Making good progress on descriptions. 
I hope to have a build out within another week. 
Until then, here’s a few screen caps of the descriptions from early game demons to tide you over.
7/4: A Mouse in the House
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!
Next build is imminent!
Putting the finishing touches on the mouse controls build, hoping to release during this long weekend. Trying to find a way to make it entertaining to read about on here gives me a headache though, so I’m going to quietly get back to work instead.
Mouse Controls Progress
Mouse controls are coming along fairly well so far. If I could figure out a meaningful way to screenshot the progress other than showing things being highlighted by a mouse cursor, I’d provide them.
Going to try to get as close to full mouse controls in this one pass as possible, but I will confess I lose my patience/endurance for UI work at a fairly rapid pace. So I’m focusing on major elements first (hotkey buttons, targeting, menu selection) and working my way down the priority list from there.
After mouse controls, I will get to adding in-game descriptions of characters (I know, I know, but I REALLY mean it this time! ) I’ve had several people mention they’ve gotten curious enough to Google some of their favorites up, hopefully soon I can spare them the trouble, so I know there are folks who want it.
6/14: Polish, Polish, Polish
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!
6/5: Hiding Between One And Two
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.
Demon’s First Piece of Fan Art
Grace, one of Demon’s fans, has made the first piece of fan art for the game and it is *awesome*! Have a look!
Thank you so much Grace!
5/30: Keeping Score
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.
Almost time for a new build…
Getting very close now to being ready to release the next build now: most of what’s left is some polish and testing. Network stuff’s new to me, so I’m being a little extra cautious on this one.
The next build will also include some other changes, such as the ability to name characters (necessary for the high score list to make any sense!), and some balance/gameplay changes including but not limited to:
- T:1 and T:2 have been adjusted to be a bit less of a meat grinder and a bit more reliably sane. In particular: Will O’ Wisps and Freybugs have swapped locations (Wisps now appear on T:2 instead of T:1, and Freybugs take their place as a T:1 monster), and Raicho are now weak to Slash, Impact, and Pierce (in addition to Body and Mind, which they were weak to before.) I want a tough-as-nails roguelike, not an unfair one.
- All trait-based requirements/restrictions on recruiting monsters have been removed. Frankly, these weren’t a lot of fun and were making balancing a pain since it meant you could find yourself excluded from large numbers of abilities unless you were willing to completely rewire your party around getting them.
- Hitting any key to “speed up” turns in progress will now automatically skip message log “more” prompts that are related to lots of messages coming in at once (though it will still pause and make you clear “next” prompts, which occur for very important messages, usually related to immediate danger.)
- Light and Dark “smite” abilities have been adjusted, based on how common their condition is, and how easily the condition is averted. As a result, some got stronger (Agony), some didn’t really change (Blight), some got a little weaker (Punish), and some now act completely differently (Exorcism and Bane now do damage based on the target’s remaining HP, for example.) Also, Easg Saint now get Humble instead of Punish, so that the first introduction to smiting is one that can’t be fatal.
- Made the friendly demon indicator a bit easier to see (it’s now almost-neon green instead of a subtle blue.)
Up Next: High Score tracking via server!
Devil Survivor 2: Record Breaker vacation is winding down now (not that I’m anywhere near done with the game itself, it’s huge!), so it’s back to work on Demon. Next up will be tracking high scores via a server so that people will actually believe me when I tell them a score of 300 is actually rather good.
Here’s a screenshot of the game displaying the scoreboard using some obvious junk data… but, it is obvious junk data being loaded up from the server. Most of the early work has unfortunately been a bit more boring and difficult to make exciting to talk about: stuff like writing code to handle problems like losing your internet connection, retrying on a failure if the user wants, interfaces for communicating all that, bleh. Good news is, all that sort of stuff I only have to do once and then it’s there for any other server-based stuff I want to do, like say, perhaps Relic Wraiths. (Think typical roguelike ghosts… but for Demon. ) Not quite ready for those yet, for now I’m starting simple so I can focus most of my efforts on getting the framework and basics in properly.
Oh, and a shout out and thank you to Keylan (Jason) for helping me with the backend portion of this. Thanks Keylan!