Illusions, Camouflage and Monster Relations

I didn't make a post for the last couple of weeks, so there's a lot to update about.

Now that the game is getting more stable, I've been having longer play test sessions, with games lasting an hour or more. I find that the game is definitely challenging. Death can come quickly and easily, but each time I realize that the death could have been avoided if I had been a little more careful. Most importantly, I feel like I'm having lots of fun playing, so that's really reassuring.

Illusions

I implemented illusionary monsters, which exist and behave way in basically the same way as normal monsters, but have the ILLUSIONARY flag set. These monsters can't use ranged attacks or special powers; they can use melee attacks, but they will always miss. They are immune to basically every status effect and area of effect spell, but they will vanish they moment they are hit with a targeted attack. They are generated without equipment and will never try to pick up items. Essentially, their purpose is to divert attention away from real threats or to scare away enemies. Using the clairty spell or potion will allow the player to see which monsters are only illusions.

Some monsters have the power to create an entourage of illusionary allies that follow them around. Another illusionist monster will randomly create illusionary monsters one at a time as it wonders the dungeon, gradually filling it up out of sight of the player. The player can also find the "scroll of illusions" to create their own illusionary allies that will divert the attention of other monsters, useful for both attacking and fleeing.

Monster Relations

I overhauled the way inter-monster relations work. I do want certain conflicts to exist between monsters, but that should be very targeted. Sometimes a dog will run off to chase a rabbit, which I think is kind of cool. Similarly, if a priest happens to meet an undead creature, they should fight. Arachnids should hunt insects. Etc. Until now, monsters were fighting each other a little too much, leaving the player to plod through a lot of empty rooms with corpses.

So I created one big look up table with entries for many specific monster groups, such as "canines", "wild canines", "insects", "snakes", etc. I've find this way great for making a few hostile tiles between targeted groups, while leaving the default relation as neutral, so most monsters don't care about each other. One small drawback is that if I want to make one member of a group behave a little differently, I have to break it off into a subgroup, like "peaceful snakes" for example.

These categories can also be used for other purposes, such as for special weapons that do extra damage to certain categories of monster.

Camouflage

I added a new item I had planned for a long time, the "cloak of camouflage". The cloak does not make the wearer completely invisible, but is unseen from beyond a certain range. That range is constantly changing depending on the player's action. When standing still, the range of detection is very short, when moving it is larger, and when fighting it is very far. I believe this system is very similar to that used in Brogue and Moonring, but in this game it is only relevant when you have the camouflage extrinsic.

The camouflage range is represented on screen with a transparent green ring so the player is always aware of it. Of course, having one more thing to draw and erase means a lot of other graphical effects must be updated. I haven't got around to changing all of that quite yet.

High Score Table

Maybe one of the most entertaining thing I remember from classic roguelikes was reading the tombstone messages for all the possible deaths your character could suffer. My game also engraves your demise into an onscreen tombstone, and now it also saves post-mortem info to a high score table you can look up from the main menu.

City Names

In 2024 I was focused a lot on adding stuff to the game: monsters, potions, wands, spells, etc. Now that I've got quite a lot of that, I'll be transitioning into working on the higher order systems of the game, such as adding a rumours system where the player can gather information about certain dungeons, treasures and enemies before they visit them. To do this, I realized that the randomly generated towns scattered across the world would have to be named so that the player would have some point of reference when told something like "the vampire lord lives in the catacomb beneath North Longswordshire". So I populated a couple of text files with made up names to use to name the cities of the various civilizations. Each city is assigned a name from one of these files during world gen and signs are posted where cities connect to highways to display the city name.

Going into 2025

Anyway, I'm taking next week off of work. I'm planning to use a bunch of that free time to work on this game and get a new playable version ready for early 2025. I think I'm getting close! I just have to resist the urge to launch into too many new systems! :D