New Roguelike for Amiga: The Lair of the Lich King

[Warty]

Maybe if that "_ "said:

(hit space)

at the end of the text where it says, "...Extermination Badge!" in white or something.

I was confused because all other keys were unresponsive. At least I'll know what to do next time I see it!

The problem is that sometimes the entire width of the buffer is used for messages, so if I put "SPACE" or something there, it will cover something you might have wanted to read. It looks like dungeon rooms could extend right to the row above the buffer, so if I put it there, it could eat a dungeon wall. I think I'll try something like " ** Hit SPACE ** " on the bottom row of the stats area. that would put it right next to the end of the 3rd row, and would just get overwritten when stats refresh themselves after you hit space.

[Warty]

Question
Let's say you just escaped battle victoriously with 2HP left. You run to a hallway to rest.

Do monsters in this game ever wander (besides the Lich King)? Like, if you're resting for 50+ turns, do you ever run the risk of being rudely awakened? Not sure I've seen that happen, or if it's even possible.

For that matter, do (or can) monsters even chase you if you flee a room wounded?

Yes and no: there are not random monsters who decide to wonder, as Rogue has. But there are some monsters who prefer to wonder. So if you are on a level where they are on, they might find you in a corridor.

Chasing: yes, monsters will chase you. In 8-bit version, they are pretty dumb, if basically, if you are close enough to have to run from them, they'll probably not get lost chasing you. I would like to make a bigger/smarter chase AI in the Amiga version. The Lich King in particular would benefit from that.

Minor Note
Not a big deal, but once you enter your Name at the beginning the lower part of the screen draws itself then dissolves before the game loads.

it's probably a compromise made due to memory shortness. I can see if there's enough memory to change the timing, but this sounds familiar.

Thought
It would be cool if I could pay the Tinker to identify an item...

Interesting idea! no space in 8 bit version, but will think about that for amiga version.

[Warty]

While I find the "Steps" counter interesting, I don't find it particularly useful unless I should be literally "watching my steps" to find a general average where I get my ass handed to me by the Lich King. And I've not been looking at that closely at all as I've not generally felt an overwhelming need.

If I've unraveled a particularly large and windy map, I already have a sense of dread if the pink stairs are on the other side of the screen as I travel back w/o even looking down at the steps counter.

Maybe it matters more beyond level 3...

On the other hand, the "Loot" number is directly tied to my final score, and I do think that'll be important to some gamers trying to climb the Death Charts. It's really hard to know where you stand score-wise unless you keep flipping back over to the inventory screen. Just a gamery/gamification thought that's occurred to me on more than one occasion.

Interesting. I always have an eye on that. In the F256 version, which uses an 80x50 screen, there are actually 8 rows of comms buffer, 1 column each for stats, so you get 2 more stats. loot is one of them. For the 3-row versions, my logic was that things you need to help you stay alive are shown, and things that only matter after death or during tinker interactions are not. BUT... the experience level might be worth changing out?

Ah... there was one more reason I just remembered... loot goes to 5 digits, so it would eat another column from the comms buffer, which would increase number of times you need to see the "hit space" message.

[Warty]

Found a small bug in the on-screen helper text.

I attempted to cycle my magical items when I knew I didn't have any. This spawns the following text:

Code: Select all

DM: No magic selected ('-' or 'v' key to cycle)

The problem is it should say "'0' or 'v' key to cycle" since the '-' key is for using ranged weapons.

ah, good find. I keep meaning to update that. changed the actual key combination, but not that help message.

[Warty]

What I've been working on the last week:

• misc bug fixes
• memory leak bug fixes
• updated VBCC binaries and targets to latest (crazy fact: wonderful people are still improving the 1.3 build targets and VBCC itself)
• got profiling working, and have started to look at performance more
• figuring out how to give PTPlayer a valid VBR, which is something I didn't even know existed until last week. EAB folks think I shouldn't be using PTPlayer the way it was designed to be use, because it is supposed to be used when you take over hardware, and I'm trying to write an "OS-friendly" app. Not going to change right away though because A) I don't know how to do the right thing yet, and B) who knows, I may need to make this less OS-friendly.

Performance:
- on 68030s: fine on both 1.3 and 2.x and above
- on 68000s: playable with audio on 2.x and above, but pretty slow with 1.3. Apparently there are some OS calls I use that were sped up in the 2.0 release. It may be that it will be faster with music disabled, that could be an option. But also, need to have people test this with their machines and tell me if it's playable or too slow.

Size:
- it has busted out of fitting on one disk. Is anyone still wanting to PLAY from 2 disks? I'm definitely planning on including an installer script to get it into a folder on your HD. But anybody want to do this on a floppy-only system? I guess maybe. If you turn off all the sound effects, it will load faster of course.

[intric8]

Awesome stuff!!!

Performance:
- on 68030s: fine on both 1.3 and 2.x and above

I'll be curious to see if this plays on my insane A3K with RTG and an 060 (if it loads at all; gulp!)

- on 68000s: playable with audio on 2.x and above, but pretty slow with 1.3.

I can test this one on 2 different Amiga 1000 setups I use regularly.

1. A1K with 8MB modern Fast RAM, 2MB chip, OS 1.3, 14 Mhz AdSpeed, SCSI2SD storage via Microbotics Starboard R2
2. A1K (stock) with Parceiro 2.5: 28Mhz, 8MB Fast, unlimited storage, and any OS we want to compare agains (1.2, 2.04 or 3.1)

Of course I can test it on some other less blingy Amigas, too, but one of those ^ will likely be my own personal destination for your Amiga port.

Size:
- it has busted out of fitting on one disk. Is anyone still wanting to PLAY from 2 disks?

Would you have any interest in sending me your intro/outro HAM images and letting me try to convert them to a 64 or 32 color image via Art Department Professional or something similar? You would still have a very impressive and colorful image but the file would likely be much less KB (or are you needing a lot of additional space on Disk 2)? Just a thought.

If the game fit on a single disk I'd probably play from a floppy. But since you're creating an installer it'd be nuts for me not to put it on a hard drive at this point even if it was only 1 disk. It'll simply load so much faster and quieter, including between levels since it seeks the disk in-between each level (I assume Amiga does the same thing?). Storage is cheap in 2024. =) As a result I personally don't care how many ADFs it takes.

To that end, if there was a CRT'd version that was C128 specific (something I'm not sure was ever created...ever?) that would blow the door off its hinges storagewise. But then again, getting anything to support the 128 that can use CRT files in native C128/80 column mode... yeah.

I only mention this because I'm currently playing a new Japanese-style game on the C64 called Briley Witch Chronicles 2. It requires the game be loaded off something like the Ultimate II+ as it is a "very large" CRT file. But all of my game saves are written to a 1541 disk drive. Kind of funky, but it works and the game is enormous and amazing.

[Warty]

oh, nice set of machines that don't match anything I have. this is good.

I'm just putting in the prefs now, so you can control music and SFX. next up will be key mapping. then go back to SFX and give people the ability to specify their own effects for given situations.

I did some work too on building for 68000 vs 68030. We can see if that makes any performance difference on your machines. I think 68060 is a possible build target too, no idea what happens tho.

Let me get a bit further on the prefs, then I'll send you something to test.

Oh, and I do have an option already to skip the HAM image, for very constrained systems. I guess I could make that a choice. I don't think the HAM image is what's filling up the disk, it's all the sounds. You can definitely make a "mini" single-disk version that just has a few sounds if you want.

[Warty]

Good progress (boring stuff to code though, lot of busy work):
- there are prefs!
- you can set your own choice of keys for (almost) all the game actions, including an alternate.
- you can have music off, SFX on; SFX off, music on, or both. you can also set volume of music. (SFX always plays at full volume).
- you can use your own sounds, if you really want to. specify file name and file size. Or, you can selectively turn off sounds by setting size to 0. On memory constrained systems, this will give you a fair amount of control.
- fixed some bugs found in play testing, including a fatal one that would be frustrating if you accidentally tried to "drop last picked up item" having actually drank it first.
- fixed some more memory leak bugs.

Got to level 11 today (the "dark" dungeon levels, but not yet cavern levels), but got trapped by Lichie. Didn't have the right kind of magic to escape. We had a very short duel: I did 9 HP of damage, and he did 100+.

[intric8]

Great progress!

you can use your own sounds, if you really want to.

That's pretty wild. I wonder if I can sample the crazy death sound from the SSI Gold Box games for any time I get killed (or kill others)? hah!

[Warty]

you can use your own sounds, if you really want to.

That's pretty wild. I wonder if I can sample the crazy death sound from the SSI Gold Box games for any time I get killed (or kill others)? hah!

Back in the day, I used to download sound packs that people put together for Marathon. Really extended the game quite a lot. So, you should be able to do just about anything you want. I would keep them fairly short, except for maybe player death, as not much happens after that.

I make them with audacity on my Mac, then run SoX on them to get to right format for Amiga. there are also amiga-native tools you can use if you want.