I’m back from doing the ol’ Christmas rounds with family, hope Santa was nice to everyone

I usually like to blog about things that I’ve done, rather than what I’m going to do – That way I don’t break any promises when I change my mind or if (when) things don’t turn out. It also serves the purpose that if I’m making a post it’s based on actual, real progress. Ya know, something tangable that I’ve actually done. But because I’ve been away – this post aint gonna be like that.

There are five things I need to get done before Caverns of Underkeep reaches alpha 2.0

1. Content. Pretty vague term really, more monsters, Items, ecologies, misc. stuff, art assets etc.. I’m going to be adding two more levels to the current five. Oh, and I’ve got a basic story outline to incorporate. I’m reasonably confident that the total depth of the dungeon will stay at seven levels, at least for a while.
2. Better enemy pathfinding by implementing the A* algorithm.
3. New Spells and spell effects – I’ve got around 5 or 6 spells to add. You’ll be able to access the new spells by increasing your intelligence.
4. Saving highscores to an online database.
5. The Inn – A new location in town, you’ll be able to rest and recover, gamble and do some other misc. things.

That’s it! Remember Jan 15 is the target date.

I’m going away for a little less than a week and I’m not going to have any internet access, so no working on Caverns of Underkeep and no updating the blog. For those of you testing the game, please still give feedback, I really do appreciate it, you can leave comments on the blog if you wish, I won’t be able to reply but I will be able to read them when I get back.

As for Underkeep news I’ve added the first mini-game, a very simple jumbled-up word-puzzle used to unlock chests that are randomly placed about the dungeon. It was pretty easy to add and I think it’s quite effective. Although I’m not sure about the hint system I’ve developed, because you can just brute force solve it – I’ll probably change it when I get back.

Another thing that I’ve been thinking about recently is the direction I want to take the game in – And I’ve come up with two main objectives.

1. Short playtime (approx 1 hour to beat, 2 would be absolute maximum)

2. High replayability

The way I see replayability working is that you get a different experience almost everytime, this is somewhat handled through random level generation and different classes\challenge modes but I think I can take it a little further.

For example, I want to introduce ecologies, meaning that a level might be infested with spiders or undead or Fire and Lava creatures. But you wouldn’t know until you played the game as to which you got and each ecology would have it’s own special strategies that work best against it. The level would have all the decals and features for the creatures inhabiting it of course.

That way I can still keep the depth of the dungeon small, but increase the chances that the game will be different each time you play.

Another thing I want to do is add heaps of secrets and easter eggs, I really liked it how in Kings Quest II there was some ridiculously small chance that you could see batman driving the bat-car in and out of a cave. A friend told me about it once and I thought he was lying because I’d never seen it – Turns out he wasn’t lying, just that the probability of seeing it is really, really small.

Edit: I’d just like to point out how much adding ecologys would effect random generation. Say I have 6 levels that each have 2 possible themes, then I have 2^6 = 64 unique combinations of a 6 level set. This number grows at an exponential rate. So if I have 3 possible themes for each level then I have 3^6 = 729 unique combinations. That means there would be a < 0.14% chance that you would get the same ecology combination as your last playthrough.

After getting some good feedback from the alpha demo and a continously running demo that a few people have access to, I’ve got a big list of stuff to complete for the next public demo.

The target date for alpha 2.0 is Jan 15, 2008 and will contain 5 levels of the dungeon.

Over the last couple of days I’ve been tidying stuff up, fixing bugs that have been there for ages (and adding new ones in the process) making minor graphics changes and just generally tweaking and proding around. Mostly uninteresting stuff, but it all has to get done sometime.

I’ve also added a restart button so when you die, you don’t have to hit refresh on your browser if you want to play again – Yay!

I really want to get onto the mini-games – I’ve got two different styles of puzzle chests planned and I think they’ll be quite a hit. There is also going to be some kind of gambling in the Inn (which doesn’t exist at the moment) and maybe somekind of ‘flirt with the barmaid’ game, but I can’t quite imagine how that one would work Perhaps I should stick a dinner-dash component in, where you have to serve customers dwarven ale in order to earn some extra gold. And if you get their order wrong they’ll start to pummel you?

Maybe not…

I’ve also drawn some new graphics, probably the best I’ve done so far. The character on the far left is an option for the players avatar, but the others are going to be bad guys.

Plugged the first load of sound effects into the game today, and for the most part they work quite well. In the weekend I went around to a friends house and we used a microphone and an audio effects processor to create a bunch of sound effects.

It was my first time creating sfx from scratch – And well, we didn’t have much of a clue really. We just banged stuff together and pitch shifted a bunch of vocals. My favorite noises were the Orc sounds, which aren’t in the game yet but when we were recording them the dog took exception and started growling at our down-pitched grunts.

Getting the SFX to sound decent whilst not blowing up the filesize has been a bit of a problem. To tackle this I’ve made all the SFX mono and most are 22khz 16 bit, with the occasional 11Khz sample. The sound effects that have the least ‘going on’ are more suited to downsampling – I’d suggest avoiding 8bit samples as much as possible, as they can introduce a nasty hiss, which really affects the sound quality.

So far I’ve added about 200kb to the download size with the small number of SFX I’ve added. Bringing the total filesize of the game to 700kb – I’d still like people on dialup to be able to play, but surely they’re used to waiting for everything by now

I’m going to try to make the game less than two megabytes, but it’s gonna just get harder the more stuff I add.