Dweller 1.13.3

Dweller is back again after a disastrous release right before Christmas. I've learnt a lesson and I will try to avoid rushing a release again.

The game is available from all the usual sources: Android Market, J2ME and J2SE. Enjoy!

Dweller temporarily pulled from the Android market

There's a game breaking issue with pushable stones in the most recent version of Dweller which has forced me to temporarily pull it from the Android Market. I'm away on vacation two more days and I won't be able to upload a fix until then. I'm sorry for the inconvenience.

Dweller 1.13.2

This is a bugfix release that addresses some recently introduced bugs. I have also experimented with buttons/triggers on the floor that activate nearby traps such as a dart trap. It needs a bit more testing before I can release it, but I think it will be a good trap addition.

CHANGES

• The quickslot help message will not be shown if you have switched of help messages in the settings
• Menu item height increased on touchscreen devices to reduce risk of misclicks 

BUG FIXES

• Double item descriptions when browsing merchant goods
• Pushable stones could be pushed on top of stairs and swap position with the stairs and cause a crash when the stairs were used
• It is now possible to wrap around in menues again

The game is available from all the usual sources: Android Market, J2ME and J2SE. Enjoy!

Eight2Empire

Eight2Empire is the blog of graphics artist Thomas Whetnall. Thomas has been working on  a very nice 8x8 tileset suitable for roguelikes and CRPGs. The first version of the tileset was made available a few days ago. Visit his blog to download the tileset and follow the progress.

Vote for roguelike of the year

It's that time of the year again. Santa is busy preparing for x-mas and roguelike gamers are busy voting for the roguelike of the year. If you want to cast your vote head over to Andrew Doull's Ascii dreams.

Dweller 1.13.1

I released a bug fix version to address some recently introduced bugs. I have also streamlined the release process into a pretty smooth one line command to build all three versions of the game and prepare them for deployment to Android Market and the website.

CHANGES

• On J2ME devices the messages will now be drawn without a background color to make more of the map visible

BUGFIXES

• The problem with double quests in quest giver lists has been solved
• Quest givers standing on a tree gave a weird error message66
• Quests and item info could sometimes end up being to high and blocking actual menu choices. These areas of text are now scrollable
• On Android any text with shadow was rendering the shadow as white

  The game is available from all the usual sources: Android Market, J2ME and J2SE. Enjoy!

Dweller 1.13.0

Dweller has reached version 1.13.0. The new version adds among other things a new quest, improvements to the key bindings and a max range for bows. Full change log:

NEW FEATURES

• Graphics for triggered traps
• You can now bump into bookshelves to get a random book
• Added key bindings for all quickslots
• Added one new quest with a unique reward
• The cursor in targeting mode shows if you're targeting with a bow or wand

CHANGES

• Added a max range to missile weapons
• Item stats are only shown at the top of the item menu on large screen devices

BUGFIXES

• Items that aren't supposed to be generated could end up in the merchant inventory
• It was possible to completely mess up the key configuration on J2ME devices

 The game is available from all the usual sources: Android Market, J2ME and J2SE. Enjoy!

A new employer, a retrospective, bigwigs and a silly competition

After eight years at Jadestone Group I took the plunge two months ago and changed job. It was a hard choice to make because it was eight great years with a lot of fun. Here's some of the stuff I did during these eight years:

The Age of Mobile
It all started out with a tech demo of the SIP technology for Nokia packaged as a multiplayer mobile game for Series 60 handsets. A multiplayer mobile game eight years ago, imagine that will ya'! The challenges were as you can imagine quite a few, but the game was well received and resulted in a sequel for the Nokia N-Gage platform.

Some screens from Spirits for N-Gage

Next up was a lot of mobile projects for Boss Media, WilliamHill and Swedish game monopoly Svenska Spel where I did everything from scratch cards to casino games and slot machines.

When I look back I realize that Nokia runs as a red thread through a lot of the stuff we did back then and the Nokia project I'm most proud of has to be the multiplayer pirate adventure game we did for the SNAP Mobile platform that Nokia acquired from SEGA. The game was under development for a long time, but never really got a chance to reach a wide audience since Nokia decided to shift it's focus away from SNAP Mobile.

 High Seize - Sea O' Fortune for Nokia SNAP Mobile

The era of Flash

During the later half of my time at Jadestone the focus was shifted from mobile to web (the mobile department was put into it's own company becoming the now very successful Fabrication Games). My main focus was client development using Flash and Actionscript and we did things like the multiplayer skill platform GamArena and the dice and card platform DiceArena, now available at 20 of Europes largest gaming operators.

To sum things up: I'm damn proud of what I did at Jadestone. I learnt a lot and got a chance to work with some great products and some amazing and talented people. I wish them all the best in the future!

The competition
Now on to the silly competition I mention in the title. My new employer, formerly named SWAD (Swedish Application Development) underwent a brand change just as I started and we are now known as Springworks. As a part of the brand change a lot of company names were chosen and discarded. For three of the more serious names domains were bought just in case one of the names would become the new name of the company. As it turned out none of the names were used and Springworks was picked instead. During a Friday beer a few weeks ago we decided to hold a competition where we split up in three groups, took one domain name each, created a simple web page and put an identical message on each page. The message was:

"We had a really hard time deciding on a new name for our great company. This name and site was one of our ideas.We are quite happy we found our soul as a warm family of skilled engineers and came up with Springworks instead!"


The winner of the competition was the group that got the highest search ranking for the message we put on all three sites. The group I was in got the name BigWigs, and you could look upon this entire post as an attempt to push BigWigs.se higher up the search rankings.

Dweller 1.12 released

I released a new version of Dweller today. The new version contains some pretty big changes that will pave the way for more variety and things to do. The new version contains a quest system and an improved system for dungeon creation that allows for themed side-branches of the dungeon. Read more about all this in the previous post here. The game is available from all the usual sources: Android Market, J2ME and J2SE. Enjoy!

NEW FEATURES

• Quest system with the Goblin King and a few starting quests (more to come!)
• World generation has been improved and the dungeon will now be kept thematically intact with optional side-branches (not done yet)
• A couple of new map tiles for the dungeon (one with a static light source)
• The minimap visibility is remembered between sessions
• Added descriptions to some potions
•  Added two unique items
• Monsters start in an idle state. It is first when they notice the player that the start to attack

CHANGES

• Item info for items in the inventory is shown in the item menu instead of after selecting Examine (except on small screens)
• When examining an item of the same type that you are already equipping the stat values of the equipped item will be shown next to the examined item's stats

BUG FIXES

• Help popups weren't always shown when they should be
• Scrolls of Enchant could fail and still mention that the item starts to glow 

Roguelike Radio #14 - Resource Management

Another week, another episode of Roguelike Radio. In this resource Darren, Andrew and Ido discuss resource management in roguelikes. The guys cover topics such as food clocks and other similar resources such as light, disease and how to make every resource count. I particularly enjoyed the little side track into more interesting uses and implementations of traps. Another interesting thing was the discussion around roguelikes without enemies. Good job guys!