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.

Ok, the time has come to unleash a public preview of my new game. You can play Caverns of Underkeep in your browser. This demo contains the first 3 levels of what I hope will become an approximately 12 level game.

The main reason behind releasing a game this early in the development cycle is so that I can get outside feedback to make sure that I’m on the right track, and to gather suggestions from players, and find and fix any major bugs that might have slipped me by. I can’t afford a QA department, so I’m letting the people tell me.

I will also be archiving all releases that I do – Alpha 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, Beta 1.0.. etc.. etc.. And hope to have no longer than a month between each major release. That way a year from now, anyone who’s interested (including me) can look back and see just how far the game has progressed.

The Alpha version of Underkeep will most likely be available for a public outing this weekend. I just need to run it by a few of my friends-who-I-use-as-testers before pointing people to the url.

Once the alpha is out I’m going to sit back for a bit and catch up on some game playing as well as some research so I can steal er.. liberate some ideas for caverns

There is an interesting looking article on dungeon generation over at Ascii Dreams. Currently my generation algorithm is laughably simple and I will need to revise it for alpha 2 – Especially as I want to add a bit more variety to the types of dungeons that get generated.

Got a good lot of good stuff done over the last two days.

• Implemented a ‘Minimum Requirements’ check for certain items. So no longer can you wield the Huge Axe of Doom (If you’re a level 1 newbie with strength 4 that is)
• Added a Quiver that has to be loaded with ammo in order to use any of the Bows in the game, as well as revamping the ranged combat engine.
• Ability to buy/sell multiple items in one go in the shops, sorta inspired by the introducing the quiver as it became a bit painful to buy arrows 1 at a time.

Tomorrow will probably be a playtesting/balance/minor polish and bug fixing day. The next fairly major feature on my to-do list is sfx – Which should be interesting, not sure if I’m gonna try find some good stock sound effects or try to make my own?

Perhaps I should try to predict when the public alpha 1.0 release will be? Hmmm… Dec 12?

Ive been spending my time balancing the first three levels of Caverns of Underkeep.

Balancing takes quite a while because I have to adjust stats for the monsters, the frequency of items generated in dungeons, the gold value of items, how combat is resolved, how resistances work, how much one gains by leveling up and so on… and so on. This also means that I have to actually play through the game and many bugs are brought to my attention during these tests, which just adds to the list of stuff that’s needed to be done. Occasionally I find something that’s very broken and I have to recode it to make it fall into line.

What usually happens when testing the game is that I find it far too easy. I make some changes, and then the game is far too hard. I make more changes, the game is too easy again. Make changes, hard. Make changes, easy. Rinse and repeat. Hopefully soon, it will start to converge to a well balanced (and more importantly) fun game.

This morning I added the ability to use the mouse to walk around dungeons. This should solve the diagonal movement issues for laptops which don’t have a numpad! The mouse walking is essentially the same as in Ultima7 – To do it I get the  mouse position and I calculate a vector to the avatar in the centre of the screen. Then based on this vector I calculate an angle. And based on this angle I change the mouse cursor to point in the direction that you want to move in. Brillant.

Although I do have to make the directional cursors smaller, and I keep wanting to click on the monsters to attack them, diablo style – rather than just walk into them. I’ll have to add an ‘attack’ cursor. Overall I think the interface is begining to sharpen up quite nicely.