Seems that there are still some nasty memory leak around that causes stalling in longer sessions. Temporary fix is to keep restarting Cavern. Also, last level should have three three switches (on three different land masses). If not, there must some generation bug. Never seen other than cosmetic issues on last level but will definetely look into this too. Some rings & amulets add damage only to melee/ranged/magic damage. Might be that inventory shows this addition regardless of what kind of weapon you equip. I have to check that one too. Some techie stuff: Cavern currently keeps every level you have reached in memory which is big waste and was planned to change in next release in any case. This complicated leak tracking as it is normal for memory footprint to increase during game. This is most probably also a cause of evil bug that sometimes lets Cavern exit without saving gamestate (reported on iPhone 3G) Writing this from Abu Dhabi, (a very hot place indeed ) but will return to imporvin Cavern as soon as I get back home.
Just wanted to pop in and tell Soulinhki what a great job he has done with this game. I picked it up on the recommendation of CommanderData and it's quite impressive. I've only put about an hour or so into it today, but it was all at a stretch sitting at my desk. It also left me wanting more. As a longtime fan of roguelikes I love it! Great work! Once I have put some more time into it and feel a little better qualified on the game I'll hopefully be able to contribute more to the discussion.
A quick question about the game. Is there anyway to tell the stats of items in your inventory? I can't find a way to tell exactly what the items do once you pick them up. In fact the only time you'll see stats for the item (that I can find) is when you are buying them in the store. I've picked up some potions and I'm not sure what they do. And it is a bit of a pain to have to equip weapons/armor to see what they do. Rings and amulets are also a bit difficult to understand some times.
There is no way to tell what an item does without wielding it or experimenting. Hopefully there will be a description box for the items in your inventory in the next update, along with a nice d-pad control scheme.
Ah, makes sense. I was thinking that is the case. It's more in line with a traditional roguelike that way anyway, right? Anyways, it's really a great game. I had a couple false starts before I had a good run going, but I got nailed by some mercenary. I thought my 9 hp would be enough to survive for the one more turn I needed to take him out but he got a lucky high damage hit on me and I lost it on level 9. I don't know why I was expecting a description box for the items. After all, no roguelike has them so why should this one? It's not a huge deal, I memorized all the damage tables for Rogue Touch I expect I can do the same for this game if given enough time. Hope your vacation is going good soulinhki!
Well, I really do think he should add a description box for the items. I wonder how much work it would be, though.
Quick question for everyone here. What classes do you guys tend to play? I seem to only have much luck with the warrior class. The archer guy seems really good on paper, but he should stop moving whenever an enemy comes into view. As it is now I accidentally walk right next to enemies all the time with him. I haven't tried the wizard yet.
It depends on your playing style. The warrior is probably the easiest for beginners. Archers are fairly simple too, only they can shoot from a range and seem to have less health. Wizards are the hardest and the strongest if you're willing to spend money on scrolls and collect ancient scrolls. Wizards can't hold much weight and don't have much health, and it takes a lot of gold to buy the potions and scrolls to support them, but they are the strongest if you know what you're doing. I just recently beat the game with the warrior class, and got 2nd in the global highscores. (my name is "!") The first time playing through is the easiest with the warrior for sure. The game is a tiny bit on the easy side for a roguelike, though.
Well great. I seem to be stuck in "A Very Hot Place." I'm guessing by the hell theme that this is the last level, so it came up rather unexpectedly, as it has been fairly easy going so far. Anyway, there seems to be a third switch I need to get to that rather portly demon in behind a locked door and I can't for the life of me find it.
Seems that there indeed is a glitch in generating last level that prevents sometimes access to all switches. I will be back to my computer today and will solve this asap. I'll most likely do a somewhat major maintenance update next week with planned memory management improvements and level generator fixes. On a sidenote, I was planning to add few special rooms and items carrying references to most active testers/forum posters, if you absolutely do not want your nick to appear in game just drop me a messsage.
Nice to see you back in the thread! If you don't mind me asking a really generic question, how did you get the idea for creating your own roguelike? It's always interesting to hear about how things like this pop up, and your game has a lot of ideas/details in it that sort of set it apart from the crowd.
I think I found another bug. I've encountered this twice now. The first time was near the bottom of the levels where I'd killed some dude and I think he turned to stone or something, but he prevented passage into the room beyond. And just now, on a new game, I entered an area beyond a sign that said, "Beware Snakes" and sure enough, there were 4 snakes. Dispatched them all at the mouth of an area and now their blood pool is preventing passage beyond.
Found the blocking-snake-blood issue. This will be fixed in next update. As with the Short Iron Sword crash bug, this was related to old item format (Snakepit is the first theme I did for Cavern) For last level, if the switches are unreachable there is nothing you can do, sorry. With new game you have chances to get working level. Yet again, this will be fixed in next update. johndramey: I've done programming as a hobby since teenager and always dreamed on making own crpg. Maybe the biggest influence came from an old macintosh game called TaskMaker, another one was Exile series. I started many rpg projects over the years of which none were finished - these were not roguelike with random dungeons. In the early 2000's hobby programming kind of winded down due to work and family things but when the iPhone was released I thought it was the perfect platform to finally make the dream come true. (not to mention it was about the same time my kids were old enough to withstand daddy working all nights on computer ). Cavern started as a fantasy rpg similar to Exiles but when Rogue Touch was released I decided to go with random dungeons. The result is somewhat a mix of both. For anyone interested, I've actually released one other game before, Invaders in 2000 for windows. It still has homepage at http://www.helsinki.fi/~ssierla/invaders.html, havent tested it in years so no idea if it works on modern pc's though.
I've never encountered any of these issues before, although one time it took a few minutes to find the last lever, as it was pretty hidden. Great reading, thanks. I have a place for indie developers, especially for indie game developers. I really do. Keep creating great games!
The Sword of Leech and Ring of Vampire don't always update the leeched hp on your actual HP bar. Not sure if this is due to lag but on one of the floors my hp bar wouldn't update, leaving me on max hp even whilst taking damage. Cleared the whole floor without dying or potting/eating, not sure if this is a bug or not, only happened the once. When you're in the shop and you have something highlighted, if you double tap the screen anywhere, it'll count as double tapping the highlighted item, thus selling it even if you're not double tapping over the highlighted word/item. Not sure if it's a bug, some of the stairs leading down have been hidden behind secret doors, which some of them are insanely hard to find, spent at least 5-10 minutes running around trying to find where the secret door is on one floor. When frozen some of the mobs will hit you with ice again, freezing you again. However, when freezing mobs they still have a turn after their first "you are frozen" message, so to speak. Making you unable to do anything due to being permanently frozen. It would be better if when hit when frozen, it wouldn't reapply the frost effect, until the next turn so you can actually hit or run instead of just being told you're frozen for 20+ turns (I suppose getting +frost resistance would fix that ;>). The high scores don't update properly, i've been able to "resubmit" once which ended up saying "(null)/(null)" for my rank and class rank and close below it instead of resubmit, I can understand if I got a low score and didn't make it on the high scores, but I got 33207 which is currently #1 spot! ! Things i'd like to see in future updates are; harder mode to play on, right now only the first few floors hold a threat, by that time you have enough money to spam potions and the loot you find pretty much allows you to ignore buying things from the shop. More items, Even though i'm still playing through it getting items i've not even seen yet (game 3 I had not come across the Frostbite, then found 3 of them on the same floor -.-), however, this is more aimed to wards the archer and mage, i've only come across 6 ranged weapons for example, and something like 11 melee weapons. Maybe something like a leveling up system, so instead of auto adding str/dex/int based on your char, you'd spend your own, even class skills would be awesome. edit: wtb a resubmit/update/add your local scores to the global scores.
Great tips, Juneau Leech and freeze issues is something that I have to take a look at. Broken highscore-resubmit is a known issue that will be fixed in next update. Actually, next update will also introduce a completely new highscore server that does not utilize google appengine - it's a lot more reliable and faster and should make 15sec waits for ranks history. Old server will be supported for a while for users with 1.2 and 1.3.x versions. Limit for one score per user outside of top 20 will be also lifted so ranks will be much more fine-grained. I'll try to transfer top 20's from old server. Some secret rooms can contain exit, most not. This is intended. I'm working on game balance, I agree that it gets a bit too easy after certain point. Status update on next version: -Lvl generation is 2-3x faster. -Cavern starts up much faster. -A lot smaller memory footprint. -Saves game state faster -> should solve issues with savegames on slower machines. -While focus is on stability and bug fixes, there are new items and secrets -Should be out early next week.
Awesome. Looking forward to the update. I've held off playing it at all because I've gotten down to the bottom twice and twice couldn't complete it. (The second time there were only two "rooms" -- the one I started in and a connected room with a demon and one switch. That was it, just the two rooms.) I'd rather not try again on the off chance it might generate a whole last level I can complete. The other changes sound interesting though. It'd be nice to see some changeups. For example, the first two games I played I never found a scroll of Magic Map. Then I found two on the third game -- first time I'd seen one. I'm glad there are items I still have yet to discover but Magic Map seems a bit on the rare side for what it is. Just by way of example, anyway.
