Hello everyone! Sorry for the long absence. Haven't been feeling well these past few weeks. Apparently working 10-12 hours a day, 7 days a week for 8 months without a break wasn't the greatest idea when it comes to mental and physical health. Who would have thought huh :P

Feeling much better now though and getting back into the swing of things. Sorry for all the bugs and crashes over the past few weeks, this update should fix most of them.

My plan moving forward for the next few months is to focus on each zone, one at a time and spend about a week adding a ton of new content to them. I'm about halfway through doing this with The Upper Dungeon so there's a ton of stuff in this update that's basically incomplete or a work in progress but I figured it would be best to get it out right now since it fixes a lot of crashes.

I'm planning on trying to get a much larger update out once a week on Friday with a bunch of new content for a specific zone. Bug fixes will also be addressed with any serious crashes been fixed with hot fixes asap as usual. I'll be on discord then on Saturday at 2:00pm PST to hangout and discuss the changes once we've had a chance to play with them.

I'll be giving a full update report on Friday when I actually finish this update. As mentioned above there's basically a ton of half finished stuff here that's getting released just in order to get the crash fixes out. A rough overview however:

GRAPHICS:
Totally placeholder at the moment. I'm doing a ton of work on generation that should eventually lead to a lot more interesting terrain in the dungeon with a lot more 'stuff' so that we can move away from the empty rooms connected by bare corridors look.

I'm planning on a lot more vertical elements with raised and lowered floors, platforms, pits, spanning arches, and a lot more multi tile furniture, structures etc.

In order to wrap my head around all of this I figured it would be good to start with an extremely simple art style, basically with no texturing or detail so that I can focus on getting the actual shapes and perspective correct and everything 'reading' clearly.

GENERATION:
A complete overhaul on much of the underlying generators. I'll have a better description of this on Friday once I actually start taking advantage of the new flexibility. Suffice to say, this is one of those huge updates that is required for future updates, but doesn't actually do much on its own.

That being said you might notice some slight differences and new features in The Upper Dungeon generation.

SPECIAL_VAULTS:
The Goblin High Shaman and Goblin Necromancer are now in the game with their own unique vaults. They still need some unique drops and will likely need some balancing so that they don't completely destroy the player. A big focus on much of this dungeon renovation phase will be on adding these unique, mini-boss like encounters.

I'm trying to hold back for the Upper Dungeon however since I don't want to throw anything to crazy or complex at the player in the early levels so these guys are pretty basic.

BUGS_CRASHES_AND_FIXES:

• Reverted the changes to slow movement back to orthogonal only. We had a good discussion on discord about this and I think slow = no diagonal is the best way to go moving forward since it creates much more tactically interesting situations. One of the goals going forward will be to simply never generate a situation in which a character needs to 'squeeze' since it tends to be awkward and littered with odd special cases.
• Between this and a few other fixes, I believe I've caught all the issues that were introduced with the last update.
• Added a check where the player cannot be healed after they are dead. This fixes a bunch of odd edge cases where life taps, regeneration etc. were restoring hit points after the player was already dead.
• Portals and zone lines will not drop 'pulled' npcs onto dangerous terrain. There were a couple of crashes associated with this.
• Fixed the goblin bombers throwing their bombs into solid objects causing them to 'poof'.
• Fixed the crash w/ the freeze spell
• Shields up will no longer work unless you have a melee weapon equipped. This is one of those odd ones where a change to code exposed what was previously a bug but just didn't cause a crash. I'm trying to remember wtf Shields Up was doing now with a projectile weapon equipped.
• Plugged a hole in the end level of The Ice Caves that was causing auto explore crashes and other odd behavior.
• Staff of Poison now has the correct max enchantment level of +3.
• It was possible to fall into the goblet room in one of the Vault of Yendor end variations. This is now fixed.
• Fixed an issue that a number of players were having w/ corrupted save files causing the game to fail loading at 99%. I'm not sure what happened here but I took a look at Zens save files and they were totally unreadable, so the game will now simply clear the saves and throw an error if this occurs but otherwise still start the game. Zen, Reykavik, Limeylocks, please let me know if this fixes the issue!

That's it for now! There's a lot more going on behind the scenes with this update and I have a ton of stuff that's semi complete and is just disabled until I can finish it, so as previously mentioned, I'll be doing a proper full update report on Friday when I actually finalize this stuff.

Thank you everyone for your patience and support!