips didn’t show item stats or effects. I want players to have all the information they need to make decisions.
- Line of sight logging. In a recent r/roguelikedev Sharing Saturday conversation, I mentioned performance problems when a large number of actors were active. This is caused by expensive line of sight and pathfinding algorithms. I added a log statement to track the number of executions and was surprised to see several occurrences per actor per turn. Next week I’ll reduce the number of calls.
- AI content creation experiment. Last week I mentioned exporting ScriptableObjects to JSON files to experiment with AI accelerated content creation. I gave ChatGPT the JSON file for an Alchemy Chamber room type and asked it to create a new Study room type. ChatGPT successfully created the new Study JSON file. ChatGPT then asked me if I wanted to add a chance of missing bookcases for visual variety and add random items like books and scrolls to the table. I replied “yes” and it updated the file. The update was mostly correct, but did contain made-up values for some of the attributes. I’ll need to provide lists of values to prevent this. Although this experiment was promising, I’m going to hold off on further experiments for now to focus on higher priorities.
- Started looking for an artist. I posted in r/gameDevClassifieds and used AI web searches to find pixel art RPG/roguelike sprite artists. These efforts yielded a list of 40 artists. After reviewing each artist’s portfolio, the list was reduced to 8 potential candidates based on style and previous work. While these artists are clearly talented and capable, I have yet to look at a portfolio and think “this is exactly what I’m looking for.” I’m still hoping to find that, so I’ll do some more looking next week, and possibly do a try-out with some of the artists on the short list.
- Miscellaneous UI fixes and refinements.
- Many bug fixes.
Next week I’ll continue looking for an artist, add traps to some room types, reduce the number of line of sight calls, and try to make existing room types more distinct in terms of gameplay.