Fame 0.9.9 released!

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".

Apart from the dynamic map, the world will no longer be the same every time you start a new game. Now that random settlements have been introduced, you will have some extra reasons to explore the land. Settlements can be occupied by several different races. They may be neutral or hostile towards you. Buildings in settlements can contain some valuable resources (typically locked). Certain citizens may want to trade with the player, others may offer some services (healer, blacksmith), depending on race and alignment. There's still a lot of space left for creativity here, so the next game release will probably contain more of that stuff.

I had lot of thoughts about procedurally generated content. This has been inspired by another game project, but also by my old notes complaining about numerous problems. The subject is actually never closed in a roguelike game, but this particular game hasn't even reached the playability treshold and I believe that problems with procedural generation have contributed big time here. One thing that has already been fixed are partially predefined locations. There were 8 such locations in Fame 0.9.8 (6 in the Forest Dungeon and 2 in the Altar of Fire) and they all looked the same - the procedural part to the left, the predefined part to the right. Very boring. Now the predefined part is placed randomly and can be of any (almost) size. The only limitation is that the part must have a rectangular shape, although this can be easily worked around (a single cell is still a rectangle). I'm very satisfied with the result and most likely this change will increase the total number of partially predefined locations in the game, which, in turn, should make it more interesting.

Another matter is generation of items and monsters. The old algorithm worked, but it did not give the player the feeling that encountered items and monsters are consistent with the difficulty level of the current location. The new algorithm uses normal distribution and should be much better (although it probably could use some tweaking).