Sep 25, 2017

Rogue Effect v1.0 and Drakefire Chasm v1.3.4 Released

This year's Annual Roguelike Release Party managed to sneak up on me and I didn't quite manage to get a new release out for it. I rescheduled for the next (the past) weekend and missed that deadline too as I ended up going for a double release and debugging two games is twice as much work. Especially if one has an unexplainable bug.

Rogue Effect


Rogue Effect v1.0 release is not as grand as it maybe could be. The big stuff was in v0.9 already and the remaining "0.1" I reserved just for the saving/resuming feature which I predicted to be a considerable amount of work the way I planned to do it. (And it was.)

Nonetheless, the game is now feature complete and I don't plan to work on it anymore unless a big bug turns up or sudden inspiration strikes me. Rogue Effect was originally started as a seven day roguelike and the sort of 7DRL mentality kind of continued through the whole project: its 21.7k lines of code are full of hacks and getting things done as fast as possible disregarding how it would be later to change or add something.

Since it's compiled in Visual Studio, the game requires MS Visual C++ (2010) redistributables to run. I probably should have mentioned this in the previous release(s) but I'll add the links to those now to Rogue Effect's (and Drakefire Chasm's) page.

Download: Rogue Effect v1.0 (Windows)

Changelog:

v1.0 - 2017-09-25

 New features:
 * Saving & resuming
 * Pressing shift or ctrl highlights cover from the cursor's position

 Fixes:
 * Biotic Charge should no longer sometimes crash the game
 * Corrected some power evolution descriptions


Drakefire Chasm


The reason I'm releasing a new version of Drakefire Chasm in addition to Rogue Effect is because last week I got an email from Teco who had found v1.3.3 too easy compared to v1.3.1 and was suspecting a bug.

I recalled at some point having watched someone beat the game on YouTube. Some enemies had been getting killed a bit too effortlessly but I had thought that maybe I hadn't watched closely enough and he had had the stats for it. And he had been playing a red dragon after all, which is the easiest one in the early game. Neither had I touched damage values since 1.3.1 so why would it be bugged?

But after Teco's email I started investigating and found out that for some mysterious reason, in the release version, instead of doing 100/50/25% damage depending on enemy type, attacks were always doing 1000% damage against everything. I couldn't get the debug version reproduce this but the release always did it. Eventually I located the problem in the function that determines damage modifier.

It's a really simple function and there was just no way for it to even return a value more than 1.0 -- or less than 0.25 as it then started doing after I started adding debugging messages around. When nothing else worked (I originally had thought I had forgotten simply to clean the project before compiling for release), I rewrote the function slightly differently. And now the release version too seems to work as intended. It's kind of worrying I couldn't determine the exact reason but as long as the game works and is challenging again, right?

Download: Drakefire Chasm v1.3.4 (Windows)

Changelog:

v1.3.4 - 2017-09-25:

 * Fixed a damage bug that made the game too easy
 * Ball Breath's range reduced by 1
 * Ball Breath's radius increases now by 1 per 3 age categories (down from Age / 2)
 * Deep Breath now increase Ball Breath's radius/range by 1 (down from 2)
 * Added value of treasure collected to ability screen
 * Corrected a small error in Breath's description

3 comments:

  1. Oh no! And there goes the only roguelike I could beat!

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  2. Wow, yeah, it's a lot more challenging now. I only started playing your game at 1.3.2, which was just as easy as 1.3.3, so I never knew how it was *supposed* to be. But, my winning strategy (prioritizing inspiring meat, falling back on tough, and avoiding strong) is still perfectly valid, especially with a Red, so I got more than half way through the game on my first run of 1.3.4 despite it being harder. Gotta actually pay attention when fighting the 'experienced adventurers' though; they're strong enough now to force me to eat a corpse I didn't want to just to get some HP... :P

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    Replies
    1. Oh, in case it wasn't clear, this comment was about Drakefire Chasm.

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