New build is up, with character descriptions added to the game.

Every demon, unique, hero, and summoner now has a description, which can be viewed in their character sheets. The character description page of the sheets is the default page when viewing characters via inspect or the View Party menu, so they will be easy to find. Remember you can use the left and right arrows on your keyboard to change pages in character sheets (a feature which I admit has not been terribly useful before this build. )

I’ve tried to keep the descriptions interesting but reasonably brief, and I think I for the most part succeeded. I hope everyone enjoys reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them.

New build is up! Links to your right point to the new 7/4 builds!

You can’t quite do everything with the mouse now, but you can do a whole heck of a lot more then before:

• When presented with a list of choices other than during negotiation, you can now use the mouse wheel to scroll the list, and can left-click entries to select them.
• Ability buttons are now actually left-clickable.
• You can now use the mouse to choose and confirm targets for abilities (mouse over cells to target them, left-click your target to confirm it.)
• You can now left-click visible cells on the map to perform a few actions, based on what you clicked, and whether or not you are currently in combat.

Full mouse controls may still happen at some point, but I am a little less sold on them than I was a couple of weeks ago. For the amount of work it would take, it is not a commonly requested feature: people do want to be able to do *more* with the mouse, but I’ve only heard one request for anything even close to full mouse control. So going forward, my focus is to provide more options for mouse support when feasible in terms of effort and when I believe they make a lot of sense, rather than trying to make sure literally everything can be done by mouse when I’m not even sure that will turn out to be great or desired by anyone even if I invested the considerable amount of time required for it.

That said, I do want to go back and get negotiation working with mouse controls. Kinda newb of me that negotiation selection is different from every other kind of selection. Well, it won’t be the first time I’ve broken out the refactor tractor for UI related things.

Since I try to include screenshots with each major build, I have reluctantly taken a screenshot of a mouse-highlighted menu selection during character creation. It will likely go down in history as the most boring screenshot of a roguelike ever taken. Trust me, the actual build is much more exciting. Go play it already!

New build is out, links to the right have been updated.

In this build, I’m taking care of some polish tasks before moving on to  mouse controls. Overall gameplay balance, AI, and UI have all received some improvements.

Big ticket items:

• Support abilities (buffs and heals) no longer require clear lines of fire.
• Several area effect projectiles (mostly Rune effects, but also one ability: Fireball) can now be aimed short of their maximum range, making them a bit easier to use.
• Sleep and Charm have been slightly reduced in duration.
• Group movement no longer lets faster allies range far ahead of the player.
• The UI will warn you when attempting to use hostile abilities when all enemy targets are immune to them.
• Demons are now much more persistent about pursuit. Beware!
• Further adjustments to how different groups of the same faction communicate with each other: enemies a bit less effectively (to further reduce swarming behaviors), allies a bit more effectively (so that player allies support friendly link targets better.

Enjoy!

A new build already? Yep.

6/5 adds Demon’s first (non placeholder that is!) side-dungeon! Look for the dark stairs on the tower’s second floor!

But, keep in mind, each side-dungeon only has a chance of appearing: they aren’t constant fixtures of the dungeon. For the new one, the chance is currently 50%, so you won’t see it every game.

Also made some other small balance and AI tweaks, but nothing too major or exciting. 6/5 still uses the same scoring model, so players running 6/5 can compete with 5/30 scores fairly.

Good luck, and as always, feedback is welcome and appreciated. I want to make the best roguelike I can, after all, and that means a steady diet of good feedback.

Build links to the right have been updated with the 5/30 build. The major new feature of this build is the online scoreboard: when your games end, your character name (also a new feature ) and score will be sent up to the server and then shown to you alongside similarly ranked scores so you can see where you ended up at. You can press \ in game to view the top 20 scores as well.

Of course…

…the scoreboard is empty right now, so it would be pretty easy to get in the top 20. Based on past feedback, even a score of several hundred will probably last for quite sometime: Demon’s pretty tough.

Also in this build:

• You can now name the main character.
• Removed all trait-based recruitments restrictions and requirements. These weren’t a lot of fun, and were making balance kind of a pain too since it meant there were some abilities that were mutually exclusive (i.e: If you had Demon A that gives Ability N, you can’t recruit Demon B that gives Ability T, so N and T are mutually exclusive.)
• Slightly rebalanced T:1 and T:2 to be a bit gentler an introduction to the game.
• Enemies no longer spawn particularly close to portals.
• Enemy groups communicate less with each other, making it less likely the player will be swarmed by very large hordes.
• Infection only halves Stamina regeneration instead of completely removing it.
• The main character’s healing/restorative abilities, if any, will automatically be used when Resting to reduce downtime. (This is particularly important for builds that drain maximum health from enemies, since excess MaxHP decays over time.)
• Skipping VFX (by pressing any key during them) also skips non-critical message prompts.

Good luck! I’ll post another update soon about what I am working on next.

Build links to the right have been updated to the 4/26 build, which makes some balance tweaks and fixes some bugs, including certain nasty errors in the spawn tables… even especially evil-tempered roguelikes like Demon shouldn’t be throwing 33 monsters at you in one encounter.

Hey folks. Fixed up the manual a bit (thanks Lobos!), and also squished a rare crash yaxamie helped me pin down. The crash is rare, but any crash warrants a new build ASAP so here we are. 4/19 is available at the links to the upper-right of the page.

By the by, the current non-Herbie record for score in 4/17+ builds is… 752. Mean build is mean. I’ll have some comments to add regarding the difficulty level of the current build a bit later, but for now I want to spread the word about the crash fix build. Cheers, and good luck in the tower!

Surprise. Instead of just posting more information about the build as promised, I decided to push a little bit and actually post the build itself!

Build links are now on the right-hand side of the webpage now, but just for consistency’s sake, here’s a link in the post too: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B-sx_4eW-B5hWnhNZlRPclZLeUU&usp=drive_web

I feel like all I’ve done for forever is talk about what’s coming in this build, but I suppose I need to do so one more time for a summary. Here’s the highlights!

* 19 new demons, including 4 new starter demons!
* 50 new abilities, and significant changes to several existing abilities as well.
* Fairly extensive rebalancing of the game, with an eye to making it as challenging as humans can stand. So long as every death can be traced back to a reasonable mistake (which to me is a requirement for a roguelike to be fair), I will be happy with even very, very, very low win rates.
* New mechanics including cantrips (free action spells that share a cooldown with each other), staggering (delay the target’s next turn, doesn’t fully Stun, so is available more widely), and link penalties which take effect on failed attempts to link with certain demons.
* Hex, a new Dark-element status condition that greatly reduces physical offense and defense, as a counterpart to Light-element’s Mute.
* Various AI & UI upgrades and bug fixes.

Also, here’s a small collection of screenshots showing the results of a rather brief run I had with an Ice/Dark summoner in the 4/17 build. Mean game is mean.

Picking out a starting ally from among the now 12 options.

Almost dead on T:1. Demon is still Demon alright.

Dental hygiene lessons from a zombie? Only in a roguelike.

Well, Demon finally has rats… and they set you on fire. This shouldn’t be a surprise.

Annnnddd… dead on T:2. Ouch. Shouldn’t I be better at my own game?

But, before I dive into my art cave for awhile, a new build that addresses a few bugs that have been reported since 2/4: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B-sx_4eW-B5hWnhNZlRPclZLeUU&usp=drive_web

No report of a first win yet on the February builds, but rumor has it someone is close…

Just pushed the 2/4 build to Google Drive at the usual link: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B-sx_4eW-B5hWnhNZlRPclZLeUU&usp=drive_web

Fixes an annoying content bug affecting some rarely seen passive abilities, as well as makes some minor UI and balance adjustments. Enjoy.