Progress has been pretty good on Runestar lately, with the last week in particular being a manic frenzy of coding after a brief hiatus. Here’s the highlights:

• Bug fixes too numerous to list individually, along with a lot of internal optimizations and stripping out obsolete code. Also numerous tweaks and improvement to the UI/UX.
• Random loot tables have been expanded with the inclusion of coins, which convert directly into currency. In other words, NPCs can now drop money as well as items.
• Added support for maze rooms, which don’t automatically map out on the HUD and can be tricky to navigate!
• Expended the tunnels beneath the city, including a fairly sizeable maze area populated by carnivorous centipedes.
• Added a screenshot key, which can export in-game screenshots as BMP, JPG or PNG format.
• Despite being treasure, circlets, rings and amulets can now also be worn as armour. If you want to look fancy.
• Made some major improvements to the saved game format, resulting in much smaller save files and much faster reloading.
• New version compatibility system for save files: the game will now recognize any save file formats (including those from before this change was implemented) and give a more friendly error message screen if attempting to load an incompatible version, rather than crashing or worse.
• Finally solved the problem of being able to sprint across the world in no time: a new movement points system allows for brief bursts of very fast movement, though prevents players from sprinting everywhere at top speed.
• Eating far too much food can result in becoming bloated, slowing the regeneration of movement points.
• We finally have poison and bleed effects for both the player and NPCs/enemies. Critical hits have a chance to cause bleeding, and certain weapon types and monster attacks have a higher chance of causing bleeds, and/or a chance to inflict poison damage.
• Revamped ammo types for a few of the low-level firearms to give better progression (thanks to Roho for the help on this one!)
• Added longbows, shortbows and crossbows to the ever-growing arsenal of weapon types available to the player. Bows are single-shot weapons that must be ‘reloaded’ after each shot, but have extremely high base damage to compensate, making them ideal ambush weapons.
• Shops will now automatically sort their inventory to make it easier for shoppers to find what they want.
• It is now possible to eat monster body parts and use unknown medicine, though the effects are often negative.
• Added new shops: blacksmith, gunsmith and armorer, to make it easier to find the gear you want to buy.
• Implemented a new crime system — currently only covering assault and murder, though more crimes will be added later — which can eventually result in ordinary citizens turning on you if you let your crime rating spiral out of control.
• Finally, the best part of all: quests! So far, these are divided into three categories: kill quests (go and kill 5 giant spiders), collect quests (bring me 10 iron ingots), and exploration quests (go to this place then report back). Of course, quests also come with a variety of rewards! There are currently only 8 quests in the game (2 of which are repeatable), but I plan on adding a hell of a lot more as the game progresses.

The post Runestar devlog 30/9/16: quests, crime and poison appeared first on moxx.net.

We’re back! After a fairly lengthy hiatus, I’ve recently started work on Runestar again, and there’s been a hell of a lot of progress since my last blog post. One of the most significant changes to happen since the last update on this site was a fairly huge code revamp, where I gutted and replaced thousands of lines of old code in a fairly massive revamp to completely change the control system and interface to the game. This accounts for the relatively small amount of gain on lines of C++ code and JSON data — there’s been a huge amount removed, and a similarly huge amount added in return.

In a nutshell, I’ve completely ditched the old command-based input system — where you’d interact with the game in the manner of an oldschool text adventure, with commands like GO NORTH and KILL DRAGON. Instead, it’s now entirely based on roguelike-esque keyboard commands, which are 100% customizable via an in-game keybinding screen. The old text parser was a huge part of the code and digging it all out was a fairly sizeable job, but I feel the game definitely benefits from the upgrade.

I’ll try to sum up the major changes since the last post:

• [0.28.1b] As mentioned in the last blog post, the game’s save files are now a great deal more robust and with very few exceptions, older saves can now work properly with newer builds of the game. This is only the case for saved games created in 0.28.1b and onward. There’s also a pretty cool loading screen now.
• [0.29.0a] Added a character creation screen, where you can choose a gender and initial archetype of your character, which determines skill bonuses and starting equipment. There are still no “classes” per se; one character can learn any skill given enough practice.
• [0.29.8a] Added a status command (now key) to display vital information about the player character.
• [0.29.9a] Added hand-to-hand weapons which use the unarmed skill, for players who want to go the monk/martial artist combat route.
• [0.30.1a] Added a proper options screen where you can set screen resolution and other game options, without having to manually edit a file by hand to change settings.
• [0.30.2a] Added a keybind screen where you can reconfigure (almost) any of the keys used in the game.
• [0.32.0a] Implemented a menu-based inventory system to replace the terrible old inventory management.
• [0.32.13a] Greatly improved looting items from corpses, so now you can choose individual items and/or loot everything at once.
• [0.32.25b] This is the point where the old command-based parser has been completely removed, and replaced entirely by keypress/menu-based controls.
• [0.32.27a] Added a pause key, to pause the action without having to open a menu.
• [0.32.29a] Added functionality for some mini-map rooms to be colour-coded, making it easier to identify locations such as shops and water sources.
• [0.33.0a] Added a new fast-travel system where the player can teleport between special, previously-visited nexus rooms.
• [0.34.0a] Rooms now have varying light levels based on time, weather, and other factors, which affects the success chance of sneaking.
• [0.34.1a] Fully dark rooms are now supported, where the player cannot see items or enemies nearby, but can still attempt to fight.
• [0.35.0a] Added equippable light sources such as lanterns and torches, which can be held by both the player and NPCs, and affect the light level of the surrounding area.

The post Runestar devlog 16/9/16: back in gear appeared first on moxx.net.

Nothing much to report this week; I spent most of the week off code as I needed a break, and the last couple of days’ of work have been stuff that’s just not interesting to read about: code cleanups and refactors, bug-fixing, that sort of thing.

The major improvements include a new universal save-file system (from this point on, a save from any version of the game will work with any future version of the game, though weird shit might happen if you try to use it on an older game version), an archetype selection screen to determine starting gear and bonus skills, and a snazzy loading screen. Aside from that, very little to report this week. Things should be more interesting next update!

The post Runestar devlog 17/6/16 appeared first on moxx.net.

Another Saturday, another weekly devlog! There’s been a whole bunch of changes and improvements to the project this week, and as always, I’ll skip over the boring stuff that nobody cares about (bug fixes, code refactors, engine fixes) and focus on the fun things:

• [0.25.14a] Slowed the respawn time of NPCs right down, it was a bit crazy before (mostly for testing purposes). This still needs to be tweaked more in future, but it’s a step in the right direction.
• [0.25.14j] Crunched all the audio files used by the game down into a single .fox file, rather than having dozens of loose .ogg files. Okay, not the most exciting feature, but I’m proud of it.
• [0.25.15a] Different ranged weapons now use a much larger variety of different reload sounds, rather than the generic pistol-clip reload sound. Also, renamed the project to Runestar, a move which I’m very pleased with.
• [0.25.16a] Added a HUD icon for reloading, showing both when a reload is in progress, and when one is needed (i.e. one of your ranged weapons has no ammo left).
• [0.25.17a] Added water sources from which water containers such as canteens and flasks can be refilled.
• [0.25.18a] Added disease which hampers health regeneration, can be contracted by drinking unclean water or eating raw meat.
• [0.25.19a] Added water purification tablets, which can attempt to purify unclean water with varying levels of success depending on the quality of the tablets.
• [0.25.20a] Added antibiotics, which can be taken to combat the effects of disease.
• [0.25.22a] Adjusted plasma weaponry so that it can occasionally backfire, damaging its user. This isn’t strictly a nerf, as plasma weapons were always intended to have this effect, and have a higher overall damage output to compensate for the risk.
• [0.25.23a] Added a black market vendor who sells all sorts of things you won’t be able to find elsewhere, though at an extremely inflated price.
• [0.25.24a] You can now butcher corpses for raw meat. There is currently no way to cook this meat (that’s coming soon), but it can be eaten raw.
• [0.26.0a] Finally added a respawn system. Death is no longer the end; now the player will drop all their equipment, inventory and money on the ground (don’t worry, NPCs won’t steal it and it won’t despawn) and respawn naked and at half health in a cloning facility.
• [0.26.1a] Added a fast food vendor type, starting with Pickle’s Place finally now being able to sell the player food.
• [0.26.2a] Populated Ascension Tower (the cloning facility) with NPCs and a medical shop.
• [0.27.0a ~ 0.27.2b] Finally, finally added an armour/clothing system which provides varying levels of protection from damage, and clothed all the existing NPCs in the city.
• [0.27.4a ~ 0.27.4d] Another one that’s been a long time coming — finally implemented the loot system, with enemies dropping semi-random items.

The post Runestar devlog 11/6/16 appeared first on moxx.net.

The long and short of it is that the project formerly known as Subgea is now called Runestar. While I liked the name at first, I’d been discontent with it for a while now and decided it was high time for a change. I’d just like to point out that, aside from the change in name, this is the exact same game project in development. It’ll take more than a name I’m unhappy with to dislodge me from this one!

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Well. It’s been a while since my last devlog, due largely in part to my decision to slow the updates down to once-per-week summaries of the development so far. As you can see from the numbers above, things are coming along nicely, though I’m sure those of you reading this are more interested in specifics.

Without further ado, and roughly in chronological order of development (skipping over boring things like bug fixes, code cleanup, etc.):

• [0.23.9a] Added bandages of various qualities, which can be used to heal some damage when used outside of combat.
• [0.23.9b] Standardized the colours of various in-game messages, to make it easier to distinguish at a glance between informative, positive and negative things happening.
• [0.23.10a] The flee command is no longer instant; instead, it causes the player to stop attacking and to seek a break in the combat in order to escape. Fans of JRPGs will already be very familiar with this, and love it or hate it, I decided it was the best fit for the game without allowing the flee command to be a sort of “get out of jail free card”.
• [0.24.0a ~ 0.24.4a] These updates were largely focused on adding loot lists (and a lot more loot items) to the game. Enemies still don’t actually drop loot yet (aside from their weapons), but this is due to change very soon. The actual code under the hood is about 95% of the framework to make loot and shops work.
• [0.24.5a] Added commands to see what loot/items corpses contain, and to take only specific items from said corpses. Before, looting was an all-or-nothing affair.
• [0.24.6a] Added a new hauling skill, which determines the player’s ability to carry heavy objects. The base max-carry weight has been boosted a fair amount, and by carrying a heavy load around, you can increase that limit even further as the hauling skill increases.
• [0.24.8a] Added a medical skill, which increases when using medical items (currently, only bandages exist) and boosts their effectiveness.
• [0.24.9a] Added a mercantile skill, which allows the player to get more money when they sell items to shops, and levels up from nontrivial transactions. Wait, did I just say shops? That’s right…
• [0.25.1a] Shops! There are now different types of NPC vendors who will buy and sell a variety of items, along with an auto-restocking inventory.
• [0.25.11a] Added fortune cookies, because why the hell not, that’s why. The jump in version number is due to a bunch of boring bugfixes and code refactors that you don’t want to read about.
• [0.25.12a ~ 0.25.12c] Quality of life door improvements, such as automatically attempting to open the door when you move in the direction of a closed door.
• [0.25.13a] Stealth! This one was a lot of fun to work on. You can attempt to move silently whenever there’s nobody around to see, and sneak around. If you manage to attack an NPC or monster without being detected, you get a bonus sneak attack which gives 100% hit rate and 100% critical strike rate. Not too shabby! However, if you’re detected by a hostile foe or fail the sneak attack, the enemy will get an attack of opportunity which gives them the 100% hit/100% crit strike instead. Your stealth skill can improve your odds of success, but all NPCs and enemies have their own hidden awareness skill which varies.
• [0.25.13b ~ 0.25.13d] Boring bugfixes and things.

The post Runestar devlog 4/6/16: weekly update appeared first on moxx.net.

This may not be the most interesting of devlogs today, but it’s one worth mentioning: I’ve finally cleared my to-do list of a lot of essential-yet-boring tasks, adding a bunch of boilerplate functionality to the game! This includes:

• The drop-down status bar resize/revamp I’ve been meaning to do forever (the bar now occupies only a corner of the screen, rather than the entire top with a bunch of blank space)
• Health regeneration! Now the player will heal damage slowly over time, though the more total health you have, the longer it’ll take to regenerate the slow way. Consumable healing items are coming soon.
• Examine command, to see the attributes of items in the game. Not terribly exciting, but useful.
• Splitting and re-stacking of stackable items (such as food rations or ammunition).
• Corpses will now disappear eventually, slowly if they still have loot and more rapidly once looted (or if they were empty to begin with).
• A flee command to run away from combat, if an exit is available. However, any foes you were fighting will remember you the next time you encounter them.
• The skills listing (currently only combat skills) has been revamped and now looks pretty snazzy, rather than the uselessly ugly garbage it was before.
• More in-game help files. ’nuff said.
• A bunch of bugfixes, including some really obscure edge cases that were lurking around for a long while, and one that inadvertently made the player invincible.

I know nothing in that list is particularly thrilling, but I’m happy to have gotten a bunch of essential functionality implemented and done, so I can begin focusing on more exciting features. :3

The post Runestar devlog 26/5/16: all the essentials appeared first on moxx.net.

Today I decided to completely eschew doing boring, boilerplate stuff that needs doing such as splitting item stacks or regenerating health, and instead worked on something a bit more fun: early framework code for vehicles and mechs, which also paves the way for distant-future stuff I want to eventually work on, such as airships. But enough about the future, what did I manage to get done today? Plenty!

While there’s currently no way to manage, repair, or equip vehicles and mechs outside of hard-wired debug code, I threw a couple of test vehicles into the game world to try out regardless: a tank (representing the basic vehicle type, which is slow and has terrible agility but packs powerful weapons), and a mech (representing the walker type, which has increased mobility but lower defenses). Vehicle weapons are extremely powerful compared to their hand-held equivalents, however the ammunition is expensive and heavy, and vehicles can’t reach a lot of areas, such as going indoors or climbing down ladders, limiting their use to outside, wide open spaces. I’m also going to eventually add fuel, which will be another balancing factor to vehicle use.

The other major addition today is one that I’ve been meaning to include for a long time: ammunition for ranged weapons! Ranged weapons tend to have a higher base damage than melee, along with a better chance to hit (because they can’t be parried), and the plan all along was for ammunition to act as a balance to compensate for the superior stats over melee weaponry, along with occasional weapon jams (which are currently not implemented).

Finally, I’ve implemented a much more minor feature which limits the speed at which player-entered commands are processed, stopping a player from getting an unfair advantage by being able to type extremely fast. Player input is now processed once per game tick (2 seconds), though you can still queue up a number of commands in a row if you wish. There’s also a few bug fixes and the like, but they’re not very interesting to write about, so let’s just have some screenshots instead.

The post Runestar devlog 24/5/16: vehicles, mechs and ammunition appeared first on moxx.net.

Another relatively short update, but a fairly significant one today!

While I’m largely very happy with the direction that the project is heading, especially with plans put in place for player-controlled vehicles and mechs, there was one thing that was consistently bothering me: the equipment system. The combat engine is based largely on (character) skill levels, but also influenced significantly by equipment, and the system I had in place up until this point was… in a nutshell, too granular. I had no less than 100 separate tiers of weapons, and not only did the combat system rely more heavily on gear over skill (especially for ranged weapons, which can’t be parried), but it was also far too much of a headache to deal with such an absurd range of potential gear.

Something had to change, and that came in the form of a combat revamp of sorts — the new system is a lot more linear than exponential growth, equipment tiers are narrowed down from 100 to 20, and character skill makes a huge difference in combat, to the extent that with maxed-out combat skills, you could be dealing up to 11 times more damage with the same weapon than a complete novice. After a fair amount of tinkering and testing, I’m happy to report that I’m extremely pleased with this new system, and it fits my vision for the game far better than the original ever did.

In addition, I’ve finally implemented the feature that grants bonus critical strike chance when using a one-handed weapon with an empty off-hand, meaning that now all styles of combat (one-handed, dual-wielding, two-handed) are equally viable — as it always should have been; I prefer the use of weapons to come down to player style and preference, not a clear-cut case of X is objectively better than Y. I’ll also be implementing ammunition and weapon jams to ranged weapons in the near future, along with backfires from overcharged weapons such as plasma rifles, which should help narrow the gap between melee and ranged weaponry in terms of overall usefulness.

Here’s a couple of screenshots of the new combat engine in action. More to come soon; there’s some more boilerplate to work on, but I’d like to get the vehicle code implemented sometime very soon!

The post Runestar devlog 23/5/16: combat and equipment revamp appeared first on moxx.net.

A relatively short update this time, mostly since I’ve not posted anything much about the project for almost two weeks, and I don’t want people to think that’s already dead. In a nutshell, life’s been pretty busy lately and I haven’t had a huge amount of time to work on the project, but what I have been doing is largely behind-the-scenes work.

So what’s changed since my last update? Plenty… that isn’t very interesting to talk about. There’s been a whole bunch of bug-fixin’ (including a few minor memory leaks and a buffer overflow that had been in the code for months or longer), more stability for the Linux build, improvements to the built-in error-handling subsystem, a whole bunch of improvements to the JSON data files bringing the city up to speed with the new time and weather system, and a small tweak that ended up improving the rendering speed by approximately 16%.

It’s not quite ready for a public demo yet, as there’s a lot of core systems that I really need to work on and fix up before I’m happy letting people poke at it, but the project is coming along very nicely and now that I have the city update out of the way — a frankly tedious endeavour which had to be done, but took far longer than I’d anticipated — I can go back to focusing on adding more fun mechanics and interesting things. Stay tuned for more updates!

The post Runestar devlog 18/5/16: bugfixes and performance updates appeared first on moxx.net.