Hello fellow reader! First of all apologies for the very late development diary. The truth is I had several weeks with a lot of none rogue empire tasks, and I tried to put the rest of the time into development. Anyway the development diaries take about half of a day which I could use to do more development so from today on wards I will post on bi-weekly basis.
Before we start, I wanted to share some important news: The prelude's first alpha version is scheduled to be released next Friday the 21th for patrons and Saturday the 22 for everyone else. If you want to give it a try, just sent an email with the subject pre-alpha to hello@roguempire.com. It will be free and playable, yet incomplete, so dive in it at your own peril!
Ok, enough yada yada! Today's topics:
Bosses: Ancient Eagle Druid Tharandum Case Study!
Strength and Agility damage influences.
Night & Day cycle.
More Items & monster loot!
Bosses: Ancient Eagle Druid Tharandum Case Study!
No rpg game can call itself a game without bosses! So today I will show a little bit of what you can expect from Rogue Empire Bosses.
To do this I will introduce you to Tharandum, a very old druid of a long forgotten race. The player encounters Tharandum in a small but deep crater still lit with sunlight. For some yet unknown reason Tharandum won't let the player pass any further deeper into the dungeon.
Now one thing I wanted to make in Rogue Empire, is to make bosses as unique as possible. One particular field is AI. As it is the case with Tharandum I expect to code specific unique AI for every boss. In the case of our first boss he is very smart on what to cast/do and when! At least it seemed so to me ;).
Now as a boss, Tharandum counts with a small Arsenal at his disposal. I will tell you of some of them in order to not spoiler all of them. But anyway, it is fair to say: SPOILER ALERT
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Are you still with me? Great!
Nature Regeneration: This spell as you might guess heals the target over time. The effect is not very big, but over time it heals quite a lot!
Nature's Twister: A handy spell, the nature's twister throws the target through the air into a random place further away from the caster. Additionally this might be very painful :S
Sun Bolt: A ranged spell that deals damage as well as drains a little energy. Alone it's not very troublesome, but considering nature's twister it makes a good combo!
The boss also counts with other abilities, but those are for you to discover!
Strength and Agility damage influences
During this development iteration I also added strength and agility influence over melee and ranged damage respectively. Basically both stats can increase damage done with any weapon equipped to up to + 100%. Also when really low, these stats actually penalize damage done with weapons.
With this caster classes will clearly do less damage than fighter classes. Something worth mentioning, as there is no class limitation on what your character can equip.
Night & Day cycle
Something that was left to do in the game is to count global time, this means minutes, hours, days, months and years! And with time also comes night and day! This means non dungeon map types like woods or plains will get dark during night and clear during day.
In addition to give some more immersion, I plan to use this among other things to create special timed events, timed monster spawns (some monsters might show only during night for example), and other secrete stuff!
Also in the future I will do rain as well.
More Items & monster loot!
So in this iteration additional 30+ items were added to the game. At this point core armor items are left to have a complete item set!
With the addition of these new items I added monster loot. Before now, items would basically only lay around somewhere for you to discover. Not anymore! Now some monsters have a chance to through you a bone ;)
One thing I decided to do is to not let every monster in the game have a chance to drop an item. For example why would a wolf have a health potion... Anyway I am not yet sure if this is the right call, let me know what you think!
Some Remarks!
Next Friday (if you are a patron) or Saturday for everyone else will be the very first release to the world of a playable version of the prelude (A part of it). Again, shoot an email to hello@roguempire.com if you are interested! I would welcome any constructive feedback very much.
Its still a long shot from being ready, but it will get there! Especially if you support the game! If it is within your reach, support Rogue Empire at patreon.com/roguempire! You can also follow us and spread the word about the game in Twitter.com/RoguEmpireRPG or facebook.com/roguempirerpg. Anything helps, no matter how small!
Hope you like this development diary!
Till next next Friday! :P