Version: 0.1.2

Oh hey look, it's been a week or so.

Shutting up and coding has been rather fruitful.

So, I'm done with version 0.1.2. At least. I'd feel almost comfortable saying it was up to 0.1.5, given that these versionings are pretty much completely arbitrary and I did a good lot of stuff. Rather, did one thing very thoroughly. That said, I'm going to stick with calling it 0.1.2, but might jump up a lot after hitting some key features for 0.2

Things to do for 0.2:

1. One infinitely-deep dungeon
2. Enemies and items that increase in power along with dungeon level
3. Backbone of the Skill system (the "No Useless Mages" clause)
4. Beginning stages of enemy AI (intelligent item equipping, decent pathfinding, skill usage)
5. Acceptably good battle mechanics (2-weapon fighting, holding one weapon in two hands, shield utility, basic combat balance)
6. A main menu
7. Being able to save/load

That seems to be a good amount of stuff for several more subversions. Morst importantly, that all equates to "I can probably release this thing and not cringe too hard at how broken and unfinished it is".

So, that's future plans.

Current state of stuff:

I've spent a good long while now making the Item system. For now, all I've got is weapons and armor, but given that I have over twenty thousand items I think that's a good starting spot.

Okay, backing up. 

I've mentioned before my plans for the item system.

Well, now I've done it.

Not completely, per se, but enough. Enough to take twenty basic items and thirty adjectives and wind up with over twenty thousand different items. Mind you, the differences between a Mediocre Iron Knife and a Crude Iron Knife aren't staggering, but it exists and I'm taking credit for it. The point is, I could add a few lines to a file and wind up with a few thousand new combinations. Geometrically. I fully expect to have millions of possibilities by a v1.0, if not sooner. Of course, after a while I'm not going to check how many possibilities exist; that'd be somewhat computationally-expensive. I'm just going to say "a lot" and go with that.

I have not implemented Identification yet. That's going to be a pain.

Good Idea: along with a name of modifier, include an abbreviation. Instead of the excessively-verbose "Prismatic Exploderous Heavy Adamantium Shirt of Sensuality," use "Prs.Exp.Hv.Adm.Shirt of Sen." in the menu screen; use the full name on examination. Yes, those are actual magical prefix/suffixes. They do anything currently except exist as a placeholder to make sure that the magic-item coloring and generation works properly, but I'm seriously seriously considering leaving most of them in. Especially so there's a chance of getting an "AWESOME Reinforced Titanium Plate of AWESOME"

Which sort of brings up another point; redundancy. For the most part, redundancy is avoided, i.e. you won't find a "Light Heavy Iron Steel Club". Keeping a separate list of materials items are made out of (and mandating that they have a material) ensures I can pick just one, and keeping a Type with each adjective ensures non-opposing (and non-repeating) modifications. I.e., no "Dull Sharp Iron Longsword" or "Sharp Sharp Iron Longsword". Also, each adjective can only modify things with a certain descriptor; i.e., Sharp only modifies Edged items, so no "Sharp Steel Club" or "Sharp Leather Armor".

Here's a picture of how the Inventory looks with a lot of items in it:

Yes, I'm waay over my carrying capacity there. Does it even do anything at all? Yes! I'll allow you to carry more than your STR (and VIT) scores will allow. However, it is NOT a good idea. "Moving at quarter-speed with quarter-agility(evasion)" not-good idea. Things are similar with equipment capacity. Inventory weight includes equipped-item weight (no putting your iron boots in your pocket and suddenly weighing less overall; just being less-immediately encumbered).

Items scale the ATK-growth with strength and dexterity in differing amounts. So, a katana is not a slightly-better longsword; it's more like a different-style longsword.

Menus scroll properly, which is a godsend should you ever (please never do this) pick up 200-something items.

Oh, and I colored the menus. I also reimplemented the main message to be multi-colorable. Right now it just shows the item you're standing on in the color of the item, followed by whateverelse in white, but eventually it'll show NPC names colored to their sprite and damage colored to a) the type of damage being done (red for fire, blue for ice, etc.), b) how healthy the damaged thing is. Probably b), I think it'd be more useful. We'll see.

Did basic non-integer turns. Right now the only thing that takes "a turn and a half" (sqrt(2) turns, really) is moving diagonally. Yes that's right moving diagonally won't really help you escape monsters. Well, except around corners for now because the pathfinding is still very stupid. I was thinking, "my line-of-sight is circular; how come I can move diagonally as fast as I can move straight?" So I fixed that bit of inconsistency.

Also, extremely excitingly for me, I'm pretty sure I've fixed all the memory leaks.

Woo.

For those of you who don't know what that is: In short, the game doesn't take up 400MB of RAM after playing for thirty minutes. Thank god. It's currently running at around 5MB (or 20MB if you open the inventory with 200ish items...), which is somewhat unacceptable given that it's just text. 'Course, it's graphical text, so that's really not too bad. As in, if I decided to throw in a tileset later on, no big deal, gonna use right around that much memory still.

So that's what I've been doing this past week.

Blatant Lies:

Turns out I lied when I said I'd have some blatant lies. Waitwh-