All things must come to an end...

And I've decided that as the year comes to an end the beta might just end with it. Unfortunately it means that all your highscores, heritages and heroes have been wiped in the transition. There's now a full version of the game available on the download page that does not have an expiration date like the betas had. If you want to see what a nerd can do in 12 days, you can find the latest change log here.

Owners of registered accounts can now reach level 20. Once a player with a registered account logs on the Epixx.org server a license file is made in the client's directory that enables levels above 10. There are no DRM or s*it like that to prevent the file from being copied to any other player so there is only one rule: whoever sends me a license file on email can claim the account it is linked to as his own. New versions of the game may require that registered users log in once on the Epixx.org server to get an updated license file and if the account has been claimed by someone else, you're out of luck.

Since there is no easy way for me to set up shop anytime soon, anyone who already has or will become a King or Queen while playing on the Epixx.org server can send me an email that mentions their account name and I'll throw the serial for that account in a reply. Folks who don't mind making "oh my gawd, I died again" videos on teh tube can also throw me an email with a link to your channel and the name of your Epixx.org account. If you sent even one bug report during the beta, you can also get a serial by letting me know your account name.

The address is nibbe at epixx dot org just in case you have missed it before.

HOTFIX: It seems my year ends with a 32 day month. A bug was found that simply allowed shooting without using a turn. This version corrects that. Sorry for all those who already downloaded the earlier client.

Heads keep rolling...

I've finished my pagan ritual and just can't eat more food ever... at least until evening. Anyway, two new Kings have been crowned in the past few days: Altren-A and Gifin-Gifcom. Although the second crowning was made by using memory mapping tools, these two (3rd and 4th) seemed legit by the logs.

As with all the Kings in the beta, I will manually go through the data to verify they're within the rules of the game and produce screenshots while I take a peek in-game to see what the equipment, talents and heritages were at the time. Here's Altren-A's and Gifin-Gifcom's screenshots just before they picked up the crown:

I can't promise I will do this for all beta Kings but I will add "Prince Altren" and royal assassin "Gifin-Gif" as unique encounters in the next beta. If you don't want your name to be used in such a way, please throw me an email and it won't.

Oh, I almost forgot. Softpedia has poked the beta and has given it clean bill of health. You can find it here.

What the... where's the end of the world???

Ahh well, better get back to work then.

I put up a change log for beta 3. It shows already implemented features and I'll keep updating it until the beta comes out in January. You can find it here. Other than that, the next few days might see less updates due to some silly pagan ritual that involves excessive eating and drinking among other things.

The King is dead, long live King Mercen...

This morning at 01:30:12 GMT our dearly beloved King Primus was slain by Mercen, excuse me, King Mercen. I cannot say anything for servers run by other people but as far as I'm aware of, this was the world first kill.

I took the liberty to browse through the server logs, snatched Mercen's heritages and character data to verify that the kill was made in-game and produced the following screenshot of the moment when he picked up the crown from the corpse of King Primus.

So, Mercen, you can now register your game using the following serial FY12K9YX or you can drop me an email at nibbe at epixx dot org (mention your account name so that I know it's you) and should this game ever go commercial you will receive a free copy.

Oh and sorry about the graphics at the ending, it's just because my sidekick hasn't yet finished them =)

Open beta part 2...

The next beta version is now available. See the Change log for more accurate information.

Lots of bugs were tackled, some new content was introduced and all heritages can now be unlocked in the beta making it otherwise a 100% full game except that the level cap is 10 instead of 20. The in-game tooltips of the heritages have not been changed so refer to the change log on how to unlock them and please don't report the tooltips as a bug =)

This beta will run until the end of January 2013.

What happens next...

I'm currently fixing a number of bugs and balance issues that have been found in the beta (there's around 30 issues I'm aware of ranging from missing sound effects to null pointer exceptions as well as the occasional "Evil Cheater" anti-cheat feature that didn't work quite right).

There's some issues that seem a bit trickier than the rest but hopefully all of them will be fixed by the end of the month when the next beta version becomes available.

Some survival tips...

When you start a new character, choose whether you want to cause damage using strength or agility. After choosing your path, set STR or AGI to 8 and STA to 8. This is the easiest way to start a new game.

When you gain more ability points, it is easier to place the first point on the damage ability before placing a point on stamina. This is because you will hit easier, cause more damage and take less damage due to enemies dying faster.

If you choose strength as your main ability, there's three talents that work best as the first talent: crushing blow, heroic charge and deadly throw. Throwing weapons without deadly throw is difficult because it uses agility to hit and strength to damage. Deadly throw changes it so that it will use the better ability for both and you can easilly kill creatures using nothing more than rocks before they can touch you.

If you choose agility as your main ability, you can go ranged or melee but if you go melee you should either equip one or two small weapons such as daggers (and possibly a shield with a single dagger) or a single medium sized weapon such as a sword. If you equip a medium weapon in the main hand and anything in the offhand, the main hand weapon switches to using strength instead of agility and your toon won't hit or cause any damage after that.

If you are having trouble with ranged creatures, you can try to wield a shield as it makes it harder for ranged attacks and spells to hit you. You can also run away and let the archer or wizard use up all his arrows or energy and then move in for the kill.

If you want to try shield bash talent, remember to learn dual wield as well because the bash is an offhand attack and it receives penalty modifiers to both hit and damage and will most likely miss or do no damage otherwise.

If you reach level 10 and find one of the monsters, either evade it if you hear its presence (and reset the dungeon) or use any and all possible ways to damage it from range and to keep your distance to it. This is just a reminder because the game gets much more difficult when you reach level 10.

Beta gameplay...

I've played the beta through to level 10 a few times and here's one of the times. I cleared out existing heritages so that I wouldn't have any advantage on this run. The rogue ended up being a fighter that knows how to read after I found a wand of wishing, which is one of the rarest items in the game and requires literacy to use.

The run went smoothly, albeit the rogue almost kicked the bucket several times, but in the end he's covered in almost fully enchanted set of items thus unlocking a new heritage if I happen to find a few more coins and a ring when the story continues...

The following movies are roughly 7 minutes each:

• Immoral choices (Levels 1-6)
• Poisons and stuff (Levels 6-8)
• Orcs and more orcs (Level 8-9)
• Cowardly wishes (Levels 9-10)

Are we there yet?

It's 3:04AM here at the moment and yes, after the final 15 hour push, we're there now. The beta is available for snatching in here.

The beta is almost the same as the full version of the game with the exception that it has a character level cap of 10 instead of 20 and timewise it takes about one quarter to reach the final battle. About one third of the heritages cannot be completed in the beta but they have been tested out otherwise so it's not a problem.

As for the difficulty level, it's somewhere between insane and masochistic and for fairness sake it can't be lowered. Just before uploading the game I checked the final battle one more time to make sure it works with the lowered level cap, gave the toon pretty much the best items obtainable and got my ass kicked due to a little bit of bad luck.

Almost there...

Little more polishing to do before it's ready for beta. One of those things to do was the splash screen seen below that takes away the pain of having to wait a couple of seconds for stuff to load.

Beta is closing rapidly...

A lot of progress has taken place and the game is now playable from start to finish. At the current rate, the game should enter beta in December.

Here's a few movies of the game play:

• Create an account and take the first steps.
• Slightly better start as an archer after a few tries.
• Some town actions and the adventure continues.
• Another day and a dungeon with a gruesome ending...

Amplify, fade in, fade out, cut, copy, paste...

Two weeks of doing the above operations as well as few others and the directory listing says that there are 234 files and 4 folders for now. It did take some programming as well as testing that the sounds actually play at the right time but now I can say that almost everything the player can do makes some kind of noise...

Fortunately I didn't have to do only sounds as my copy of X-Com said 40 hours played on sunday, which was pretty nice considering that it became available on friday =)

The town screen...

8 days, 90 hours and 1 town screen. This was one of the largest individual todo-list entries, if not the largest, and now it is done. Everything can be used with either keyboard, mouse, or combination of them both. Also shown on the screen below is a glimpse of the new background image which, while still a work in progress, shows the mood of the game pretty well, methinks.

Achievements?!? Oh noes, they're heritages...

5 days, 60 hours and 30 heritages. Heritages are almost like achievements - you have to do something to unlock them and then they enlarge your e-peen forever - but heritages also benefit the player character in some way.

Content is slowly evolving...

Couple of months has passed as I've been preparing for leave of absence from my day job. Now I have free time until April 2013 to finish this game and get poorer in the process as my savings turn into fat on my belly.

Anyway, here's a screenshot where the player is trading items with some merchant that just happened to be in the same dungeon. As with everything else, it works with either keyboard, mouse or combination of both. Keyboard users can tab between the views and mouse users can just drag and drop items back and forth.

New tileset and other stuff...

Last month has been very productive. A new tileset just appeared out of thin air as well as new talent icons. Interface and AI coding also leaped forward and monsters can now zap and shoot the player in addition to hacking and slashing.

In-game tutorial...

What can I say, I hate playing games where the user interface is usable only after you find how it's supposed to be played by pressing the "wrong" button only to find out it's the right one. That said, I plan to have the "annoying user interface dog" to explain all the possible user interface actions the player can make the first time such an action becomes relevant.

High definition graphics...

Two weeks of inkscaping and programming and everything is scaled up for bigger screens. Unofrtunately it was a single entry on my todo-list with this innocent looking title "- 48 px graphics..." and there's still a lot to do. I could've just done it with "gfx.setScale(1.5);" and do something else, but it would've felt even more like programmer graphics than it does now.

Spell icons...

Few evenings of inkscaping and almost all spell icons have seen the light. Just have to figure something for bestow and remove curse and do some tweaking here and there, and then I can get on to draw a bunch of talent icons.

Time flies by...

Todo-list just keeps getting shorter with around 40 main entries remaining. It doesn't quite tell the truth though because some of the entries such as "Sound effects" splits into 23 sub entries and those sub entries contain anywhere from one to thirty plus sound effects each. On the other hand some main entries, such as "Draw a rat", doesn't take more than a 30 minutes or so to complete.

Anyway, this isn't exactly a 7DRL but I hope it's gonna be finished before it ends up being a 7YRL =)

Monsters and stuff...

Lots and lots of new things have entered the game and for the first time ever, my todo-list has less than 100 entries remaining. Some of the new things added just in the past week include a mouse interface, action bar with hotkeys that can be changed on the fly, and a couple of new monsters that mysteriously appeared out of a friend's pen tablet.

There's still a lot work remaining but the following picture gives a pretty good glimpse where the game is at the moment:

Happy new year!

There's nothing quite as pleasing as having a full week of free time and having it ruined by power outages due to some lame storms (and cheap power grids). Anyway, it's a new year now and I didn't get an eye or two blasted out in the process by some stray rocket, so that's a big plus.

I did, however, manage to play around with my new keyboard thingy that fell out of Santa's sleigh and makes some strange sounds while those black and white keys are pressed, and came up with a midi sound clip for the login screen of the game. It can be heard here.

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