I know I said last July that I would no longer update the game. That's generally true as far as big content updates go, but I've wanted to tackle a few quality of life issues.

Quality of life stuff

These things have been requested for quite a while. I thought the game had ample warning about starvation, but it turns out tunnel vision is forcing a lot of players to miss the standard warning. So I'm adding a modal warning whenever you're near starving. Also, all levels are mapped on the Hotel Map as soon as you see stairs leading to them. You also get a little log message which might help you spot staircases more easily.

Ally system

The game engine was totally not built around having allies, so I had to rewrite huge sections of it. But now there's a new spell CHARM, which lets you convert wild beasts to your side. Yes, I'm talking rats, bats, balaurs, even crocodiles. Only being able to tame beasts might seem limited but there are a few surprises if you look hard enough... Along with that, there's a new class, Brutemaster, which starts out with CHARM plus a pet wolf.

Revenant

How about something completely different? The new Revenant class bypasses most of the normal game mechanics. There is no healing from blood, no regen (HP or MP), and no hunger whatsoever. Instead this class heals every time you drink a potion, so drink up!

Apothecary upgrade

The last class I added before this was the Apothecary. Though very powerful late game, they're a bear to play early on and it's easy to shoot yourself in the face with your own MIASMA spell. I've added one pip of poison resist for this disguise.

Performance

What really drove me to do this update is I realized I could possibly fix a long running performance issue with the game. It turns out that Pixi, the rendering library I was using, was slowly growing a texture cache and never releasing it. The result was that the game ate up about 50MB extra memory on each new run. Within 20 runs, that's a gigabyte of extra memory. Several runs could cause the game to bog down severely. Woops! I believe this has been fixed.

Controller lag

I believe I have fixed the cause of controller lag reported by several players. Things should be much smoother!

New achievements

Four of 'em!

Lots of bug fixes and typo fixes

One in particular that you might notice is a fix regarding map generation with doors. Sometimes extra doors were generated not surrounded by any walls. That's been corrected. I also fixed a somewhat rare bug that only occurred if the Ice Throne and Ice Father were killed on the same round about 50% of the time. And I fixed a bug where vampires didn't take damage when standing in sunlight if they came into your field of view for the first time. And lastly, I have improved the way some errors are logged so I should be able to track more issues if they arise.

Enjoy!

And by the way Happy Halloween!

[ 2019-10-27 20:49:58 CET ] [ Original post ]