Erebus 0.5

A bit late announcing this one, but Erebus 0.5 was released end of January. This features a 3rd quest (not quite as long as the 2nd one, but longer than the 1st!)

For the engine, the main focus has been fixing up the look of the graphics. Rather than using a more traditional tile-based engine, Erebus uses a vector-based approach, where rooms, corridors etc can be defined as polygons. This means I'm not limited to everything being snapped to an axis-aligned grid. It also makes it easier to potentially switch to a 3D engine at some point in the future[1]. But it does mean the 2D graphics require some thought. I'd ended up with drawing the floor regions and walls such that they had a top-down view, but this conflicted with the characters and scenery that use a tilted isometric view.

In 0.5, this is now fixed (you need to start a new game to see it - older save games will still show the older view): everything is now drawn with a consistent isometric view (so a 1x1 square is drawn with height 0.5[2]). The texture mapping for the walls is as it should be (thankfully Qt is quite powerful for 2D graphics, and allows applying an arbitrary transform to an image being drawn). The main issue remaining is doors, which at least look prettier than before, but it's hard to get something that looks right for the side-on doors (that go west-to-east), so these are still drawn with a false perspective.

The game also now features wandering monsters, either ones which randomly spawn, and ones that can interrupt you when resting!

Tweaks have been made to the game rules, there are various small UI improvements, and various bug fixes too.

As of 28 February 2013, the Symbian downloads have passed 46,000. I've received 36 reviews, of which 27 were 5/5, and an additional 4 were 4/5, which an average of 4/5 (to the nearest integer - Nokia Store doesn't show the fraction).

Also I got a review at All About Symbian :) (The review noted the inconsistent graphics perspective, which should be fixed now as noted above.)

[1] My original plan for Erebus was to make it 3D, but then last year I decided I wanted to support mobiles - my 3D engine isn't yet ported to Android or Symbian, and I wanted to support older smartphones like the Nokia 5800 anyway.

[2] Not true isometric, but the 2:1 isometric used in computer games.