- Finally... a new version of The Red Prison - 8 March 2022
Hey guys, firstly, can I apologise for the really long delay between new versions with the game. I was distracted by other projects and only just made it back to working on this game. There's actually a heap of behind-the-scenes changes, which I'll outline briefly, along with some important in-game additions, which I might actually start with because it's far more interesting. Additions to the game are merchants and guildmasters. In friendly settlements throughout the Red Prison world, you can find merchants who are stocked with various goods, ammunition and sometimes magic items for you to buy. Prices are affected by your charisma. Players start with some gold now as well, which is also affected by your charisma. There's even a unique merchant placed somewhere within the game (ok... he's in Cindemere), who has an inventory of powerful magic items to buy (or steal - more about that belo…
- New version released - 21 May 2020
Changelog: * Added ability for warlocks to select pact of the chain. * Changed monster death functions to account for summoned creatures not leaving corpses. * Fixed bug with quest generation when starting multiple new games. * Allowed for warlocks to create bats as familiars for testing purposes. * Finished work on shared field of view with familiars. * Added monsters: stone golem, swarm of bats, swarm of insects, swarm of poisonous snakes, swarm of quippers, swarm of rats, swarm of ravens, tiger, triceratops, troll, twig blight, tyrannosaurus rex, vulture, warhorse, water elemental, weasel, werewolf, wight, winter wolf, wolf, worg, wyvern, yeti, young green dragon. * Finished implementing find familiar spell so that you have a choice of a range of monsters. * Made it so that familiar vision now works properly in all graphical modes. * Added ability for allies to describe their traits…
- New version with overworld, quests, graphics update and more - 11 January 2020
A new version of The Red Prison has been released which overhauls a lot of features about the game, but in particular there is now an overworld to explore with a number of dungeons placed over the map, friendly towns to investigate and quests to undertake on the behalf of unique NPCs! The game plays almost entirely differently with these changes, and while it's all still a work-in-progress, there is plenty of new content to explore. The game will continue to develop from here with more quests, more NPCs, and the development of a story to discover while taking on the challenges in the many different dungeons. Other changes include a graphical overhaul of the world which makes things cleaner and a lot better looking.
- New version with variable move speeds for PCs, NPCs and monsters, and more! - 26 November 2019
Things have been a bit slower for me in terms of putting out new releases. That's been because of a combination of real life commitments which needed to take priority over game dev work but also because there was some big ticket items which would need a fair bit of time to complete and to properly test. This version is one of those big changes and the game now includes variable movement speeds for all creatures. While that might seem like a relatively small change, it required a lot of behind-the-scenes work to implement a kind of energy system for all entities and to translate that to work with each creature's speed. The big reason for the change was the intent to rebalance the game more in favour of melee combat and against ranged combat and spellcasters who spam offensive cantrips. I've always worked on the theory that each on-screen tile represented ten feet in terms of distance. Th…
- New version - warlocks, a proper endgame and much more - 8 September 2019
I've just released a new version and there's some really quite significant changes: * Warlocks - a fair few players have requested this class be added to the game and the current build has them in there as an experimental option. You can quick-start as an aasimar warlock to try it out quickly. It required quite a bit of work behind the scenes to deal with the different way that warlock's spell slots worked - rather than having spell slots per level like wizards and clerics, they only have a single pool of spell slots to cast all spells from. There's still quite a bit of work to do - there aren't any eldritch invocations in the game yet but there'll be a few options being implemented very shortly and there's plenty of room for more spells. I also need to properly implement low level spells being used with higher spell slots. It wasn't a big priority previously but it's an important aspec…
- Inventory management for allies - 27 August 2019
New version has just been released which allows for the player's allies to be controlled in terms of what weapons and armour they use. This should let character builds who can't use heavy weapons and armour, for instance, to kit out their followers with these things so that they don't go to waste. You can use this feature by 't'alking to your follower and choosing the inventory management option. This will give you the choice to give the follower items to equip or carry along with making them give them back or drop them on the ground. Hopefully it's fairly self-explanatory. The 'l'ook command has also been expanded on so that you can use that to see creatures (which practically at this time is limited to player followers only) and what items they are carrying and have equipped. I might expand this system to giving a visual cue to the player as to when a monster has a special item equipp…
- Dynamic dungeons with environmental traps, more powerful rogues and more - 23 August 2019
New version has been released with the biggest changes being the introduction of all-new vaults with interactive features. Currently they are limited to pressure plates which open and shut secret doors, but it has the capacity to be expanded to all sorts of effects. This is the way that I've decided to implement traps - rather than just a simple trap which causes damage without much other interaction, these traps cause the dungeon to shift around the player. Sometimes this will expose the player to unexpected danger, sometimes the player will find themselves having to survive without their allies for a while, or sometimes it'll just make exploration a bit more interesting. The next biggest change was the implementation of a form of the cunning action trait for rogues. Thanks to some clever user feedback, the idea is to allow rogues to always withdraw from combat with provoking opportuni…
- New version released with minimap! - 12 August 2019
With the latest version you'll have a minimap in the bottom right hand corner for all graphical modes. It shows the player, visible allies and enemies and marks the location of up and down stairs if you've found them. Hopefully this helps people navigate the dungeon a bit more easily and you won't have to change to small ascii mode to find the stairs!
- New version with wands, rings, potions and artifact weapons and armour - 9 August 2019
After a bit of a break from development, I've been back into the swing of things and have just released a new version. The main features of this version are picking up a bunch of small big fixes and changes that I've been making slowly over the last few weeks (while notionally not working on the game) and a big development push into expanding the categories and variety of magic items available in the game. These now include: * wands of web, fireballs, lightning bolt and magic missiles; * dwarven plate armour; * dragon scale armour of all kinds; * elven chain mail; * mithral armour of all kinds * oil of sharpness; * rings of poison resistance, invisibility and protection; * potion of giant strength (with different strengths for hill, frost, stone, fire, cloud and storm giants); * potion of heroism; * scimitar of speed. There are two categories of magic items with common and rare having d…
- New version - druids, dynamic quests and a heap more - 18 July 2019
After a few weeks delay, a new version is finally up for download. The delay was because I embarked on a bit of a complicated arc of development and the build was too unstable in various ways to release because of these big additions to the codebase. I've been spending the last couple of weeks playtesting and ironing out bugs and hopefully (!!!) the version that I've released is as bug-free as I can hope for and playable! Here is a rundown of the big changes: * Druids - new character class has been added. The big feature of this class is the level 2 ability to use wildshape! There is also a powerful selection of spells available from both the cleric and wizard lists and there'll be more custom spells coming over the next few months. * Dynamic quests - I've begun the work on making dynamic quests which appear randomly in the dungeon and assign you different and often competing goals. The…
- New version with six new playable races - 28 June 2019
I've decided to widen the scope of the game a bit and expand beyond the original four races plus subraces and things got a bit out of control! Now there's six new races to play: half-elf, half-orc, tiefling, aasimar, kobold and bugbear. This opens up some interesting new character builds: * Kobold rogue - high natural dexterity makes a natural fit for a rogue, but the pack tactics trait synergises really effectively with sneak attack. When you and an ally are both next to a target, you get advantage on your attack from the pack tactics trait and the bonus damage from sneak attacks which becomes very powerful. * Bugbear fighter/rogue - the key feature of the bugbear class is natural reach on all weapons and bonus reach using weapons already with that trait. What it means is that you can be a great weapon fighter and use a polearm to hit monsters 3 squares away. Or you can be a rogue with…
- New version released with two-weapon fighting - 25 June 2019
Two-weapon fighting is now an option for all classes. although fighters have the ability to utilise the two-weapon fighting style. Without that fighting style, the player can wield a light weapon in both hands. Light weapons include: daggers, clubs, handaxes, light hammers, short swords, scimitars, and sickles. The weapon in the player's main hand works as normal but the weapon in the off hand can make a single attack per round as a bonus action only without any bonus damage from stats and the like. If a fighter takes up that fighting style, then both attacks are made with normal bonuses to damage. It hopefully adds a bit of flexibility to builds and weapon choice in the early game and it seems like it could really come into its own if you manage to track down two powerful light weapons to use together.
- Reach weapons, new encounter system and a bunch of other changes - 22 June 2019
Some pretty significant changes took place this week: Made reach weapons work. This was something which didn't really occur to me as being a core part of the game but it's something that a few players have gone looking for almost immediately so it needed to get done. They work via the ranged combat menus by pressing 'f' or 'F' with a limited range. You can select a target within range manually or just use 'F' to auto-target within range. It works alongside thrown weapons as well so that if you're at range, those commands will throw at the target and if you're closer then they will default to a ranged melee attack. Reworked entire encounter and monster generation system. Single monsters are still generated depending on dungeon level and CR of the individual monster. Mob generation was reworked from scratch with new classes for Encounters and Monsters within that encounter so that special…
- New monsters, map segments, improved graphics and user interface - 13 June 2019
New version released and here's the full change list: * Fixed problem with combining various enchantment names by adding a name_tail variable for '+1' and the like to go along with name_prefix and name_suffix. * Added new monsters: plesiosaurus, poisonous snake, polar bear, pony, pteranodon, quipper, rat, raven, reef shark, riding horse, saber-toothed tiger. * Fixed bug with misnamed hawk as blood hawk. * Added change so that when trying to cast spells or do ranged attacks, if the attack or spell doesn't eventuatuate because out of ammo or spells slots etc, no turn is taken. * Added number of new dungeon vaults with emphasis on wide corridors to enhance party play. * Added feature to autoexplore so it finishes on the downstairs. * Resized native tile size from 16x16 to 24x24. Previously I had every tile at 16x16 for some forgotten reason during development and sized these up or down as…
- New version - name changes for player and NPC's, poison reworked and new monsters - 1 June 2019
New version released and the main things that happened this week are: * Custom names for player and for NPC's. During custom character creation you are still given a suggested name (and implied gender) but you can regrenerate this until you're happy or enter your own name. During the game, when giving orders to your allies, you can also choose to name them now as well. * Reworking of the poison system. Before this I just lazily created a 'poisoned' condition which applied 1 hit point of damage per turn for a set number of turns. This didn't really reflect how poison works in the rules where there are a number of different poison types which instead apply damage instantly with various dice rolls to determine this, along with the chance of saving throw against variable difficulties with differing results if you succeed... there's a lot to deal with there from a programming point of view!…
- Download issues resolved - 21 May 2019
It seems that there was a weird problem on the Steam backend which meant the game’s download link wasn’t showing up. It’s now resolved and hopefully everything is working properly.
