Cryptic Hints and Breakable Equipment

I took a few weeks off from development, but I'm starting to get back to work again.

In some of the old roguelikes you could find fortune cookies in the dungeon and inside you would find a cryptic message that gave a hint about how to do something in the game. Although I don't want fortune cookies in my game, I decided to implement a similar hints system. Now, while you're exploring the dungeon, you'll occasionally find a randomly chosen message scrawled onto a wall. Here are a few examples of the hints I've added so far:

• They say if you want to escape an iron golem, go for a swim.
• They say the undead avoid taking medicine.
• They say a classic prank is to slip a water spirit into a fountain.
• They say you should never be shy to ask your friends if you don't know what your items are for.
• They say that shadows are afraid of fireworks.

Apart from that, I added hit points to armour and weapons so that they gradually wear down and need to get replaced. Armour will lose hit points whenever the wearer is struck for an amount of damage that exceeds the protective rating of the armour. Weapons lose hit points whenever they strike a monster with an armour rating higher than 0. When an item loses all its hit points, it isn't deleted, it just becomes broken and can no longer be worn or wielded. Even unique magic weapons and armour can be broken in this way, but those typically have much higher hit point totals than mundane items.

So far, the only way to repair an item is to read a scroll of renewal. These are not uncommon, but rare enough that a player would want to save them for their most important items.

Since equipment is now destructible, I also added that certain monsters, mainly acid-based ones, can now directly damage equipment, making them much more dangerous.

I also went back to work on the world generation process a bit. This is probably the least developed aspect of the game right now; I originally made to generate a world with a single blob-shaped continent. Worlds are still made up of just one continent (there are no methods of sea travel so far), but by using several blobs together, the continents look much more interesting, with more bays and peninsulas. An example of a recently generated world is shown above.

I also made improvements on the way precipitation is modeled. Until now, precipitation was purely a function of how far a particular point was from the ocean, so that every continent had a ring of forests on the outside, grassland further in, then shrubland, then desert. Now it counts steps towards the ocean, but with mountains acting as walls to create a rain shadow effect. In this way you're more likely to get deserts on the side of mountains opposite from the ocean.

Just recently somebody tried out my game and sent two full pages of feedback, which was pretty awesome. It's always great to see the thoughts that other people have about the game.