Hello everyone!

A very different update this time. The past 6 months have been pretty crazy with tons of new content added a breakneck pace. Following the Vault of Yendor update I ended up getting pretty monstrously burned out. Lack of motivation, hating the project, doubting its value, questioning my choice to be a game dev, blah blah blah, the usual stuff. Honestly at this point I'm not even really phased by this anymore. A few weeks of taking it easier and I'm over the hump and chomping at the bit once again to get moving.

I've decided to take a bit of a break from the endless push of new content and focus the next few updates on:

1. Clearing out as many bugs and crashes as possible as they have begun to pile up again.

2. Working on polishing up a bunch of the level generators. Mainly by adding some purely aesthetic assets to try to really sell each level type as a 'real' location.

3. Adding a whole bunch of text based lore and world building to the game. Something I've been sitting on since the end of Rogue Fable III.

Of the three goals this update focuses almost entirely on #3. I've been planning this work since pre-production and have been sitting on a growing document of ideas over the past few years so really this is just a matter of implementing a bunch of stuff that's been quietly fermenting in the background. This is a total change of pace from the last bunch of updates and its been a massive breath of fresh air to work on something so completely different.

So update 1.28 is mostly a lore and world building update with a few other odds and ends. The next few updates will cover a more balanced spread of the 3 goals outlined above. I've still got a mountain of actual content I want to get implemented before the end of the year so I'll see how long I can keep this up until I get the itch to start building new zones, enemies, bosses and classes again.

I'll put this at the top so that its clear what's actually being added with this update. If you want some more explanation as to how I intend to handle lore I've got a whole mini document below this section.

The meat of this whole update is a massive amount of text added to the game to help flesh out the games world and backstory. This all exists in world as signs, notes, unique object names etc. Its my intention to eventually have a staggering amount of this sort of text held in lists which can be randomly placed into the world in each run.

So the lore and backstory of the world is only gradually revealed to the player over the course of many runs (assuming you want to pay attention). I'm not trying to a tell a 'story' rather I'm trying to create this sort of ambient sense of logic and coherence. Currently this update is adding literally hundreds of lines of text implemented in a bunch of different ways:

• Signs: all written by Yendor and placed everywhere in the dungeon. These are typically rules, policies, and reminders to his minions. A huge amount of world lore can be conveyed simply through whatever Yendor is yelling at his minions.

• Announcements: I've added some new Yendor announcements that occur when the game begins. I intend to eventually have a pool of these for every zone transition in the game. This helps to characterize Yendor while also letting him slip in some lore about every zone in the game.

• Books: I've added tags to many tables in the world where Table-Objects can randomly spawn. I want to eventually have many types but books are one of the most basic one. These are books written by Yendor (allegedly) that he has graciously distributed to his minions as reading material.

• Magazines: another Table-Object. These are external publications with articles featuring Yendor. I plan to have a bunch of different magazine types each focusing on some different thing. Yendor of course gives all sorts of absurd interviews and makes many contradicting outrageous claims.

I want to redefine the Fire Mage as the most simple and streamlined version of a caster. He should be the most straight forward caster to play and likely the first one that new players come to grips with and start getting wins. His focus is entirely on damage output with basically no utility. So this is a first attempt at creating a Fire Mage that is just: different forms of raw damage.

• Ignite (Tier-2): A single target spell that does not require clear LoS to target. Has +1 range compared to Fire-Ball. Deals 12DMG (same as Fire-Ball) and then 25% damage over 4 more turns. So it deals double damage compared to Fire-Ball but on a single target and with much more permissive targeting. I'd like for this to be one of the highest, if not the highest, single target damage ability in the game.

• Fire Nova (Tier-3): A target based AoE nuke that also does not require clear LoS to target. Has +2 range compared to Fire-Ball. Deals 12DMG (same as Fire-Ball), but has a much larger AoE. Given its large AoE, long range, and permissive targeting you can pretty much always get value from this spell every time it comes off the 10T cool-down. I'd like this to be the most straight forward and highest damage AoE spell in the game.

• Fire-Portal (Tier-2): He still has this spell but I'm looking for ideas to replace it with something that is damage based. Probably not another direct use ability but rather some kind of buff or modifier. I want the Fire-Mage to have 0 utility.

The balancing on the numbers probably will need some tuning and balancing but the main idea I want to get with this class is just: simplicity but power. He's very good at killing enemies but he's gonna need some cross-class talents for utility. Every other casting class in the game should be tempted to take his talents as they just provide such easy to use raw damage.

His Wall-of-Fire ability will be replacing the Ice-Mages existing Ice-Cloud ability. Probably with a range reduction and no cool-down. His Burst-of-Flame ability will be reworked eventually to go on a Geomancer class where you can target any stone wall and cause a similar sort of 'burst' pattern of stone shards.

I'll be doing a lot more work here in the next few updates but I've still tried to knock out some of the more serious issues.

• Fixed a hard crash in VoY when pressing G to bring up the Goto-Menu. To many fountains on the Yendor boss level crashed the game as the menu did not have enough buttons.

• Kocha Duplicate: took a while to figure this one out but it was caused by the Melee-Golem lunging into the wall and killing itself in the same turn. One Kocha was ejected due to the lunge crash, and one was ejected as the golem just died.

• Kocha Golem Negative HP: was caused by the same bug above. The golem was not actually correctly destroyed and so when Kocha reanimated it, it had negative HP.

• Vault of Yendor scripting would break if the player exited and reloaded the level.

• Completely rewrote the entire Level-Controller system to fix a whole bunch of weird crashes and bugs. This often showed up as Yendor scripts running in completely unrelated levels. There were multiple reasons this could occur so I just ended up rewriting the whole system from scratch as previously it was a duck taped together mess that had grown out of hand.

That's it for this update! Most of the actual content is 'hidden' under the topic of: I added a bunch of lore text and signs lol. I'm going be creating a new thread in Discord if anyone would like to suggest additional text lines, signs, notes etc. I definitely plan to have way way more of this stuff by the time the game actually fully releases and I'd love to get some contributions from the community.

The plan for the next few updates is to continue adding more lore, to add a bunch of flavor objects and rework many of the generators, and most importantly to try to make some progress on cleaning up a bunch of the long standing bugs, crashes and issues. The plan is that text and sprites should have a low chance (not zero lol), of introducing new bugs and crashes so hopefully I can actually make some progress here.

Justin

Abilities and Talents:

• Shadow-Step (Power): nerf to one turn

Monster Balance:

• Shark (Nerf): Damage MHigh => Medium

• Challenge-Vault: 3 Sharks => 2 Sharks

• Steve is now dominate immune.

• All clockwork enemies are now vulnerable to shock.

• Enemies now face the player when they initially agro (purely visual).

• Entlings heal in water the same way Golems heal in lava.

Item Balance:

• Fixed a bug. It now grants 4MP + Potion Count

• Totem-of-the-Beasts (Nerf): Charges 5 => 3

• Lighting-Forged-Staff (Nerf): 9DMG => 8DMG

• Lighting-Forged-Staff (Nerf): remove item ability (spreading shock is powerful enough)

• Crown-of-Brilliance: 1INT, Mental Resistance => 1INT, 1Mana-Tap

• Crown-of-Brilliance: Make it drop from Wobi-the-Warlock (instead of Crown-of-Thought-Theft)

• Charm-of-Draining: 1Mana-Tap => 2Mana-Tap

• Orb-of-Flowing-Thought: 1MP-Regen => 2MP-Regen

• Hammer-of-Crushing: -1DMG

Environment:

• Tile based 'steps' are now all unstable. Unifies it with the actual up and down stairs. Adds more terrain interactions.

Descriptions:

• Killing-Strikes: "Attacking low HP enemies with physical damage will perform a killing strike."

• Sleep-Bomb (Smoke): "Creates a cloud of smoke that blocks enemy vision."

• Shadow-Step (Power): "Gives the player one turns of the Power buff."

• Life-Spike (Stackable and Healing): added space between the first and second sentence in both.

• Spectral-Shield (Magnetic-Pull): "Clicking on the spectral shield will pulls all enemies in range towards the shield."

• Spectral-Orb (Arcane-Bolt): "Clicking on the spectral orb will perform an arcane bolt between the player and the orb."

• Fixed Mind-Bender desc (he had the mental tether text).

Bugs and Crashes:

• Crash: when returning to a level in which an NPC is standing on top of a Blade-Glyph trap.

• Crash: using a portal in which the destination and all adjacent tiles were blocked by NPCs

• Crash: killing Bright-Shadow the turn after one of his golems goes inert causes a crash

• Crash: in crypt, drop walls blow up and then when moving over a previously opened door the game crashes.

• Crash: Vampire Lord can crash when one of his bats is created on a blink shroom.

• Bug: Dash-Attack (Recover SP) was not working at all

• Bug: Summon monsters (ex rat flute) onto a blink shroom can cause most to not spawn (crash text but no crash).

• Bug: Flash-Freeze had different targeting for water vs npcs. Now unified to work on all visible tiles.

• Bug: Level gen will no longer place side-vaults adjacent to solid objects on walls. Often resulted in holes or gaps.

• Bug: When leaving a level, enemies are not only fully healed but their wounded HP cap is reset.

Misc:

• New version of Random595s Impossible-Difficulty-Challenge.

This ended up turning into a mini document so I've moved it down here so that the actual update is clear.

First off, I have no intention of trying to tell a traditional story. There is no narrative arc centered on the player that progresses within a run or between runs. Given the unique mechanics of rogue-likes in which thousands of players field hundreds of characters through the same dungeon, a linear plot does not make any sense in my mind. There is no 'chosen one' and the player's quest for the goblet is not the 'story'.

Instead what I want to do is focus entirely on the dungeon itself and Yendor as a character. This is pure world building in its most raw form. I want to use signs, notes, announcements etc. to create the sense of a living, breathing, coherent world that exists entirely independently from the player. Yendor and the dungeon itself are the main characters of the story. The endless hoard of mysteriously replicating adventurers are treated as this constant nuisance and irritation.

All the world building and lore exists in world as physical objects and descriptions. I want it to be completely optional and unobtrusive by design. There are no forced cutscenes or dialog trees to navigate. Nothing in the lore and backstory is required to beat the game. The player can completely ignore everything and still play the game as a straight dungeon crawler. But its my hope that for those who do pay attention, the world will become a much richer, stranger, and ultimately more interesting place.

This is the backbone of all the world building and lore. I want to create the most realistic, logical, and coherent fantasy dungeon EVER! The twist here is that I'm not starting with a realistic world and asking: "what kind of a dungeon might evolve here?". Instead I want to take the generic Fantasy Dungeon, as depicted in every game, movie, cartoon etc. and treat every bit of its absurdity, and silliness with absolute, literal sincerity.

So we have this space in which dozens of different species coexist. Where most of the minions seem to spend their time either standing around or patrolling randomly. Where levels range wildly from libraries to sewers to natural looking frozen ice caves. Where an evil overlord sits gloating and flexing in the depths of this crazy fun house dungeon plotting various 'schemes'.

I want to treat this all as 'truth' and then ask over and over again: what would it take for this to exist? How could this actually be built and maintained? What kind of a mad man would create such a place? I want to treat this with absolute earnestness. I'm not trying to parody or make a joke of fantasy tropes I'm trying to essentially explain in pain staking detail how such a world could actually exist and function. The sort of 'stuff' that comes out of asking these questions is, in my opinion, both hilarious and very interesting.

• Why is there a fire zone and ice zone right next to each other? How is that actually maintained? What possible purpose could this serve?

• Why do monsters just stand around in random spots waiting for the player to show up?

• How and why do all these different species of monsters coexist in the same space?

• What do they eat? Where do they sleep? Where do they go to the bathroom? What do they do all day?

• Why is there a giant Ice Dragon in a chamber with entrances to narrow for him to fit through?

• Why is their a seemingly ancient crypt in a fortress that is otherwise inhabited by living creatures?

• What possible purpose could this whole insane place serve?

• And perhaps most importantly... what kind of a mad man would build this?

The whole goal (and joke) of the lore and world building is to endlessly answer these questions. So take any dungeon or fantasy trope, put it into the dungeon in its purest form and then ask: why, how, for what purpose? What comes out of this is utterly absurd and unhinged but my hope is that it all has this strange sense of internal logic. Its my dream that after being exposed to enough Yendorian Flavor a players will just start to fill in the blanks themselves. It becomes almost like a mini-game to try to explain why something exists, how it functions, what it means in terms of the overall dungeon.

Given the realities of solo development, my 'budget' for injecting lore and flavor into the world is extremely tight. I also think that 'story' in a roguelike should be ambient, environment based, not shoved in the players faces with unskippable cut scenes or giant text dumps. So I've settled on these 4 pillars for placing text directly into the game world itself.

Any object: table, barrel, bookshelf, bone pile, can be given a unique name to reflect its purpose and context. This can all be done without having to create endless new art assets. A table in a mess hall becomes “Mess Hall Table.” A table in a prison becomes “Torture Table.” A barrel in the ice caves might be “Frozen Ale Rations.”

This allows a single asset to serve dozens of distinct purposes, depending on where its placed and how it's labeled. I can essentially 'explain' large amounts of how the world works just by uniquely labeling objects in rooms and areas. All of this at the cost of some text.

Some objects are uniquely suited to this. Things like crates, barrels and sacks ask the question: what's in them? Books and magazines can use the same sprite but have different text for their titles and contents. Pipes spewing water in the sewers can have their descriptions list what sorts of crazy toxic stuff is pouring out of them.

Signs are placed all throughout the dungeon, serving as literal labels for areas and subzones. They communicate that the dungeon is not a random sprawl, rather, it’s an organized, labeled, and internally structured space. It also helps sell Yendors neurotic character where EVERYTHING has to be obsessively controlled and organized.

Furthermore signs can be used as notices, reminders, announcements, orders etc. This is how Yendor officially communicates with his minions. Any guard room, kitchen, training area, hallway etc. can have signs on the walls written by Yendor that help convey some piece of world logic or narrative. This is Yendors formal voice: trying to maintain order, enforce rules and project authority.

I think a lot can be revealed about how the world works based on the sorts of orders and rules Yendor makes for is minions. We can describe not only how the dungeon operates but all the sorts of things that have gone wrong purely by having Yendor 'yell' at his minions through passive aggressive, bureaucratic, sign postings.

Notes are the more personal, informal counterpart to signs. These are direct orders, complaints, or rants from Yendor to his staff. They help reveal his personality: petty, obsessive, self-important, and slowly unraveling under the weight of managing this logistical nightmare. These notes expose the reality of dungeon operations: constant breakdowns, endless delegation and rules clarification, and Yendor’s perfectionist misery as he tries to keep this whole crazy place running.

The Fantasy Dungeon is inherently an absurd concept that would be nearly impossible to actually create and maintain and notes are a great way to convey Yendors constant frustration at trying to keep this whole place operational.

These are the big theatrical broadcasts that trigger on starting the game or at zone transitions. They’re Yendor’s stage voice, delivered via some magical dungeon-wide PA system. Here, Yendor performs his role as dungeon overlord, complete with monologues, villainous gloating, and mockery of the player. He is performing for the player, for his minions, for the goblet and probably for himself, in the most bombastic and ridiculous fashion possible. This is Yendor as he WANTS the world to see him.

This is also an easy way to inject lore about the zone you are entering. Yendor can slip in bits of lore in his zone transition announcements. If I end up adding these announcements before the player fights bosses or triggered by other events then we can also use this to inject some additional lore.

This is a list of various little 'tricks' that I'm trying to use when writing all this textual stuff.

Basically every piece of lore in the game is in someway 'spoken' to the player through Yendors voice and Yendor has an ego the size of the sun. He's not only an unreliable narrator, he's so absurdly smug and confident that he acts like this gravitational black hole that just collapses plot holes and inconsistencies. Challenge him on some absurd detail and he'll not only affirm that its 100% true but he'll come up with some even more absurd meta explanation on the spot while sneering with contempt.

Dozens of contradicting origin stories for the goblet? Your puny mortal mind simply cannot comprehend its magnificence. Absurd things with seemingly no purpose maintained at enormous expense? You just don't 'get it'. Totally convoluted, ridiculous evil schemes... bruh its ok, not everyone has what it takes to be an evil overlord.

So we have a crazy world, built by a crazy person, and that crazy person is the only persons voice we can hear. This puts us in a very strange, and very open ended place where what's canon and non-canon become this very blurry line. Furthermore, because there is no conflicting voice of reason, the craziness ends up becoming... consistent? It should even start to seem totally logical and coherent. That's the sort of tone I'm going for.

For whatever reason (madness?), Yendor has this vision in his head of the platonic, ideal fantasy dungeon. To him it is just self evident that he NEEDS a fire themed area, an ice themed area, a crypt, multiple elaborate doomsday devices, a prison to lock up princesses, traps to thwart would be princess rescuers etc. He considers the construction and maintenance of such a space to be some sort of high brow art project and views himself as this tragic yet heroic tortured genius.

Of course building and operating this sort of place is an absolute logistical and engineering nightmare and this is what a lot of the lore and world building deals with. So in a sense the whole dungeon and its operation can be divided into two different broad categories:

1. Some trope or stereotypical feature that Yendor MUST have because...

2. All the infrastructure, rules, policies, regulations etc. that help maintain these absurd features.

So a lot of our lore and world building then just builds on these two categories. Half of the text is Yendor gloating and flexing about how clever, artistic and creative he is for creating... whatever. The other half is him tearing his hair out trying to make this whole crazy thing actually function.

Many signs and notes and even his announcements will reference past events. This is so easy to do and there are so many variations but the result boils down to: the dungeon exists in time. It has a past. Stuff happens here with or without the player.

As a basic example signs posted in guardrooms, kitchens, workspaces etc. starting with: "Due to the recent incident.... some absurd new policy or rule." I don't even need to explain what the incident was, but the implication was: something happened (probably involving loss of minion life), and now Yendor and the dungeon have been forced to react with some new policy.

In the same way signs, notes, announcements can reference future events. Upcoming meetings, training, staff events. Plans that are in motion and are about to reach some new stage. Construction projects that are in the planning stages. Really anything that's going to happen... in the future. Again this creates this sense of time passing. The dungeon not only has a past it has a future. It exists whether the player is there or not.

Whenever possible I want to label things with totally arbitrary numbers. Storage Room 7, Mess Hall 3 (south), Hallway 44B etc. Honestly it can just be randomly generated. The idea is simply to convey this sense that the dungeon is way bigger than the player ever sees on screen at once. It also helps to reinforce that idea of Yendor trying desperately to order and regulate this inherently chaotic and unstable place.

This also should put the question in the players mind of... is any of this even real? By not real I mean you should start to question (with horror) if Yendor actually imported 10,000 tons of sand to make an indoor desert and intentionally burred ruins in it because... Are the stones in the crypt weathered because they are ancient or did Yendor pay some contractors to do that? Is every pile of rubble or bones actually numbered and tracked in some insane spreadsheet? If proc-gen messes up and generates a dead end hall but the hall is labeled Hallway-7B... was that intentional?

While the monsters and minions are never given a voice themselves we can learn a lot about them through Yendors signs and notes addressed to them. All the things he reminds them of, scolds them for, pleads with them to do correctly, I can use this to convey:

• General laziness, bickering, and incompetence.

• Stuff they do during work hours or in their free time: stop building pillow forts in the dormitory's, stop sneaking into the pipes for a nap during patrols etc.

• Species specific quirks: ogres constantly eating everyone, orcs being rowdy and unruly, dark elves being these total snobs etc.

• Are the pirates actually pirates or is he paying some dudes minimum wage to stand around shouting YARRR all day?

• The kind of strained, bureaucratic relationship Yendor has with his staff

Same idea here. The player is never given a voice or a backstory but Yendor is totally aware that hundreds of nearly identical plucky young heroes keep crashing through his dungeon. He's fascinated by this phenomenon, he studies it, he probably has plans to weaponize it.

So as I talked about before, the 'story' of rogue fable is basically told completely from Yendors perspective and not the players. The players are treated like this outside force, this plague, infestation, this constant naissance that Yendor and his dungeon have to keep reacting to.

Its kind of meta but basically the in universe lore is totally aware of the absurd mechanics of roguelikes. Just as the dungeon is sagging under the weight of trying to maintain so many conflicting tropes, Yendor is going a bit crazy trying to understand where the hell all these guys keep coming from.

The last an perhaps most important point to make. I don't want to make this a parody of fantasy tropes. I'm not trying to write jokes, break the forth wall or have the universe be self aware. The in game lore is never winking at the player. Really its the complete opposite tone I'm going for. As far as Yendor is concerned being the greatest evil overlord and building the greatest dungeon is just this self evident life goal.

Everything about the world should logically derive from Yendor trying to fulfill and maintain this insane dream of his. Instead of trying to write: haha funny, its more a matter of like... reverse engineering. Once you accept the basic premise of Yendor as a character then the lore and world should really just write themselves.

Hello everyone! Hope your all doing well! A pretty major update this time, basically a first pass rewrite of The Vault of Yendor.

When I started this update about 2 months ago I had a pretty humble objective: The Vaults hadn't been touched in a long time and I just wanted to add some extra levels and enemies so that they wouldn't be quite so lame. We are just about at the half way point of development with another year and a half to go so I wasn't particularly concerned with finalizing anything at this stage. Really was just looking for a bit more content in this section of the game.

While doing the initial design work the vision I had in mind was: this is the final zone in the game so it needs to test everything the game has been teaching up to this point. It needs to be a distillation of the mechanical essence of the entire game. It also needs to be the most thematically dense part of the game since this is Yendors actual doom gauntlet, the section of the dungeon where his character is most prominently on display.

Naturally this led to a series of pretty deep design rabbit holes where I started trying to define exactly what the core combat experience of the game is as well as what Yendors character is like and how he manifests it in the dungeon which is sort of an extension of his galaxy sized ego. So a huge amount of the work of this update ended up being pure, foundational design work. I feel like I've cracked open some pretty deep design veins that are gonna pay off massively over the rest of the development cycle.

I've tried to inject as much of this insight into this initial set of Vault levels as possible but honestly, achieving this level of polish was never the goal for this update. So I ended up sort of spinning my wheels these past few weeks and getting burned out until I remembered that this update was supposed to be pretty humble and modest.

So I'm releasing it now in the form it was always supposed to take: a rough first past, a prototype for testing, analysis and feedback. I feel like even in this rough state its vastly superior to what we had before and taken together with all the design insights that will be guiding future updates, I'd say the last 2 months has been extremely productive.

I have divided all the vault levels into 'Large' and 'Small' levels. This refers to both the physical size of the level and also to the length of time it should roughly take to complete. According to my own testing and balancing a 'Large' level should take about 2:00 and a 'Small' level should take about 1:00 to complete.

The 'Large' levels are big, long, messy, and chaotic. They have a high likelihood of getting out of hand if your not careful and many of them may be total meat grinders if you don't tackle them perfectly. They will also have the more complex or elaborate level wide mechanics and will be where I'll be investing a lot of the 'art budget' to create some unique and memorable set pieces.

The 'Small' levels by contrast will tend to be much more focused, fast paced challenges. They can be thought of as a very hard 'skill check'. Do you understand how to deal with THIS unique challenge. Many of these are just a single tough fight in a very enclosed space. These will often be the more gimmicky or highly specific levels.

The Vault of Yendor is now 5 levels long. The first two levels are 'Large', the next two levels are 'Small', the 5th level is the Boss level with the 3-Phase Yendor fight. I'm hoping to create a nice little tension wave here that includes some massive, challenging fights in huge impressive arenas without having the whole thing turn into a grindy slog.

So we start things off with a bang with the two Large levels. As mentioned above, this is where I'll be investing a lot of 'art budget' into making these 'Large' levels really impressive looking. Just as things are in danger of getting grindy, we rapidly progress into the two 'Small' levels. This is followed immediately by Phase-1 and Phase-2 of the Yendor fight which should also be relatively fast paced. We finish things off with the giant Phase-3 Yendor fight as the finale.

I'll be refining this whole arc over the next year and a half but I think that this basic concept of: BIG, BIG, SMALL, SMALL, SMALL, BIG, REALLY BIG, is a really solid structure. Overall in terms of total timing, the entire Vault-of-Yendor + Yendor boss fight is supposed to only take about 15mins. Given a total game time of about 60mins we really shouldn't have more than 1/4 of the game time be spent in the end game.

Over the course of working on this update I ended up accumulating a mountain of level ideas, design write ups, and rough prototypes. A lot of these were very specific, gimmicky, or mechanically complex. For this first rough pass I decided to narrow the list down and focus on a set of more 'generic' levels. These are levels that are very easy to template: randomize spawns, waves, object placement, mechanics timing etc. I figured that this is the best way for us to get a really solid 'core' set of levels with a ton of variety.

There are now 48 unique levels, up from our previous 20, all of which have been reworked and included. The plan is to eventually have a pool of at least 100 levels for the final game release. Most of the future levels will probably be more specific, more elaborate, and more gimmicky. This should give us a nice mix of generic but highly varied levels + gimmicky, complex, and highly specific levels. The level selection will probably take this into account to assure a proper balance in each run.

• Portal-Waves (new): waves of enemies spawn repeatedly on various portals. By changing what monsters spawn, the number of spawns per wave, the delay between waves, we can get a lot of variation for each static level layout.

• Steve (new): Rethlits little friend now has his own set of levels! Steve is invulnerable and will chase you around the level while waves of enemies spawn on various portals. Only once the last enemy is killed will his shield come down. There are currently 4 Steve variants with sprites by Rethlit and Celtius The Dragon. This is an easy place to add future variety by just making more and more Steve variants.

• Lich-Walls (new): lots of skeletons that start very close to the player. Drop walls break open at a pretty rapid pace releasing liches into the level. You either need to use water or other objects to poof the skeleton corpses or else deal with the liches immediately when they enter the level.

• Slime-Tanks (new): big levels full of toxic waste and slimes. The new Slime-Tank object will 'suck' a damaged baby slime in and 'spit' a full health adult slime back out. This is def one of those levels that can be 'solved' quite cleanly but has a tendency to get wildly out of hand if you are not careful. This is a pretty quintessential 'Large' level.

• Sentinel-Waves (new): Uses the same Portal-Waves spawning mechanics but spawns Sentinels (from Arcane-Tower) and summoners. The main idea here being that if you don't kill quickly and cleanly the Sentinels will Mirror-Image and the Summoners will summon and you will quickly have a level full of enemies.

• Three-Ring-Circus (new): Another good example of a 'Large' level. Player starts in a small room surrounded by enemies. After every \[x] turns the entire outer wall explodes and reveals a larger ring with even more enemies. There are 2 walls that fall (so 3 rings of enemies), and then the final 'wall' will open a bunch of little nooks on the outer edge, all of which contain more enemies, one of which contains the stairs.

• Summon-Waves (new): an experimental level that probably needs more fine tuning. Every other turn Yendor summons either a bunch of Spectral-Blades, an Orb, or a Crystal-Golem somewhere in the small arena. Except for the Golem they all have relatively low health. The trick is that you pretty much have to be killing stuff on every single turn or else the map ends up filled with enemies.

• Arena (old): a varied set of levels that all start the player surrounded by groups of enemies. The main idea here is controlling the fights so you don't end up agroing the entire level at once. In the future this might get broken up into more specific level types.

• Portal-Loops (old): I'm not really sure what to do with these levels. They are probably the easiest ones to skip or at least avoid most of the monsters. I'm still undecided on if this is a good thing or not.

• Lich-Glyphs (old): bunch of skeletons in a big room. Again idea is to control the fights to not agro everything. Opening the glyph gates releases the Liches which will then start reviving skeletons as you search for the down stairs.

• Quad-Hoard (old): quite extensively reworked. Surrounded by groups of enemies that you try to take one by one. Drop walls quite quickly start releasing elementals into the level which will agro the groups. This one can get messy very fast.

• Golem-Maze (old): mostly just tightened everything up and added Haste-Totems and Speed-Floors to give the Golems a better chance of actually reaching you.

I'm trying to build up a roster of monsters that will cover every major mechanic that exists throughout the dungeon. I also want these monsters to synergize with each other in interesting ways as they are pretty much always fought in groups. While the challenge is supposed to be very high, I want to be careful to not introduce anything completely unseen before at this stage. As stuff continues to get worked on in the Vaults its likely that we will go back and introduce some of the more obscure and novel mechanics and abilities into the later part of the main dungeon.

The current roster covers the 'generic' monsters. These are the guys that can randomly populate our 'generic' levels. So these are designed in such a way that they should work together in interesting ways even when the exact group compositions are randomized. We probably need at least 5-10 more 'generic' enemies to fully complete this roster. In future iterations of Vaults-of-Yendor I will probably add a much larger set of specific monsters for use in the more specific and gimmicky levels.

• Knight-of-Yendor: a basic melee unit that will heal all adjacent allies whenever he takes damage.

• Demotaur: aggressive melee unit that tramples the player and lunges into range. He slowly gains melee damage every few turns while agroed.

• Iron-Golem: the basic 'tank' unit, just a buffed up standard Golem. Slow moving, high HP, high melee damage, and grab. Do we want something more unique for the Vaults or is it appropriate to just test the player on a harder version of a common enemy type?

• Shadowed-Assassin: the guys you really don't want to get hit by. Massive poison melee attack, Invisibility and Shadow-Step.

• Crystal-Golem: same as before. A reflective enemy to 'skill check' range characters who have not invested in any other source of damage. I'm fairly certain that this enemy will be changed to something less tanky but more offensive. The test is: do you have non-range damage? Not: do you have enough non-range damage to burst down a high HP tank?

• Cryo-Knight: a melee unit that attacks with a frost spear (so 2 range and deals slowing cold damage). He also summons Ice-Constructs adjacent to the player which are rooted in place but will melee you if you are in range. Initially I had him using Freezing-Clouds but this just ended up killing his allies. So the Ice-Construct is supposed to fill a similar 'zoning' role while avoiding friendly fire. He also summons Ice-Walls behind the player to block escape.

• Shield-Knight: never finished the sprite on this guy (he's not supposed to be a golem). A basic melee unit that has a Shielding-Aura that makes all adjacent allies invulnerable to damage.

• Sharp-Shooter: a basic archer that adopts the 'Sharp-Shooter' state which makes him immobile while drastically increasing his damage and range. At this point the range might as well be infinite (its currently 9.0), as 'Sharp-Shooter' state should indicate to the player: break LoS or kill him immediately.

• Death-Watch-Archer: another basic archer with a slow moving, high damage, poison projectile. This 'checks' the box of having slow moving projectiles in the Vaults.

• Arch-Mage-Fire: thematically this guy will eventually be redrawn as some kind of elemental type thing. Possibly a big flaming eye or something? High ranged damage, summons Homing-Fire-Orbs rapidly. Has a very high fire damage shield. He is basically a Fire-Elemental + Fire-Vortex.

• Geomancer: this is the anti-choke point enemy. He's currently implemented as a squishy caster but could just as easily be a stronger melee unit. His main ability is Stone-Punch which causes 'fists' to punch from each cardinally adjacent wall and deal high damage. So hallways and corners will essentially deal double damage. He also summons stone walls behind the player to block escape. I want to keep the range of his abilities short so that player can still use choke-points while he is far away.

• Lich: the 4 elemental lichs have been collapsed into just the Toxic-Lich. He works the same as before: summoning poison clouds and reviving his skeleton allies. He should generally only spawn with skeletons as they are immune to his poison clouds and benefit from his revive mechanic.

• Mindbender: currently using the mindflayer sprite. Could this just be merged with the Evil Eye in Arcane Tower? A squishy caster that confuses the player for 10 turns! So you either need to break LoS or kill him. Casts Mental-Tether which summons a 'Tether' adjacent to the player which immediately 'charms' you. This means you can move around the Tether but can not move away from it.

• Summoner: another one of those places where I'm thinking: should this be a generic, familier but harder version of a basic enemy type? Or should he do something special? Currently implemented with just Spectral-Blades and Spectral-Orbs but at a higher summoning rate than anywhere else in the game.

• Priest of Yendor: our only pure support unit (we need more). Heals allies, smites the player with a fast cool-down and casts Torment. Again the question arises: make him unique and surprising? Or just make him a buffed up priest?

Just some random balancing I did while testing these levels over and over again. Not really any firm feelings here. Very likely to change again (and again), before final release.

• Shield-of-the-Guard: 50% Max Block => 30% Max Block

• True-Shot-Bow: 7DMG => 6DMG

• Recovery (Base): 50% Healing => 100% Healing (of Healing-Shroom)

• Recovery (Greater): 125% Healing => 200% Healing (of Healing-Shroom)

• Shadow-Step (Base): 20CD => 10CD

• Shadow-Step (Fast): 10CD => 5CD

• Shadow-Step (Vanish): stays at 20CD

• Rage (the general mechanic): reduced the delay at which it begins to decay: 2T => 1T (its still pretty broken)

• Shock (Base): Damage 8DMG => 12DMG (even with the 1T stun I still found it quite difficult to get value from with the 10T CD).

That's it for this update! Despite the majority of work during the last 2 months being spent on fundamental design, I think this is still a pretty hefty update. There's obviously still mountains of work to do on Vault-of-Yendor (I've got pieces of it all over the 'floor' right now), but I think this achieves the initial objective of giving us a lot more variety and laying out a rough draft for future work and refinement.

My plan for the next update is DEFINITELY to try to take it a bit easier and focus on some clean up and bug fixing. I'm also planning to devote a bunch of time to doing a big world building pass and inject a load of Yendor flavor throughout the dungeon. The last time I tried to do an 'easy' update I ended up doing the giant equipment rebalance soooo.... I'll try to be more disciplined this time :P

Hope you all enjoy the new levels. Please let me know how they are playing! Suggestions for future level types or enemies or whatever also greatly appreciated!

• Fixed NAN damage on lava in Yendor boss rooms.

• Fixed a staircase in Golem-Maze that would not be accessible to ogres.

• Yendor will now start agroed and spout his dialog lines.

• TP Scroll will keep you within the current arena in Yendor boss rooms

• Game will no longer crash on reading empty signs (signs with no long text).

USER INTERFACE:

• Unusable Ability: when you don't have MP/SP/CD still select the ability and just display 'Out of mana' for example when you click. This stops misclicking and moving when you quickly select an ability and then click. Credit to Random595 on this one!

• Fire-Ball (Extended): desc now notes perfect-aim

• Fire-Ball (Focused): desc now notes 1 tile AoE

• Fire-Ball (Big): desc now notes 3x3 tile AoE

LEVELS:

• Vault-of-Yendor: will not spawn 1-3 'good' shrooms: blink, invuln, power.

• Three-Ring-Circus: now uses correct VoY wall tiles. This may change in future to some kind of circus tent or like a theatre curtain tile set.

• All signs now use just a mouse over Title and Desc. You don't need to click to read.

• Bosses in Branch-1 now all generate with same chance. We had a higher chance on the new bosses for testing.

BALANCE:

• Life-Spike (Healing): Range: 4 => 6 (no penalty)

• Life-Spike (Healing): Duration: 5 => 4 (no benefit)

• Force-Bow and Force-Staff now have a Power-Shot like ability instead of 25% chance to knock back. This unifies them with Force-Lance and Force-Hammer.

• Force-Lance and Force-Hammer (and bow/staff) all now have CD:5 => CD:10. They should be worse than the actual Power-Shot talent.

• Mana-Tap is now an enchantable stat ex. Crown-of-Thought-Theft

• Removed resistances from Yendor. I'm actually planning on removing resistance for a lot of casters that arnt explicitly elementals like... elementals. In some future game where the player has much more freedom to tackle the dungeon non-linearly and build up alternative gear and equipment sets, resistance heavy areas are fine. But for Rogue-Fable-IV you shouldn't get punished so severely for not having the correct elemental counter.

BUGS AND CRASHES:

• Fixed a level gen hard crash in Ice-Caves:4

• Fixed Steve crashing when killed by Discord. He now has an additional layer of invulnerability that guarantees he really cannot take damage from any source.

• Fixed: levitating down a pit on Zone-Level:4 will now always land you in the entrance room of the boss arena. Fights like Kocha break if you don't start by passing through the portal.

• Fixed: boots of grounding were not building past +10% ability power