Castlevania marries Diablo. Twisted Tower is born.
Randomly generated dungeons, random loot, swords, spells, lots of enemies, lots of containers to break and open!
Twisted Tower will be released in chapters, with Chapter 1 having:
* 30 floors of randomly generated levels
* Three different level themes for the randomly generated levels
* Several outdoor areas for low-level practice
* Village where you can do some shopping, upgrade armor, and more
* 8 different weapon types (Sword, Mace, Greatsword, Hammer, Spear, Bow, Staff, Wand)
* Randomly generated weapons with thousands of possible attribute and feature combinations
* 40+ spells
* Tens of upgrade and consumable items
* Two selectable weapon-focus talents with sub-skills
* Tens of unlockable skills
* 30+ enemies
* Several special enemies
* Two bosses
* Art and sprites by HitmanN
* Soundtrack by Adrien Couturier, aka LoKi ( http://soundcloud.com/loki-6/ )
* Plus a lot more!
Expected release date for chapter 1 is currently uncertain, but there's hope for 2013 yet.
I haven't clearly been very active with updating the devlog this year. The reason is that, ahem, well, I haven't been very active with Twisted Tower anyways. >_< I've done some stuff, but not nearly enough to call it progress. I've finished the remaining spells from the to-do list, as well as changed enemy data to allow varying degrees of resistances. Previously enemies took either 100% damage to a specific elemental, or none. Player already had varying amounts of resistances, so it seemed logical to apply the same to enemies. It also makes combat with spells a little bit more interesting than just spells being flat-out great or useless.
But here's the real kicker. A bug that has been pestering me for a very very long time now, is now fixed! This bug was a memory leak, which caused the game to continuously reserve more and more memory during runtime, eventually ending in a crash. Countless evenings I spent trying to figure out the source of this nasty problem, until I finally managed to isolate the issue to one extension, INI++. I contacted Jax, the author of the extension about this, and he promptly issued a fix, which got rid of this memory leak, completely. Awesome!
Now that Twisted Tower is stable again, I need to find some extra motivation to resume working on it regularly. The release is likely pushed back again though, as I may need to do a few more changes to certain mechanics that I earlier thought were solid enough, but now find lacking. It's best I don't estimate a release date at this time.
Still going a bit slow with Twisted Tower, but I've reached couple of milestones from the planned list of things for chapter 1.
Namely, I've finished:
-Remaining consumable items (now 16 total)
-Remaining material items (now 25 total)
-Remaining unique Weapons (now 28 total)
-Also recently finished a new derivative enemy type, which actually 'heals' certain other enemies, instead of attacking the player.
Now I'm working on the remaining three spells and some weapon bonuses, after which I'm probably moving on to remaining enemies, armor upgrade scheme finalization and one more shop NPC.
After that there's still more stuff to do though. Big things, but not many. Chapter boss, story events/elements, tutorial/help section and some environment/NPC art. These bigger things have been eluding me for a long while now, mostly because I don't want to work on them until everything else around them is functional and satisfactory.
With all that said, I'd like to wish everyone a merry Christmas and happy holidays.
Things haven't gone too well with the Twisted Tower development. There's been very little development since last update, at least content-wise. I've been focusing on performance optimizations and stuff like that... but I still had about three weeks of downtime due to things mostly out of my control. I've been in and out of hospital, originally because of stomach pains caused by gallstones, then my liver values going haywire. Had an ERCP done, liver biopsy, MRI, you name it. All's good now though. Everything's returning to normal, nothing serious has been found, all pain is gone and I was discharged from the hospital a few days back. Life's returning to normal again.
Now I'm just a bit lost about where I was with the project. Trying to keep things rolling to some direction though. Still, development has been delayed by over a month because of all that happened. It's probably best I don't put too big expectations on the completion date of chapter 1 at this time. A vague 'first half of 2013' will have to do for now, until I get the hang of things again. There really isn't that much left to do though. A few items, a few enemies, chapter boss battle, some story elements and stuff like that.
Adding new content has slowed down considerably though, but there's been plenty of polish going in the game over the past weeks. In fact the current test version I'm working on consists almost exclusively of things that my faithful testing crew has been reporting, suggesting or requesting. I'm definitely not making a game just for myself here. I want people to enjoy it, so I'm reluctant to add too much new stuff until current issues with gameplay have been solved satisfactorily. I just hope I don't go too far with that stuff... ^^;
Anyhow, among the new content is a feature that I've had planned for a long while, but never got around to adding it, until just now. Portal Beacons.
In Twisted Tower, every five floors you have a portal that connects that floor and a portal at the base of the tower. All that is not new, but I figured I'd explain again. If you die and choose to respawn in the village, you'd normally need to continue from the tower floor with the highest portal you've reached before. The Portal Beacons allow you to create shortcuts. When you find a Beacon Pedestal in the dungeons of the tower, you can spend a semi-rare item called a Sacred Orb to activate the crystal on the Beacon Pedestal. This enables you to teleport to that floor number at any time from the main portal at the base of the tower. For example, you're trying to reach floor 20, but die on floor 19. You need to start again from floor 15. This time you find a Beacon Pedestal on floor 18, and activate it. You die again on floor 19. Now you can continue from floor 18, instead of 15! This feature is particularly useful before boss fights, because currently there won't be a save point or portal right before the boss. If you die in a boss fight, and have no beacon enabled closer, you'll need to replay up to five floors again. Good thing is, even if you do die, you lose nothing but some money from dying and respawning. You keep gaining experience and new loot as you replay the dungeon floors. Every floor is a fresh experience, every time!
I've attached a screenshot of the initial version of the Portal Beacon in activated mode. The light is actually a pulsing wave, so it looks kinda plain here. I'll probably add some more light effects on it at some point.
Release of Chapter 1 probably won't make it for 2012 anymore, but I'm still hopeful for a 2013 January/February release. I've pretty much got a schedule plotted out. Keeping up with that schedule is what's been proving tough lately, what with all the polish and tweaking needed on the existing content, and other projects taking up much of my available time.
... plus I get hooked on MMO games way too easily. T_T
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