Day 6 progress: it's starting to look fun...

So today my revised goal was to get as much “quality of life” changes made to the game as I could to make it more fun, and tomorrow I’ll be adding the endgame, where you have to climb back up out of the dungeon after defeating the boss, fighting more dangerous versions of the monsters you encountered on the way down!

What did I accomplish today?

• Added “elemental essences”. What do these do? Several things! For one thing, you need at least 10 essences of an element to cast a spell, and 40 to cast it at standard “attunement”. Attunement is calculated from the number of essences you have of a particular element, and it serves as a multiplier for the power of the spell. So if you have an attunement of 200% for an element, your spell using that element will be twice as powerful! But I used a logarithmic function to compute attunement, so there will be diminishing returns…
• How do you get essences? By defeating monsters! Stronger monsters will drop more essences, and uniques will drop a veritable cornucopia! So the more monsters you kill, the more powerful your spells get! Pretty cool, huh?
• But that’s not all! Essences also power up your stats! Each element has a specific boost that affects your stats - for instance, fire boosts the power of all your spells at once, and light causes you to regenerate some HP and MP when you climb the stairs to the next level. All these boosts are detailed on the spellcasting screen. The higher your level of attunement, the bigger the bonus. So of course there are diminishing returns here as well. Now essence stat boosts only apply to the hero right now, not to the monsters…
• I actually fixed that annoying speed bug that was causing half the player’s actions to disappear into the ether when there are fast monsters around! Looks like I was completely ignoring the allotted time parameter in the time processing function, and instead just let all creatures move once - which sometimes wasn’t enough to let the hero get another turn! Thank goodness for Visual Studio pointing out the unused parameter!
• Monsters can now cast spells! They won’t blindly rush the player and melee him quite as much!
• Monsters also won’t attack each other anymore!
• I added some tooltips to the map so you can inspect monsters and terrain.
• I had some extra terrains in the game which were not getting used (trees and water); now they are used randomly in place of floors and walls respectively. So now not all walkable terrain is transparent and vice versa, making the game a bit more interesting…

So, what’s the plan for tomorrow, the final day? Well, I have two top priorities:

• Create a manual so players know what the heck they’re doing and what the controls are and how everything works.
• Create the endgame scenario, where once you defeat the final boss, you have to rush back to the top of the dungeon before time runs out, and the monsters will all be powered up!

Other things I’ll see if I can do, if I have time:

• Multiple words per element. It’s pretty easy to type these short magic words. Maybe instead of giving each word its own magical effect, the longer words will just be stronger versions of the existing effects?
• Multi-word spells, where each word has an alternate combinatorial effect when used to modify another spell (e.g. fire might make the spell hit repeatedly over several turns). This was something I really wanted to get into the game because it was my favorite feature of Lost Magic. If I can’t do it tomorrow, maybe I’ll add it in a post-7DRL version of the game sometime…
• Monster spawning. At the very least, I’ll respawn a bunch of monsters in the endgame (no fair killing them all on the way down to get an easy ride coming up!) but it might be nice to spawn them gradually over time… or would that encourage grinding on the shallower levels?
• Spell animations. I’d like to light up the tiles affected by a spell, but never got around to it.
• More mouse stuff, like clicking on the map to walk to a tile. But monsters are plentiful enough that you’d be interrupted anyway…

So things are looking good - there were a few features I wanted to implement that I haven’t got in, but the game’s working, apart from being able to win!