Quick summary:
Full change log:
Quick summary:
Full change log:
Last several months were a hard time for the project. I've totally lost motivation, but luckily that was just temporary. Now I'm slowly getting back to the development. Slowly. This explains why there are so few new features and content. More can be expected in the next release, which I'm planning right now.
See you soon!
Full change log:
This is mainly a bug fixing release. Not that the previous version was very unstable, but I've found enough major issues to justify releasing it earlier without adding any new content.
Have a nice play!
Full change log:
• lever rooms now can occur in all dungeons
• ranged spells no longer can be auto-casted against a creature standing in an unrevealed cell
• a ranged spell has only 1/3 chance of hitting a creature standing in an unrevealed cell
• [bugfix] potential crash occuring randomly in when generating (almost) every dungeon location
• [bugfix] certain locations (Forest Dungeon level 4, Large Dungeon, Mine, Spider Cave, Thieves' Guild) no longer crash the game when accessed
• [bugfix] bandits in Totdnum are no longer neutral
• [bugfix] keyboard configuration: the message about key conflict lists the other binding, not the current one
• [bugfix] keyboard configuration: after canceling the configuration window and then showing it again, the original keyboard scheme is restored
• [bugfix] hiding the 'Look' frame, sucking blood from creatures and quitting the game works even if the command is assigned to a key other than the default one
• [bugfix] reading a spellbook identified earlier by a scroll of identify no longer produces a message 'revealing' the book's identity
• [bugfix] items and monsters are no longer generated on walls of a lever room
• [bugfix] correct message when the hero is sacrificed by somebody else... read more
This version took a little bit more to complete... It was originally scheduled for October. There were several causes for the delay, including a tremendous number of internal code changes that were necessary for proceding further, even if have little or no observable effect for a player. One of the biggest things I'm currently working on is bringing back the possibility of modding the game. This work spans over several releases (at least 8), but the flexibility it grants when it comes to strategic content decisions is definitely worth the effort. Another exciting feature is making monsters the same (or almost the same) as the Player Character. Easy to do when a game is written from the scratch, very challenging to introduce in an old game, but I love such nearly-impossible coding tasks :-).... read more
Despite extraordinarily high temperatures outside, I've been able to put together this release on time. The most eye-catching feature of 0.9.14 is surely the new Dungeon Mode. I'm not going to compete with Brogue or similar games - Fame is certainly story-oriented and it will remain such. The new mode is primarily for those who need a quick glance into the game and don't want to spend hours just looking for any dungeon filled with monsters. It was a relatively small change that may produce interesting results, so why not?... read more
The development slowly approaches the point where it makes sense to think more about the story as a whole. So far completing the game wasn't much more than a simple message box. This release introduces a special ending - you can become a Champion of deity you've chosen. What is more, the split of the storyline is already happening - currently "evil" characters will experience a slightly different ending. Eventually, in future versions, the gameplay should be totally different based on the choice you make... But that's future.... read more
This time I've spent a couple of months working on unfinished stuff from previous releases, as well as fixing bugs and preparing ground for future, hopefully more revolutionary versions. There are no new big features this time, but you may encounter some nice surprises if you dig into the game deep enough. The most important one is that you might come across a dragon again. Dragons were introduced in the game like 8 years ago, but later there were some location system changes and somehow dragons were 'missing in action' since then... Now, many releases later, it was insanely difficult to implement them back, because too much of the code has changed... I did it, though, and dragon code is once again working properly.... read more
The automatic exploration feature, also called "autoexplore," has always been sparkling a lot of discussion. Many love it. Some people claim that autoexplore is just a way to compensate for poor dungeon generation algorithms. Don't generate boring rooms and you won't need autoexplore, they say. The problem is that dungeons cannot consist solely of ultra-interesting stuff. That's not natural and probably not as cool as it sounds. Interesting stuff condendsed in a relatively small area is not that interesting anymore, that's one thing. The other is that different people have different opinion on what is interesting. You've probably already guessed it - I'm in the autoexplore camp.... read more
This version is all about balancing. In general, balancing is crucial to every game genre, but roguelike games are particularly difficult to balance because of their complexity. That's why balancing in such a game never ends. I've done a lot of balancing stuff in the past, but apparently that was not enough and I know that this is currently one of Fame's most serious issues. For instance: attributes. Playing as a spellcasting character (of course Fame does not have character classes, mind you, but it still offers a choice of method for killing foes and earning experience points) you could notice that your Intelligence practically never raises, while Strength does. This was very unusual for this kind of a character and was making it quite difficult... well, that's not the proper word, let's say "not enjoyable", to have a spellcasting character with low Intelligence. This has been solved successfully in 0.9.10, although some similar issues remain (for instance, the Appearance attribute is still totally meaningless). There's always too little time to fix everything, but I can see that there's constant improvement in this area and that's great.... read more
This version was once planned as the last one before 1.0, i.e. an "almost final" release. This won't happen, we're still far away from 1.0. There's much to change and even more to add. Things must be balanced. Lots of content must be added. So, future versions will be 0.9.10, 0.9.11 and so on, until the game is good enough to be called 1.0. Quite challenging, but we'll get there!
Working on the new World Map I've had some headache about the content that currently fills up the game's world. Not because there's so little content - I had known it before. It's because the current content is presented in a very poor way. A World Map is typically the most suitable thing for this role. In Fame 0.9.8 the World Map doesn't even show all the locations and it doesn't change much as the player explores the world. I also discovered that some locations are not given any unique name and most of the area is simply named "Unknown lands". ... read more
Fame is currently taking a big turn. A long time ago I have decided that there will be no experience points in the game. The reason for that is unknown, even to me. Perhaps I just wanted to be original. Recently I recognized that as a big mistake. Sure, you can have an RPG game without experience points and levels, why not, but you need to provide some other clue of progression for the player instead. This is insane, but I was completely unaware of this problem for nearly 15 years... Time has come to fix that. Version 0.9.8 introduces experience points.... read more
As you can see, I've drifted away from the "Release early, release often" philosophy, or rather I'm seeking for an optimal release frequency. My one-month cycle was not optimal as too much time was spent on preparing release notes, compiling the Linux version etc.
This version comes with many small changes, so let's focus on big ones. The inventory window is available in the ASCII mode and now it's - at last! - fully functional. This basically means that the whole thing had to be rewritten from the scratch, and that was a lot of work. You never know how complex your inventory is until you try to rewrite it. In fact you never want to do this, but if you want to handle both ASCII and tile modes in your game, you'll eventually have to. Mouse-driven GUI and keyboard-driven ASCII UI are totally different... Anyway, I'm very proud of the current design of the ASCII inventory in Fame. It's mostly based on ADOM's design, only a bit more complex. ADOM fans should find themselves pretty comfortable with it.... read more
In this version I wanted to implement full functionality of the Inventory window (the most complex window in the game!) in ASCII mode. However, I decided to release a bit earlier because of some bugfixes that should become available to you as soon as possible :-).
Important changes are coming. Preparing the ground, I have rewritten the align system from scratch. Now it is possible for the hero to become "evil" and even killing monsters (most of them) should not shift the character towards "good". This has little meaning as for now, but will become critical in one of the future versions.... read more
I have spent the last 2 months mainly on fixing bugs. Many "big ones", haunting the game for months (or even years) have been finally hunted down. The biggest success was fixing some "impossible" Linux bugs. Ironically, the Linux version is not ready yet for another reason.
Among new features the most important one is the auto-aiming feature. By pressing J you either cast the last offensive spell used or shoot your current ranged weapon (if any). The target is also selected automatically and it is usually the closest enemy or (if there are several enemies at equal distance) the most wounded one. The whole system is probably not perfect yet, but it already works pretty well, eliminating the constant need for aiming manually. Now you do the manual aiming only when you feel that the auto-aim would be inappropriate for some reason, which is very, very rare. I'm really satisfied with this one.... read more
It was an easy decision... Too many people just refuse to play anything that does not display ASCII, so a character mode has been finally introduced in Fame. I'm saying "finally", because - although never officially announced - I've been playing with that idea for several years. I have played ADOM (back in 1998 it did not have an ASCII mode) much more that any tile-based roguelike game... Technically, it was not very difficult to implement, at least the main game screen. Any other game window (and Fame has dozens of them) would need to use completely different user interface for the ASCII mode, so that for now it should actually be called "mixed mode" :-). And that's strange, but this new mode is not just an alternative output type. It completely diverts my way of thinking about the game and its development. I can't wait for the next release, which, of course, will be even better!... read more
I planned to release this version as far as in June, but there were too many important bugfixes, so I had to reschedule the project a bit.
Quick summary:
Details:
Quick overview:
Detailed change log:
Quick overview:
Detailed change log:
This is mainly a bugfix release, but as always there's a number of other improvements. Sorry for such a brief message, I'm having a "hot" period in my job ;-).
Quick overview:
Detailed change log:
I was very lazy this time and spent whole weeks doing next to nothing. Especially in Fame. However, the version 0.8.9 has been finally done.
The biggest change is the new GUI skin. Some time ago I promised not to make many more GUI-related changes, but I just couldn't resist the temptation to remove that old, ugly stuff, particularly because my wife hated it. I hope you will like the new looks.
There are also some other improvements that should make gameplay more interesting. Monsters are now able to pick up items and use healing potions. Some can even steal items from the player. Some monsters (namely bats) can now fly over the water, while others can jump into it when burning.... read more
A weird thing has happened to me today.
I needed to find all occurrences of some word in the code, so I pressed Ctrl+Shift+F... This is my favorite feature of Visual Studio, I just couldn't live without it. It's fast, it's reliable, it's powerful. You can imagine how shocked I was when a message "Something evil has happened and this stuff won't work anymore for you!" (or something like that) appeared before my eyes.... read more
Once again I ignored my plans and schedules to make a more spontaneous release. I had received a lot of feedback, most of which was really worth considering.
Quick overview:
Detailed change log:
You probably noticed that there's not much content in Fame. I've spent some time thinking about the reason(s) and here's my conclusion: better tools are needed! The existing ones, especially the built-in location editor (the only tool available publicly, by the way) aren't very good and it's quite painful to create anything sensible using them. Thus I decided to improve the editor...
After nearly one month spent on this work I must say that the editor is a considerably better tool now. However, I wasn't able to improve the game itself. There are no new features this time, only some bugfixes (including a critical one) and one important change related to the skill system.... read more
This time user interface was not my primary concern (although you'll find some improvements in this area, too). Instead, I tried to focus on gameplay.
In previous versions feeding the hero was very easy. You could eat a corpse of almost any killed monster. Now corpses are inedible, but they can be transformed into pieces of meat (if you possess an appropriate skill and item(s)). Additionally you can cook the meat, so that it is more nutritious.... read more