Happy New Year everyone!
There and Back Again: Enemy AI
I removed two different enemy AI systems: hierarchical utility AI and modular scoring utility AI. They introduced at least as many problems as they solved and were difficult to maintain. I’m annoyed with the time I wasted in December on this, but some valuable lessons were learned. Enemy AI is now back to the original utility AI, with more options. I also removed fleeing. It wasn’t fun, and the logic was complicated.
Making Rooms Less Boring
One of the biggest problems with Legend currently is that there are too many rooms that aren’t interesting. I think this boils down to lacking challenge, e.g. a room containing a few crates to smash. These types of rooms have their place, but should be limited. As an experiment, I dropped random enemies into the rooms that previously had no enemies. This did make runs more interesting. There’s more work to do here.
New Content
One of my 2026 goals is to add a new piece of map content every day. This week (starting January 1), I added Broken Statues, Broken Statue Room, and Oil and Flame Slime Room.
Bug Fixes
- Ability Book selection. There were several issues related to Ability Books, which are items that enable the player to learn new abilities. In some cases, the map included Ability Books for abilities the player already had, abilities the player couldn’t learn based on their class, or abilities that are too high level for the current dungeon level.
- Log wording/capitalization. I realized when I was taking screenshots recently that there are still basic problems with some messages displayed on the on-screen log.
- Missing sound effects. When I changed the audio system (last year or the year before, can’t remember), I missed a few scenarios, resulting in some sound effects not playing.
Next week, I’ll finish the 2025 retrospective, add more map content, and make existing rooms more challenging and interesting.