Since it’s vacation time only some little stuff got done. Also I was a bit distracted by working on my TTRPG “Mythen & Monster” which we tend to play every couple of months. 278 pages of player handbook are finished so far, about 50 more to go. And I started my fifth (or sixth or seventh?) attempt at writing a Gamma World TTRP clone suited to my tastes… but all that’s leisurely passtime during vacations and soon Realms of Ancardia will be back to full speed 🙂 After the next brief interrupt of about 10 days… expect development update around the 27th of August when holiday season “finally” is over 😉

Screenshot functionality added

You now can take screenshots from within the game:

  • F10 takes a screenshot of the whole screen.
  • Shift + F10 takes a screenshot without controls and tooltips.

Screenshots are saved as a PNG to the desktop for easy consumption.

Improved texts for settlements

Work on actual gameplay has started. First thing was to rework the endlessly long texts for settlements we had so far to install a “gate routine”. When you encounter a settlement there are basically two options depending on wether a settlement is walled or not.

If it is not walled you just can enter and might encounter guards or a lonely sheriff while wandering around. Easy times.

If it is walled you can try to sneak in (success will depend on your skills, alertness of the guards, moats and many other factors) or use the official entry via a gate. At the gate you might have random encounters, hear rumors and be tithed.

Tithes are an interesting thing… because they can bery very variable. Lawful/good settlements, free cities etc. just might let you in without any barrier. Merchant-rules cities, feudal settlements and others might demand a small monetary tithe but other governments might be VERY different. E.g. dreamocracies might demand one of your dreams (e.g. some experience points), undead necromancers might request a bit of your life force and religiously ruled settlements an oath of fealty or sacrifices to their religions (with all kinds of potential alignment implications).

Which leads to…

Random tithe generation system implemented

The highly variable nature of tithes has been implemented in form of a small procedural generator that takes settlement size, alignment, dominant population and form of government and derives the type and height of tithe that might be requested at the gates. Joyful times… now you can be taxed in a roguelike 🙂 And new enemy unlocked: The Ancardian Tax Office 🙂

Miscellaneous minor changes and additions

  • The background color of the game screen now is manually configurable.

Total size of the codebase after this week

  • 38,503 LOC in 634 files for the actual Realms of Ancardia game
  • 27,005 LOC in 447 files in my own underlying TBRLAPI framework library supporting my most recent roguelike games
  • plus extra external configuration files, images, tilemaps, audio files, etc.

The running total is available here.

State of our internal ticket system

We use YouTrack to manage ideas and bugs that pop up. The listings are by no means complete – it’s more of a “don’t eventually forget to fix this bug / add that amazing feature” pipeline that gives a little structure to our development process without turning it into a managed project 😉

  • 150 open issues in total
  • 59 closed issues in total