Pets and allies in Dweller

In Dweller there's a Bag of Monsters that you can come across while exploring the dungeon. When opened a charmed monster will pop up and fight along side you. It's the same as using a Book of Charms on a monsters, but it gives the warrior and ranger a chance to get an ally. Yesterday I added a Dog whistle and gave that to the ranger as a part of the starting gear. The whistle has an unlimited number of uses and when used it summons a dog (although you can only have one dog summoned at a time). The dog will work as any ally and it will try to attack targets adjacent to the player.

I am now contemplating if I should give the wizard the ability to summon elementals, but I'm afraid of the difficulty balancing this. The wizard is already powerful as it is.

Status update

There's a lot going on with Dweller and it will take a couple of more days before I can release a new version. I thought I'd share some of the things you'll come across in the next version:

The Crypt
This will be a new side branch of the dungeon, filled with all kinds of undead. At the bottom of the crypt there will be a new mini boss for you to fight. There's going to be a new kind of undead, Ghouls. Ghouls will be fast and come in large packs so you better watch out and don't get caught in the open.

More goblins
The main branch of the dungeon will host more goblins now that the undead are moving into their own side branch. Goblin Captains and Shamans will be among the new dungeon denizens.

The Ranger's best friend
As was mentioned earlier the ranger will now have a fierce dog to fight along his side.

Tutorial dungeon
New players will be able to visit a small tutorial dungeon to learn some of the basic concepts in Dweller. The tutorial dungeon will be accessible from the forest.

And of course a whole bunch of bugs have been squashed since the last release...

Stay tuned!

Dweller 1.18.0 - The return of Mana!

I have released a new version of Dweller with a lot of fixes and new features. One of the main changes in 1.18 is the return of the mana stat. The wizard will from now on use mana to cast spells. Mana is regained each turn and fully replenished on level up. Chose your spells carefully and don't spend mana on costly spells if a more efficient spell does the job equally well. Players who prefer to play Wizards will either love me or hate me due to this change. The game will be harder as a wizard, but then again, the wizard was the easiest class in previous versions.

Other notable changes is a lot of tweaks to item probabilities. In general it has become easier to find some of the rarer items. The game does from now on also offer a full screen mode that can be enabled from the settings menu.

#221 Add mana/energy as a stat used by the wizard when casting spells
#222 Add Mana Potions
#223 Add melee thrust attack to Halberd
#218 Add a length parameter to the Line area of effect
#149 Remember position in lists when selling
#109 Getting multiple books from bookshelves overwrites previous book
#224 Add a thrusting attack to Halberds that hit two targets in a straight line
#60 Add a fullscreen option
#229 Increase probability to find enchanted items
#230 Increased probability to find some rare items
#227 Adjust chance to find enchanted bows
#228 Evaluate chance to find Dwarven Mining Helmets
#226 Book of Sleep graphics wrong
#231 Fix freeze when leveling up while handing in a quest and getting a reward of an item type that is not yet equipped
#232 Fix performance degradation when message box gets flooded
#203 Rats do not move on the forest level when starting a new game
#128 Make sure that artifacts are only generated once per game
#130 Adjust out-of-depth monster generation
#233 Adjust random artifact names

Reintroducing energy/mana

I'm finally starting to wilt to the repeated requests to reintroduce mana/magic points (MP was a stat in old versions of Dweller). I did a first stab at adding a generic energy stat currently only used by the wizard. The energy is reduced when casting spells and different spells have different cost. Some energy is regained after each turn and I'll have to reintroduce mana potions. Now that I think of it I actually believe this will be a good change that will add a lot of challenge to the way you play the wizard class.

Dweller 1.17.12 - finally some new features!

This release is actually showing some promise since it does have a bunch of new features and not only bug fixes. In this version you'll find one new spell book and slightly buffed monsters deeper into the dungeon. You will also find that axes have a slashing attack that not only hit's your target, but also adjacent targets. The damage of axes have been reduced slightly and all of them have a small speed penalty to compensate for the addition of the area of effect attack. I also plan to add similar attacks to halberds and staves.

#210 Hide XP bar text when using a small screen (320x480 or less)
#211 Fix incorrect rendering of spell and melee graphics on J2ME devices
#212 Minimap button and quickslots are incorrectly hidden on touch enabled J2ME devices
#195 Knockback effect doesn't wake sleeping monsters
#213 Remove the Missile, Wand and Book on-screen buttons. Use quickslots instead!
#162 Improve the way you cancel spellcasting
#214 Added a new spellbook
#215 Axes should have a slashing attack that hit's multiple targets
#216 Buff a few monster types

Dweller 1.17.11 - J2ME users rejoice!

Yet another bug fix release. This time around the most significant fix was for J2ME users on touch enabled devices. On touch enabled devices interactive UI elements are scaled to be more touch friendly and this unfortunately screwed up rendering of some UI elements on J2ME. This has now been fixed and I really do hope that nothing else comes up and that I can finally have some time to add new content.

#206 The cursor will clearly show what item that is used
#207 Improved the way you interact with NPCs when using tap-to-move
#208 Add option to disable pathfinding when d-pad is visible
#209 Fix corrupt UI on touch enabled J2ME devices

Dweller 1.17.10

Unfortunately yet another bugfix release. In my recent change to the message box I did manage to screw it up a bit so the most recent messages weren't visible. Sorry about that!