Monster Camouflage and Divination Spells

The agenda lately has been play test, play test, play test. Whenever I sit down to actually play the thing for a while, I've got to keep Notepad++ open because I'll spot a bug about every two minutes that I need to jot down or I'll forget to fix it. Most of these are minor issues, but some of them can keep me baffled for a while. The other night it took me hours to figure out why Monsters were properly escaping out of lethal gas clouds only to jump right back in after they'd reached the edge. Turns out they were checking for danger on the wrong tile. Anyway, despite all the work ahead, it feel like I'm getting so close to have a full, albeit short, game on my hands. I've just got to stay the course and keep working out the kinks.

Apart from polishing, I have added new content lately, including:

- Monster camouflage. A new monster called a rock lizard can disguise itself to look like a rock wall and attack unwary players who walk by. To not be too conspicuous, the lizard will try to position itself in the corner of a real wall. Still, an attentive player might notice a particular edge looks suspicious. Another monster called a "bark skinned lurker" can disguise itself as a tree. It will only do this while standing near a real tree to avoid standing out.

- Similarly, there are now gargoyles disguised as statues. Unlike the others, these don't have to seek their own hiding spots. At the time of level gen, a certain small percentage of real statues are swapped out for gargoyles.

- I improved the AI of water based enemies. It used to be the case that enemies confined to water would just try to move up to the water's edge to get as close as possible to the player, but this made them sitting ducks for ranged attacks while the player remained safely on land. Now, water based monsters will ignore targets if they are not right beside water, where they can be attacked. If a target they are pursuing steps away from water, they will immediately submerge themselves to be safe from ranged attacks.

- Potions of fiery breath! Temporarily gain the power to breath fire in a cone-shaped area of effect. Some new monsters will also be created who naturally have a fiery breath attack.

- Potions of haunting vocals. Temporarily gain the power to wail like a banshee, causing damage to all within range who can hear it. Can effect targets around corners. This power is blocked by silence and prevents the drinker from using other sound based powers.

- New spell, "shared vision". Cast this on a friendly monster and you gain the power to see everything that monster sees within a limited range. Until this time, the Field of View was only projected from the player's location through (a kind of) ray casting. I had to generalize this method somewhat so that the player can now have vision from multiple points.

- New spell, "clairvoyance". Similar to the other spell, this allows the player to see from another location, but this spell does not require a friendly target creature. Instead, the vision comes through a chosen stationary point for a limited duration of time.

- Cave levels now have themes to differentiate them. The randomly generated monsters on a level are taken from a different table, depending on what theme it is. Themes also determine what tiles you might find on the level (e.g., ice levels have ice walls, volcanic levels have magma). The themes so far are: basic cave, swamp, ice, volcanic, "baneful" (has acid lakes in place of water and many acid-based enemies), and undead.