fire as a tool

Take your matches, pile dry wood or garbage and start a fire!
There a couple of balancing issues with fire. It too easy to make an arson instead of small fire and occasionally all town. Well, not all town, but burn down couple of houses is not a big issue.
Also, AI doesn't care about fire and luring enemies into fire works well. Except you don't get experience and their equipment burns.
I have two days to add schematics for fireplaces, like pit or campfire and add fire as crafting tool.
But I'll do my best to finish it today and take another story for tomorrow.

There are two more issues with crafting:
First, game doesn't show you as Player a report about crafting results. Was it successful or not, were is the result and so on. It needs disappearing  pop-up message.
Second, crafting requires you to enter crafting menu, select a schematic, confirm it, select a tile. Doh!
Why so indie? 
Crafting features on tile should be accessible via one click menu. For example: right click on empty tile and select "build" menu, or "fire/effects" menu and so on.
You should fight monsters, not interface!

Crafting interface upgrade

I have to confess, it was super annoying task!
A lot of small bugs, tiny problems, sharp edges of legacy code and so on.
But, it is a work that should be done if we want crafting as very important part of gameplay to be smooth and easy to use.

Game automatically selects items as tools and components, shows you what components are missing and allows to change a component.
Last feature is important, for example if you don't want to cut old jacket into straps, but your brand new fancy shirt. Obvious, isn't it?
Also, it took additional day to create new interface feature.
One of the downsides of writing your own engine for roguelike: need a feature, write it yourself.
As I mentioned before, it is highly unwise to create your own engine for a roguelike game.
Yes, there is one big plus in your own engine - you know it well and you can modify it whenever you like add any functionality you want, adapt it to your needs etc.
BUT!
1.  It will take time for your engine to mature and get rid of stupid bugs.
2.  Every hour spent on engine is an hour stolen from game itself.

This issues are eager to combine and wage a war on you togeather.
For example, you decide, my game we have great feature- thunderbolts will paralyze creatures and cook bread!
Nice, but then you get Access Violation for every thunderbolt  targeting iron golem on the left and no clue why does it happen?!

I have to admit, it is a lot of fun to create your own engine, but I would not do it again if I would start my development nowadays.


PS
I need interesting gameplay story to recover from such 'technical' job. ASAP! ^_^
Maybe food or work on radio a bit, or my favorite name generators? We will see, there a lot of interesting stories on our Trello board.

As usual, I'll update build this Saturday.

Craft: small refactoring and GUI rework done, back to City development!

As mentioned, I have refactored crafting interface, so it is ready big expansion I plan for this part of the game and GUI is not longer as horrible as before.
Just a little bit ^_^.

I am back to City development and going to start with poor districts near the city wall.
Also, generator doesn't respect a side of a wall and may place few houses from outer side of a wall.
It is easy to fix, but I am not sure of it. Theoretically, the poorest people may settle outside of the city wall.

Districts near city walls should have guard posts and guards patrols, houses of poor people, vagrants campfires, garbage dumps and so on.

Who needs crafting? The question of priorities.

Have you player Fallen that is available for download now?
If you do, I think you may not even find crafting at all or just ask yourself a question 'Why this guy made crafting before more basic and important features of gameplay?'.
The question of priorities.
It was like this: I waked up and thought "OMG, OMG! Crafting, crafting! We need crafting now!" and made in a one small streak. Well. not bad, of course, but not wise when you have more important features at hand.

About current progress:
As you can see (Development link ===>) I have finished a lot of tasks and totally overtaken GoodSir. ^_^ But, he sworn  to beat me in finished task before I'll return home from seminar.
So, let the battle begins!
It looks like he didn't expect from me to work at spare time during my travel. hehehe.

Craft for 0.3

Programming of character creations screen and craft screens has been finished.
GoodSir is going to make them look good. ^_^
You can find tons of items during your travels in the Catacombs.
All of them should be useful.
Until the implementations of skills, all schematics are to available for  every character and takes few seconds to craft.
It is always fun to find a big gun, but it also fun to turn this gun it to bigger gun or even automaton!

0.3 is planned for 18.01.15
12 days ahead and a lot of work to do.

working on 0.3

Playtest has shown that Fallen engine is technically okay and, as I promised, it is time to start gameplay updates.
Yeah, it is all about an actual roguelike game.
As you can see on a screenshot above (it isn't final, just my madskills for test purposes) I am trying to butcher a corpse if mushroom roach and craft a hammer.

Hammer is a good tool! It can be used to bash necromutants or craft advanced tools and weapons.

0.0.8 development schedule

This is next version development schedule.
No more delayed versions for "one additional" feature.

Crafting:
* Item disassembling. done
* Item crafting. (for this patch: weapon, armor, cloth). in progress.

Magic:
* Spells memorization system. (I think that Craw system is worth "stealing" ^_^).
* Starting spells and spellbooks.
* Basic spells, one per category:
1) buff .
2) debuff (for ex. curse).
3) summon.
4) control  (for ex. fear).
5) creation (for ex. food, can be balance breaking, just for test!).
6) traps (not in this version, would wait for traps and doors)..
7) scouting (for ex. show creatures etc).
* NPC spells, AI use magic.
* Healing spell planed to scrolls, consumables only, because of its highly abusive nature.

Miscellaneous:
* "Use item" bugs.
* Game over screen.
* Few inventory patch fixes.

Magic

It looks like "Magic patch" is our winner in voting "contest". Won, 9 vs 6. He, he, he.
So, I'll start magic, when finish crafting basic, which I was coding, waiting for vote results.

There is little problem with development schedule... there is no schedule!
We should prepare some basic plan for every patch and update.
I'll post it here, when it would be finished.

Current status:
Crafting is going well.
I managed to smelt my battleaxe in to bronze ingots, when character would be able to create new item from resources, this goal would marked "done" for now.

Craft

Managed some crafting issues.
So, now you can disassemble item for parts, scraps etc
For example, you can smelt sword to ingots.
And no, you can't brew potion back to ingredients! (It was funny bug) ^_^