Dungeon Colony Version 0.1.8.209

The food chain in Dungeon Colony hasn't been feeding your minions well enough in the past. To provide more nutrition, I updated the boars logic, allowing boars to reproduce. You may have noticed that boars eat the grass in the outside world. Grass boars eat now helps them prepare for offspring and fill up their tummy before bringing a new specimen into the world. How much each boar must eat is dependent on the entire population of boars. That is the somewhat unnatural way of limiting their numbers. Therefore, if too many boars occupy an area, they will eat up the grass and slow down their reproduction process 'naturally'. 
If you leave an adult boar to feed on grass for a long period of time, then the meat yielded will be larger than if you hunt for younger animals. Boars also are smaller, slower and weaker when born.

Don't move and stay quiet,... you may be able to spot a Mommy boar with her suckling:

Here is the summary of changes to the boars (v0.1.8.209):

• Game starts of with set number of boars, if the number of boars on the map drops below this amount, new boars will be added to reach the threshold again (given some timer).
• Boars can now reproduce on their own. Boars have a foodCounter that fills up each time they eat grass. When full, the boar is ready for offspring. This produces a new boar and resets the counter to 0. The limit of grass to eat is increasing exponentially with the number of boars on the map. Additionally, a natural limit to their growth is equal the amount of grass available. If a large herd eats up all the grass, the food counter will fill up slower and produce less offspring.
• Select a boar to find out how much more food it needs to eat until the next offspring arrives.
• The new boar offspring counter for each boar is also stored when saving the game.
• As boars grow, more meat is beomces available after killing the animal. Baby boars start with one meat. As a boar grows into adulthood, the fur resource is also added.
• Growth rate to adulthood is constant per growth level. There are 4 levels to adult hood each requiring to eat 100 grass to reach the next level. Reaching each level increases meat output by one. Each level also increases how much food the boar can eat, how fast it can walk, and, as an adult, it also becomes stronger.
• After adulthood, growing still occurs and more meat is added to the boar, up to a given threshold.

Other changes and fixes in this version:

• Leg Traps can now be re-placed and moved to another location, or put back into storage if desired.
• Fixes issue with collecting water and the activity of selecting a water tile to command a minion to collect water.

I have a new list of bugs that I will focus on next. But last night, I started working on a bigger new feature that will be the first steps into making the actual main quest of the game.

Prototyping on Paper

Here's a snapshot of my latest doodles which involve one of my many side projects on the game. Can you tell what it is about? Hehe, I don't want to reveal everything I do, but some obvious ideas ? ... My sister convinced me to post more of my notes (I'm no good at drawing) and I'm thinking to release a few periodically, if that's something you'd be interested in?

I use these a lot to visualize things on paper first and to discuss with the others. That one, for example, I sent to my artist. Drawing ideas on paper, rather than prototyping them, often gives me more time to delve deeply into the design elements.

Dungeon Colony Version 0.1.8.203

I've reached version (v0.1.8.203). 0.1.8.x is growing mighty large and, in fact, it should already have moved on to version 0.1.9.x. However, since the major change in 0.1.8.x was fundamentally changing core game engine modules I decided to focus on fixing as many bugs affected by the tile size changes as possible. Once I feel like the engine is stable, I will begin development of the next larger feature and move to 0.1.9.x.

Therefore, today's update fixes issues that stem from the core engine changes and addresses many issues caused by doors in the game. There are three types of doors: Wooden, Steel Reinforced Fortified, and Iron Doors:

The first thing I changed was the life points of each door. The previous values were too low to prevent enemies from breaking through. The new values are 150 LP for the wooden door, 250LP for the fortified door and 1000LP for the Iron door. Especially the iron door can keep enemies at bay given it's iron properties.

Before this version, doors had several issues which have been addressed as follows:

Door improvements:

• Balances Door health points, increasing each door's health to 150 for the wooden door, 250 for the steal reenforced door, and 1000 for the prison door.
• Fixes preview of rotated door within a container cell.
• Fixes rotating doors. Now doors can only rotate 180 degrees once placed. In the container the rotation steps are still 90 degrees per step.
• Fixes placement of doors:
• aligns doors to tile grid when previewing door placement.
• will only allow doors to be placed
• a): if no entity is directly colliding with the door.
• b): if a wall immediate too the door's hinges (on both sides) is present.
• c): when doors have room to open in either direction.
• Fixes issue with enemies who get stuck when they face a closed door instead of trying to break them.

And a bug fix unrelated to doors:
- Fixes bug that caused a pickup behavior from not being deleted from the stack.

I am not happy with the doors in general yet. The look isn't 100% there yet, so I will most likely have them redone. Additionally, I also want the opening/closing animation to be a bit nicer. Plus they don't break the shadows, which is something of lower importance though.

But for now, that's it for doors and I will move on to boars to address issues mentioned by many alpha testers. There seems to be not enough of them.

Dungeon Colony Version 0.1.8.198

This update brings Dungeon Colony to version v0.1.8.198 and fixes a range of bugs. Additionally, a new indicator shows the player when a container is full.

Take advantage of Name your Own Price to pre-purchase Dungeon Colony and help with development costs. Name your own price will soon go on break, so if you like this game and would like to see it completed, this is the best time to show your support. Thank you! =)

Summary of Improvements:

• Adds blinking indicator in inventory frame when the container is full. This applies to any type of container, also the bag each Minions carries.

Bugs:

• Fixes bug when clicking the rotate button that allowed objects like the workbench or dining table to rotate into walkable objects on the map. While that seems valid, it prevents certain game play.
• Fixes bug that prevented player from placing walls even though the target location was eligible for wall placing.
• Fixes bug that prevented creatures from storing small objects laying on the ground into containers that have a size smaller than a game tile.
• Fixes bug that caused minions to ignore stockpiles when collecting certain resource types from walls.
• Fixes issue with objects when attacked the target property never gets cleared when the attacker is gone.

Dungeon Colony Version 0.1.8.191

Dev-log from this week's nightly development brings Dungeon Colony to (v0.1.8.191):

- Dungeon Master leaves book stand when done researching a topic and displays a message to the player to select a new research topic from the list.
- Fixes bug that showed wrong warning message when trying to rearm a wooden spike trap.
- Fixes issue with collision detection and objects placement on map.
- Reduces the collision rectangle for stockpiles allowing creatures to walk over the border. This helps also fix bugs with certain games from alphas who reported minions being stuck due to stockpiles blocking the way.
- Stockpiles can now be moved and replaced once build, that is if they are not filled with too much material. If it's too heavy, then you will have to first move resources from the stockpile before moving the board elsewhere.
- Traps are now triggered by enemies and neutral units: Boars walking into a trap will trigger it too.

Play the alpha free, and if you like it, support development by pre-purchasing the game. Thank you =)

Dungeon Colony Version 0.1.8.187

And I'm back into development mode. After spending the past view weeks on business aspects, I'm glad to be back to working on code. But I have also played some games including StarCraft and Civ and I finally tried FTL, which is totally right up my ally (plus it was on sale on gog.com).

It's insane how much you forget about your own code if you don't touch it for a couple of weeks. Not necessarily the code itself, but how modules interconnect and relate.

So today's version moves up a notch to (v0.1.8.187) and fixes a couple of bugs:

- Fixes issue with Minions AI when they try to find essential resources but can't reach them.
- Fixes bug when minions try to empty their inventory into a container.

Dungeon Colony Version 0.1.8.186

This update (v.0.1.8.186) fixes a series of bugs and balances some game elements. Most of the changes have been available for a few days since I have silently released new versions to fix critical bugs. There has also been an increase in game traffic and, therefore, many more bugs reported. Again, thanks to all your playing and testing. Some of the main issues have to do with the AI and minions acting up. (I should really introduce the hand from Dungeon Keeper to slap the minions who behave badly)

Besides fixing bugs, I also went to the IGDA summit a few days ago and continued expanding on the business side of being an indie game developer. In fact, I will spend a lot of my time in the coming weeks focusing on business. For that, I want to thank all of the players who have supported the game so far. Once the business side is setup, I will begin expanding development into new areas. I am very excited about that, but that's all I can say for now. So don't expect to many game development news in the next couple of weeks.

There are two issues I want to mention as they have been reported frequently:
- Sometimes, minions are not able to find food or coins which causes problems with the AI. Also, the activity counters over the chest or dining table may increase to huge numbers due to a similar bug. (Thanks Karsten B.) I haven't found the bug yet, since I had trouble recreating it, but I suppose it has to do with the reach-ability of objects. If you can recreate it and if you save your game before it occurs, please let me know. Thanks!

Here is a summary of the changes/fixes since the last post:

• fixes bug with dead spider sprites
• fixes null pointer exception with minon-order locations when loading a game.
• improves performance with pathfinder
• fixes null pointer exception with order manager
• increases food output of nuts from 10 to 20 points
• removes fuel points from fur
• re-balances flower growing algorithm
• increases starting meat to 7 pieces
• improves bug notifications to server
• fixes bug that caused minions to be stuck when building walls over them (Thanks Johny193).