Version 0.13

Version 0.13 is now available. This version introduces various improvements to the rules: each character now has their own special skills, which helps distinguish the different characters from each other. Multiple Attacks has now been implemented (players can get extra attacks either through a Potion of Rage, or with some weapons depending on special skills; the Minotaur has 2 attacks). A new ranged weapon, sling, has been added. And combat with enemies that can only be harmed by magical weapons is now conducted via the Mind statistic, rather than Fighting Prowess - such combat is now entirely psychic, and this helps balance the game, making the Mind statistic more important. A troll has been added (to the 3rd quest), which has the ability to regenerate!

Random dungeon generation has had some improvements made.

Graphical improvements have been made: female graphics are now available for some characters; the graphical effect of spell casting is improved; new graphics for dagger; new graphics for Goblin Champion, Orc Champion, Hobgoblin and Shadow. The engine now supports NPCs having differently sized graphics (used for Troll and Minotaur - we no longer have a stupidly small Minotaur!)

Improvements have been made to the UI - bug fixes, and also a new GUI button to target enemies, or cycle the currently selected enemy (particularly useful for touchscreens where may be hard to pick a specific enemy). Improvements have been made to the look of the character choice screen, and stats window.

See the history for a full list of changes: http://erebusrpg.sourceforge.net/erebus.html#history

Behind the scenes, I've also made significant improvements to the testing. Erebus has always had some unit testing, but originally for things like path finding. Later I added tests to make sure that loading quests and save games worked okay. But now I've added tests to do major testing of the rules, as well as various mechanics of the game - e.g., ensuring that doors can be unlocked with the right key, or that iff you complete an NPC's quest, you get the expected reward. As the amount of gameplay increases, it becomes more important to automate this.

A bug that I got hit by recently (fixed in v0.12) was where saved games from the 2nd quest couldn't be loaded under certain circumstances - unfortunately this wasn't the case with the initial setup, but only when the player encountered the poisonous fog, making it hard to reproduce (the bug wasn't there originally, but unfortunately got introduced during some refactoring). I'm not testing every possible state, but more tests reduce the likelihood of this happening (and this particular case is now being tested!)