The game is still in development, we’ve been working on new skills, new ideas, especially David, who is a workaholic. But in this last month the art section has been the problem.

In this past month a lot of things happened… there are some things in life that we don’t expect and in the last few weeks I’ve developed a health condition that requires some treatments.
As you know, for me to have the treatments I need money… I had and still have health expenses which quickly drained the money that I’ve saved for the development of Dary’s Legend.

So, monetarily, things got a little harsh for someone who is trying to make an independent game and has a lot of health expenses. This situation forced me to look for a part-time job to have an income every month helping me with the development of the game.
As you know, nowadays is a little bit hard to find a job which may help us reconcile the hours needed to finish an independent game, to do the other job and to rest, especially when the doctor tells you to. This was not easy to find, but I’ve found it and now I’m able to go on and do what I love the most.

Cheers

First of all, I’m sorry for the lack of blog updates lately but we’ve been working hard on the next update I promise.
So let’s talk on what I’ve been messing around.

Difficulty levels

While building the game, one of the hardest tasks is balance, the enemies power, the amount per floor, your own power, etc. Due to the nature of the roguelike the factor “random” brings some extra challenges since it’s hard to predict some situations. We have different scenarios, many players approach us saying the game is too hard and die too often, other say that after some time grinding the game feels much easier (which kind of makes sense actually). That said and following what we did for the game speed we are adding 2 extra difficulty levels, Easy and Hard, we are considering the current one the Normal. It’s up to the player to choose, we are still thinking further down the road if the difficulty you choose affects anything else other than gameplay but for now the experience is exactly the same.

So what changes in these two modes?
While more changes may occur in the future, depending on new features, right now it’s like this:

Easy (comparing to Normal mode):

• Enemies: -20% Life
• Items sell value: +15% Jotes
• Recovered HP/Mana per steps: +15%
• Chance of trapped objects: -33%

Hard (comparing to Normal mode):

• Enemies: +30% Life
• Items sell value: -15% Jotes
• Recovered HP/Mana per steps: -100% (None)
• Chance of trapped objects: +33%

There are many other factors that I could tweak per each Difficulty mode but would feel uneven. These values will probably be tweaked once we start getting feedback from players how how much easy/harder the game feels.

Content

As we get new features finished there’s one thing we’ve been falling behind a bit, and that’s new content. We’ve been mostly building down all the supporting platforms/mechanics/features but fear not, we have much more skills, abilities and recipes planned. Also Rita has been working hard on finishing the next floor visual, objects and monsters and we should see on one of the next updates.

Bugs

Yeah, I’ve been fixing many of these too, almost every bug that had been reported by players so far I’ve been able to fix it, and many others that I’ve found on my own but I’ll make the list when the update gets out.

On blog updates

We have been making blog posts with less frequency, but that does not mean we aren’t working on the game, it just means we probably have nothing yet that is worth making a full post. Usually during our work it’s like “Oh look I just changed this color on the enemy” or “I finally fixed that annoying bug”, and while this is progress it may not exactly be new post material. But feel free to poke us via twitter (@DJ_Link | @_m0r3n4) if you feel that urge for news on Dary’s Legend

This new patch brings a lot of new stuff and many bug fixes. Here are some of the changes (full list at the end).

Quests – I talked a bit about this on a previous post. This is the first build to have them, also expect more tweaks and quest types in the future.

2nd Floor remade – Rita spent some time drawing all new stuff for the second floor, since until now we were just re-using the same stuff from the first one.

Item power different and sell price in labels – Labels will now show you how much will you benefit or loose with some new weapons, also, sell price. A bit more detail on this here

Now for a more sad aspect of this update. Due to several issues and changes, older saves (v0.5.0 and below) are not compatible with this new version. I am very sorry about this. I will try to prevent this as much as possible in the future, but since this is under active development sometimes unwanted things happen.

So this is it for now. I’ll see you on our next post.

Cheers

—-v0.5.5.1—–
Added: When breaking objects enemies sleeping on a 5 tile radius will wake up
Added: Added power comparison when seeing properties of a equipment item on Labels
Added: Enable/Disable lightning Effects via config.ini file (has no impact on mechanics, just visually)
Added: Quests
Added: New objects and decoration for second floor
Added: Killed count on Monsterpedia
Added: Show/Hide Adventure Log on, in game options
Added: Neuro Stone Communicator
Added: Item sell price in Labels
Changed: Removed recipes level requirement
Changed: Enemies now should attack simultaneously (if it’s turn is the next one)
Changed: When walking pressing another position will make the player change direction. Right Click to cancel movement.
Changed: Added weights to each decoration object for the procedural floor construction
Changed: Ingredients spawning distribution between floors
Changed: Updated glew32 to version 1.9.0
Fixed: Bug that caused Cauldrons not to show up anywhere
Fixed: Solved problem with rooms with custom objects that only belonged to one floor
Fixed: Treasure chests had the same probability of having uncommon objects as breakable objects
Fixed: Some artifacts with transparent walls
Fixed: Loose tiles artifacts
Fixed: Some walls don’t get transparent when player is behind them
Fixed: Issue where loading a game would not set wall transparency until we move
Fixed: Side doors  cut in half when opened
Fixed: Auto-select gained ability to right mouse button if none selected
Fixed: Crashing bug with Store when buying something when your Inventory is full
Fixed: Some weapons causing the “Unprepared” Status Effect would remove the effect when unequipped
Fixed: Damage/Dodge indicators on screen being drawn on top of each other
Fixed: Weapons now have less probability to have negative properties
Fixed: Double clicking a save to load it no longer makes player move in game to the clicked position after load

The new update is almost ready!

– Quests –
We’ve been working on the quests system… well, my job is mostly draw new items and new menus.
As you know the aim of a quest is for the hero to obtain something or someone, and for now we have missions, to kill and/or deliver. I’m testing one while writing
We have more ideas for quests but, for now, some of them won’t be available in this update.

– Issues –
We’ve already fixed the doors problem – when the doors are open, in some cases, you could see that they weren’t fully drawn – recently I decided to fix it and it took me almost two weeks to find out the best way to solve it.
While I’m struggling, trying to create new items and menus, and fix some other visual problems, I know that David is having problems too, when he says something like: “Holy s#&%, this is getting worse… F*&% this exception…” or something like that.

– Add-on –
I added something new to the dungeon map that might help you with the quests, it will give a little bit of guidance.
It was added some menus and items for the quests.
And David probably added… like a bunch of words to the game (counting with those he has already erased), that some of them I don’t even know what they mean. You go David!

So these are a few twists that we’ve been working on, and while David is getting all together and finishing his part, I’m focus on the third floor theme and the music itself.
As the game concept evolves the musical ideas appear alongside it, and when they get more coherent I summon our musical director Sabrina Cristo giving her the orientation of what I pretend. She’s very creative, a really good musician who knows how to put her own mark on her work making the job a lot easier.

Cheers!

Quests
I’ve been mostly working on the Quest system. This has a great chance of being present on the next update.
The quests are something that we intended right from the start, and while the quest tab is already present in your Journal you never encounter any yet.

Since we are placed in the dungeon and to maintain that sense of isolation we are building this around a concept of Communication Artifacts. When you encounter one you can use it and decide if you want to accept a new quest.

(Yes there’s only really ugly coder art for this right now, that ‘?’ was intended)

After accepting a quest you’ll get it listed on your Journal until you either complete or Abandon it.

(All this is wip and still lacking some info)

In this example description refers to a monster you have to kill and an approximate location where you can find it. You’ll earn XP, Jotes and possible other stuff after completing quests.

Recipes

After some debate we decided that we will remove the level requirement for crafting recipes. While this may make sense in a more traditional RPG approach, a way of keeping stronger stuff restricted to later this breaks another rule we thing it’s important. You will not always find that specific recipe, so if you find a recipe and have the necessary ingredients, you should be able to craft it.

Bugs

An issue some players reported is that when using arrows the game slows down, even more when enemies are very distant. This is something I wasn’t able to reproduce yet and it may well be related to a slow system, still I will try to track this as I don’t see any reason for this to happen. If the game plays at a good framerate there shouldn’t be anything that would drop speed that much. Usually the heavier task is to walk when enemies are in the same room, because several systems are working at the same time, hero path-finding, enemies path-finding or action decision and minimap updating.

I’ve been fixing many other bugs and cosmetic issues, but when the update gets released I’ll get into more detail.

Thanks again for the awesome support and for those who don’t have the game don’t forget you can get it for a nice 40% off while in alpha

For more frequent rants, you can always follow us via twitter, here’s mine:@DJ_Link and here’s Rita: @_m0r3n4

I’ve been working on the second floor of Dary’s Legend, thinking in what to do, defining the style/theme, the environment, what kind of objects can relate to the theme… I’ve created three different categories of objects: decoration, interactive and block (some object that blocks your way). Within these three categories the interactive objects require more attention and precision then the others, as for each object I need to draw a second image that represents the result of the interaction made by the player (consequence). This result needs to be visually easy to identify, ‘cos it’s a dungeon crawler game, and the player will certainly pass several times through the same rooms & floors and he has to be able to identify which objects he has already interacted with.

The colors have an important role here, they can help the player distinguish the objects from the environment and they help me making a little difference with the categories. Even though, depending on what I’m doing, color isn’t enough and I need to add something more or change it all – erase everything and start from scratch.
As the game progresses these little things that at the beginning were a little easy, they become a bit more complicated, because we need to give the player all the information and warnings needed. To be true sometimes I think that there isn’t RGB enough for all the information we have.

Since this is a tile-based game somethings can get a little harder, making me think about the limit size, the origin and the proportion of the objects, so they can be placed randomly without creating any visual disturbance… basically they need to fit randomly anywhere on the floor.

For now, the 2nd floor is very colorful and here’s a picture of some work in progress:

I’m already working on the 3rd floor as well .
There are one or two menus that I still don’t like them very much, they have to be intuitive.

My job, besides illustration and part of the game design (designing the game development), is to do a charming and user friendly graphical interface. As you know gameplay and graphical user interface are the roots of a game, allowing feedback between the player and the game itself. When a player chooses to do something, it is my job to make the player aware of his choice, representing visually the response to his actions. Of course that when we say “user friendly”, there’s more then meets the eye. We have ideas how things could work, we make plans, we write the story, we do all the pre-production and production stage, but sometimes when it’s ready to use it just isn’t enough, so we have to rethink it, plan it again, redo it, and hope the next time it will work better.

There’s a lot of work to do, and for now I’m just trying to create more, leaving the less important fixes to the end.
Cheers!

Turns

Everything in the game revolves around turns. You attack, it ends your turn, you walk, the same. After you finish your turn it’s the enemies turn, they make a decision and give turn to the next in line. When I first designed this it was coded just like that. Every single action had to wait for the previous one to finish.

This “nice” illustration shows what I mean. Bear in mind my drawing skills are obviously way far from Rita’s work.

The initial builds where very slow to play, as we had to wait for each enemy to actually move (walk animation) in the dungeon. The process was slow and plain boring after a few minutes.
I then had the idea of stacking walks, had them walk at the same time. But only the ones who where going to walk, until we reached an enemuy on the list with a different action, like attacking.

This led to a faster gameplay because when walking if enemies decided to do the same they would do it simultaneously,  until someone attacks. This is how the current build is working.

But for the past few days I’ve been trying to improve this further. If surrounded by enemies waiting for 4 different enemies to attack can lead to long waiting between turns.
So again I decided to redo the turns to accommodate simultaneous combats happening at the same time. When someone attacks, it checks the following entities in line to see if they are going to attack as well, if so, they do that at the same time.
But there’s an exception to this rule. When you attack, even if the next enemy action is to attack as well, he will have to wait.
I did this to avoid confusion, let’s imagine the following: you are near an enemy, both low on HP, the next hit kills either. If we attack and have the enemy attack at the same time this will lead to confusion because your hit will kill him, rendering his hit impossible, but the only way to anticipate the outcome of your hit is doing the action. Then see if enemy is still alive or not and continue.
Enemies can attack at the same time because this problem does not happen.

I have this working already, and although further testing is needed this will be on the next update. It’s barely noticeable in most occasions but tiny decrements here and there lead to a more compelling gameplay.

Equipment Power comparison and price

Something that’s always a bit frustrating is when you collect a new piece of equipment, a sword, a shield or something else, and you can’t really remember if the power of what you have equipped is higher or lower that the one you just picked up. You have to move the cursor to your current equipped and then again to the new one.
So I changed this and now when seeing any equipment it will show you the what you gain or loose by equipping it. This does not apply to custom properties.

Also every item shows it’s sell value, not only when you are in a shop. It’s shown on the bottom right corner.

There’s other stuff going around but I’ll keep you guys updated as we progress.
Don’t forget, if you don’t have it you can purchase our game in Alpha right now getting a nice 40% off (http://www.daryslegend.com)

That’s it for now.

Apart from our personal roadmap we’ve also read all feedback/comments that we found in order to improve the game the best way we can.
So among several tweaks and fixes there are three main features worth mentioning.

Caldron and crafting

Caldron’s where already available in the previous build but where disabled. On this build we finished them and you can now boil a few recipes. We decided to share how it works.

Step 1 – You need to find a book of Recipes. Each book might contain a different one. This can be found in several places.

Step 2 – After picking one up, just right click to learn it.

Step 3 – You need to find and use one of these.

Step 4 – Combine the ingredients, or just use the “make” button to auto-complete.

And that’s it. We’ll be adding recipes and tweaking this on next builds so stay tuned.

In Game options

Another new feature worth mentioning is the new in game options menu.

It’s now possible to have the top bar always visible or in auto-hide mode (default). Also a nice slider to control the overall walking movement of our character. For now this affects walking and attacking animations. We tweaked a bit the animations but felt that each person will probably have a different value they feel more comfortable with, so you can choose between 1.0x to 2.0x of speed. Personally we’ve been playing at 1.3x.

Wait turn

You can now press the Enter key to skip/wait until your next turn. Although this is a simple change it can be used strategically in many situations.

Full 0.5.4.0a changelog list:
Added: Caldron now fully working with learned recipes
Added: Recipes to boil potions (HP/Mana)
Added: Resource globes (HP/Mana) now glow when running low, also a new effect on the liquid
Fixed: Enemy stat icons indicators no longer jumping because of the enemy attack animation
Added: Learning new recipes grants +95XP
Fixed: Some attacks could be used even if there was not an enemy
Changed: Lowered XP required per level
Changed: Increase Books (Recipes/Skills) probability
Changed: Tweak initial food/potions on Warrior
Added: Added in Game Options Menu
Added: In Game speed slider option
Added: Description to Stats on the Character Menu (wip)
Changed: Increased the attack/damage text size
Fixed: Crashing bug when closing the window directly during game
Added: Music fade between floors
Added: Chance of a monster being asleep
Added: Rare item display a gold title on the label
Fixed: Several typos in some items/objects descriptions
Fixed: Adjusted money spawned per floor
Fixed: Teleport bug when walk cycle was interrupted
Added: Wait turn. Pressing Enter will make the player wait until it’s next turn.

So we’ll get back to work on the next update. As always we appreciate your feedback and wish to thank everyone who’s been so supportive and patient with this all process. Cheers

This help us developing the game while you get to play it, giving opinions and finding those awesome bugs that are there just waiting for you

As a thank you for buying the game in alpha, we are having a 40% off promotion while the game doesn’t reach the final release.

If you encounter any problems, keep calm, first check the nice FAQ, if the problems persist,  feel free to contact us, we’ll try to answer asap. You can also check our forums, maybe someone else has the same issue.

Rita did a little something something to Dary’s Legend official website, to better reflect what’s happening, hope you like it: http://www.daryslegend.com

Before we go, a couple of new screenshots…

…and finally our current system requirements:

–Windows–
OS: Windows XP SP3 or higher
CPU: 1.4GHz or faster
Ram: 512MB (1GB recommended)
Graphic Card: OpenGL 2.0 compatible with 128MB Ram
Monitor 1024×768 or higher (1280×720 or higher recommended)

–Mac–
OS: Mac OSX 10.6+
CPU: 1.4GHz or faster (Intel Pentium)
Ram: 512MB (1GB recommended)
Graphic Card: OpenGL 2.0 compatible with 128MB Ram
Monitor: 1024×768 or higher (1280×720 or higher recommended)