Fame 0.9.10 released!

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.

Trying to fight with a bow and arrows could be even more frustrating for the player, partially because there weren't enough items that support this kind of gameplay. I've added more bows and crossbows, as well as some armor designed specifically for "sharpshooters". This fills the biggest gap here, but I feel there's still more to do - I'm waiting for your suggestions!

Another big change in this release are dungeon "flavors". In previous versions you could observe that some dungeons have white walls; that's what I call "flavor". Unfortunately, this feature was hardcoded and did not offer anything beyond different tile look. Now there's more systematic approach to this feature. Every randomly generated dungeon in the game can get a custom flavor. This version comes with two flavors (white dungeon and the new one - flooded dungeon) and more are planned for future releases. Flooded dungeons will require the Swimming skill for comfortable exploration and will feature specific monster types (creatures that can swim or fly). This may (and should) enforce a completely different gameplay style!

Flooded dungeons come with two new kind of monsters that only live in the water, but there are more new species, each with some unique feature. There are monsters that explode when they come close to the player, monsters that will attack each other, monsters that will spawn other monsters when attacked and so on.