UnBrogue weekly seed

In the spirit of the Brogue weekend and midweek competitions, tinyrodent on the Brogue forums has organised an UnBrogue weekly seed, of which the first is here. It is a much more relaxed affair, running the 1.1.6 release candidate of UnBrogue (which I haven't mentioned here, because I was rightly concerned about the possibility of bugs) and more about the aesthetic experience of playing rather than score, or depth or other criteria.

(And for those wondering about UnBrogue, I've got three or four more bugs to fix, then I'll be releasing the next version with a more public announcement than a post in a forum thread).

Review: XCom: Enemy Unknown for iOS

Deep within the bowels of the 2K QA facility:
"You're operating on the minimum specifications... What is this madness?"
"We can't justify the revenue on the new iPad only. And who are we to prevent iPad 3 owners from enjoying the game for whole minutes at a time?"
"Aren't you worried about class actions suits?"
"These are iPad 3 owners. They put up with Apple releasing an out-of-band new iPad, they'll put up with anything."
"Very well - carry on."

Just another day in the saga of XC...rash.

UnBrogue postmortem

This isn't an actual postmortem, because I've not finished with UnBrogue, but the 1.1 series of releases is coming towards a natural conclusion (with soon to be released 1.1.6 - assuming there are no further bugs requiring fixing that I can resolve in this branch) and I suspect there'll be a significant break between the 1.0/1.1 releases and 1.2 releases for reasons to be discussed.

UnBrogue started as a personal variant where I added and changed a few things that were annoying me, and then grew enough legs that it became worthwhile releasing for the 2012 Annual Roguelike Release Party (and which I deliberately kept under the radar prior to then). The main focus of the earliest release were about making plate armour and staffs of lightning bolts less of a no-brainer choice, making ogres more useful allies, and trying to increase the viability of a stealth game which I thought had potential but due to a dearth of rings of stealth in games I had been playing was something I hadn't experienced.

At a more meta level, I was curious to see whether I could incorporate some of the ideas I had been playing around after having played and fallen in love with the Binding of Isaac, a game which is particular "content-wide" in the sense that you will only encounter a small vertical slice of the possible content in the game in any one play through. Brogue has some of that width, but I wanted to see how much further and in what directions I could push it and still have a robust and interesting game.

What went right

1. Choosing a great game and code base to base it on.

Brogue is a great game of ideas to play around with, and a beautiful code base to write with. This ensured that when it came to development I was generally working at the coal face of working on new designs and ideas rather than having to worry about the back end framework. This is especially important for roguelikes which have a large number of complex systems with robust and interesting interactions; and in a hobbyist area where motivation is always a challenge, you want to maximise the amount of time you spend doing interesting things.

2. Not limiting myself to ideas that I could argue be reintroduced to the main game

This meant I could quite happily go and break the beauty of the code in search of new ideas. There is some pretty ugly additions to the code (Talismans of the Sinister Hand being the worst offence here), but I could quite happily add lots of stuff without worrying that I was adding a second (or third) set of flags to a particular data type, or that the elegance of the code was being diminished by bolting on a new way of doing things.

3. Spears and war pike redesign

The entire 1.0 branch pretty much failed to change the flavour of the game because while I added a lot of stuff, you only rarely encountered it (talismans) or found it useful (shields) - the changes to armour impact on stealth and enchantment impact on sneak attacks notwithstanding. Whereas, redesigning how spears and war pikes worked immediately made 1.1 much more interesting because you had a frequently occurring mechanic which worked significantly differently from the Brogue baseline. They were (and still are if you are on 1.1.3) a significant source of bugs, but the idea (which had to be modified prior to implementation because the original plan matched what Pender did with rapiers) is sound, makes sense as a game mechanic, and contrasts with the way other weapons work. The mace and warhammer changes helped here too.

4. Honouring the implementation of the Discoveries screen while changing the intent

The implicit contract in Brogue is that you are always given enough information as a first time player to be able to make intelligent decisions from a turn to turn basis. The Discoveries screen is a great example of this: you are told ahead of time what all the items could possibly be, which you can use as a source of making educated guesses about what specific item you're carrying. UnBrogue breaks this contract: there are staffs, wands and potions which are deliberately withheld from this screen, as well as whole classes of items (tomes, elixirs) which don't appear on it. But none of the items which are hidden from this screen can be both a) randomly found in the game and b) harmful to you (allies are fair game) except where c) staffs/wands of summoning which as a class are listed on the Discoveries screen, but which list of monsters can be summoned by these items is hidden information. Brogue went on to weaken this contract in the 1.7.x release with charms which are not listed on the Discoveries screen, but are always identified; of course, weapons and armor, and runics were never listed previously and could only be enumerated through repeat play.

5. The crafting system

I'm incredibly happy with the crafting implementation in UnBrogue which I have designed in such a way that it is possible to play 95% of games without even knowing it exists. Crafting ingredients are always useful items in themselves, because the ingredients are (almost) always other items: potions, scrolls and so on; and the method of combining them is as logical as I could make it. There are three methods of crafting in UnBrogue: a) fixed crafting locations which allow you to combine two existing items to make a new one, b) certain talismans which are only rarely available and c) potions of Winds. The crafting system also forced me to add lots of items: the vast majority of which are incredibly interesting in their own right because of the way Brogue's systems have been designed, while allowing these items to exist behind the wall of item placement - because they are not randomly placed, I could add as many as I want freely, while leaking them into the game in a process I hope feels like peeling back the torn edge of the wall paper to find a hidden treasury. I've changed this approach slightly in 1.1.4 and later, so that the majority of these items can be randomly generated, while reserving some as craft-only special creations. The only instances where the crafting locations require a non-functional ingredient allow me to use this non-functional ingredient as the bait in one of Brogue's machine rooms or one of the many rooms I added to support these.

6. Armor redesign and armor prefixes

While making stealth degrade as your armour improved made plate armour less of a no brainer, armour in UnBrogue was pretty flavourless and uninteresting, runics aside. This changed significantly in 1.1.4 in two ways: I redesigned the existing armour types to make them more distinct, including adding three leather armour variants, and dropping one intermediate armour type; and I added armour prefixes which gave various armour types new abilities which in many cases were just buffs or tweaks, or the equivalent of low strength runics but with drawbacks. I didn't want to overburden the armour identification mini-game, which is already the weakest of any identification routine, so I made armour prefixes obvious - this also meant I could add more flavour to them without affecting suspension of disbelief; and one of the leather armour variants, robes, is effectively automatically identified as being runic to make things even easier. Armour prefixes have been pretty much great from their initial introduction, bar one which is undergoing redesign, but the work I put into the leather armour variants was at risk of going to waste because so few games result in winners in leather. So I compensated by balancing them up by allowing scrolls of protect armour to buff them to the equivalent power level (give or take) of banded mail. This may have made every suit of armour too useful: but it is a risk I'm willing to take to make them more interesting.

7. Adding lots of the right stuff

1.1.4 seems to have hit the sweet spot for item generation so that there is sufficient variety for every single play through I've experienced: 1.1.6 is getting to a similar place for placement of machine rooms in the dungeon so there's enough variation from game to game (prior to this version, there's not enough different rooms early on). I'll just quickly enumerate how much stuff UnBrogue adds to the game: as of 1.1.6, I've added 12 autogenerators (flavoured blobs of terrain which gets added to the dungeon), 12 reward rooms and another 23 machine rooms (rooms which have puzzle type challenges in them) - I'm guessing all up roughly doubling the original figures, give or take, and this doesn't include modifications to 3 or 4 existing rooms - 12 monsters (of which only 2 appear as 'regular' monsters in the main game), 5 melee weapons, 9 missile weapons, 3 armours, 19 armour prefixes (new 'runic' type), 3 shields (new item category), 2 scrolls, 14 tomes (new item category), 5 potions, 21 elixirs (new item category), 7 wands or staffs of which staffs of summoning can summon 13 different monster types, 12 wand or staff runics (new runic type), 2 rings, 22 charms and 16 talismans. Having said that, other than talismans, autogenerators and reward and machine rooms, there's very little of which is truly original: I would say across all these items only marking, grappling and extinguishing darts, potions of Winds, staffs/wands of Nature, Telekinesis and Detonation and wand/staff runics bring new systems into play, and Nature and Detonation both riff on ideas which Pender originally introduced to Brogue (bloodwort plants and explosive mutations).

Next to UnAngband (where I added over 1000 monsters to vanilla Angband), these numbers pale into insignificance - but here they have far more impact. Even the humble potion of Water is incredibly useful - you can steal items from monsters, use it to make your escape or cover your scent, make a temporary bridge over lava, create a steam bath to kill something in; and more importantly, due to the finite constraint on resources that Brogue's core design entails, these actions can be life saving and even game winning. At the same time, items I added as an afterthought can become core to a play strategy: I recently almost ascended relying on a staff of Dead Man's Ear which creates a immobile and inactive monster which simply acts as a damage sponge, which more than doubled the combat capability of my single troll ally since it acted preferentially as a target while he engaged in melee (wiser players than I would have taken a direct path to the amulet of Yendor using my wand of Tunnelling instead of naively walking the long way around).

These successes are testament to the core Brogue design, but also the strengths of the roguelike genre: provided you play to those strengths as Joshua Day has written about previously. And it turns out that my central thesis: more variety is better appears to hold for the most part, even if the variety is 10 or more sets of 3 similar items with the same effect but with non-uniform activations. As it turns out, the most problematic parts of the game occur when I try to strike out further with new abilities, instead of tweak and iterate on existing systems.

And in the follow up article, I'll write about what went wrong and discuss in more detail some of the stuff I've implemented and hopefully come to some more robust conclusions.

UnBrogue 1.1.4 and 1.1.5 released

This isn't going to feel like much of an announcement unless you have OS/X, as there are serious problems affecting the Windows and Linux build of UnBrogue at the moment that are preventing it from being updated to the latest version. However, I've released 1.1.4 and 1.1.5 in relatively quick succession and you can download the OS/X build here. For full details on what's happening see this thread on the Brogue forums - the tldr is that I'm going to be porting UnBrogue to a newer off-trunk version of Brogue to hopefully fix the above issues, but this will be some time away.


Changes for 1.1.5
- Staffs of nature charge half as quickly.
- Rewrote spoiler free changes from Brogue.
- Vault keys are rarer but vault items are always better than those found randomly.
- Add two more machine rooms.
- Fix bug where partial armor did not have a strength requirement reduction.
- Fix description of royal purple armor.
- Fix bug where regular staff and wand workshops would require a challenge to access.
- Fix charms of duplication.
- Fix (and enable) 'too boring' Brogue summoning circle room by adding paralytic gas. Paralytic gas makes everything more interesting.

Changes for 1.1.4
- Increase variety of items which can be found in the game (as opposed to made).
- Add wands, staffs of telekinesis.
- Add potions, elixirs, charms of regeneration.
- Add armor and shields of repulsion.
- Upgraded charms of winds to be charms of respiration.
- Add scimitars and cleavers which have Brogue's stats for maces and war hammers, but 1 additional strength requirement and which continue to attack enemies either clockwise or counter clockwise, randomly chosen, from your target. These may be overpowered.
- Add sickles and war scythes which are quick and can also attack up to two enemies adjacent to both you and your target.
- Knight's shields allow you to choose the target of any reflected bolts. Tower shields also block slowing and negation bolts -- these do not damage the shield.
- Remove banded mail.
- Increased chain mail's protection and strength requirement (so that it now acts like Brogue's banded mail).
- Increased scale mail's protection while making it noisier (so that it now provides protection equivalent to Brogue's chain mail but with a lower strength requirement).
- Decreased plate mail strength requirement.
- Add robes which are always runic and allowed with all talismans, cloaks which have the best stealth of any armor (including no armor), and furs which have the lowest strength requirement.
- Fabrics and leather are reinforced by scrolls of protect armor so that cloaks, furs, robes, leather armor and scale mail gain +1 to +3 protection when first protected by these scrolls.
- Added various armor prefixes to further increase armor variety -- these prefixes are immediately visible.
- Darts and javelins gain +1 to +3 enchantment when first affected by a scroll of protect weapon.
- Thrown weapons are now degraded by acid. You are not warned before throwing at the moment. Stacks of thrown weapons will restack if you end up matching the enchantment level through acid damage. (Requested by thaumato)
- Combining items can help identify either the ingredients or the resulting item depending on the identification status of the product and output.
- Add two new talismans.
- Lamias are restricted to liquids but appear in groups.
- Precise runic does not apply to bolts which only affect one monster (Requested by tinyrodent).
- Tomes of summoning do not summon bloats (Reported by tinyrodent).
- Guaranteed good charm rooms don't contain throwable charms.
- Change spelling of sabre to American English saber to be consistent with other American English spelling.
- No longer take half damage on level 1 (From 1.7.2).
- Fix dart stacking bug (From 1.7.2).
- Fix bug where level divided by water would end up with an area filled with corridors.
- Fix bug where water trap could be generated too far away from a fountain.
- Fix bug where explosive blinking staffs would cause mysterious corpse explosions (Reported by tinyrodent).
- Fix description when enchanting a cursed item.
- Fix for tomes of slaying/immunity when applied to an already enchanted item.
- Fix bug where you could naturally regenerate while in debt.
- Fix bug where acid damaged shields could block infinite blows. (Reported by Jadeite)
- Fix bug where extinguishing gas would not put out burning flying monsters.
- Fix automatic identification of talismans, elixirs, tomes.
- Fix crash caused by trying to land an impaled blinking monster twice (Reported by tinyrodent).
- Fix tomes of teleportation.
- Fix instances where enchantment is inadvertently revealed when the rune is noticed on runic armor.
- Fix backstabbing with a heavy weapon could cause zero or negative damage, and calculate fractional backstab multipliers correctly.
- Fix damage multipliers from rapier, saber lunging, spear, pike impaling so they don't get sneak attack bonus, dual wield penalty if these don't apply.

ggoDbye

Raph Koster recently sparked off a discussion about the role of formalism in game design and criticism by responding to critic and games writer Leigh Alexander in a letter. I recommend you read his response to Leigh's questions:

"when people say games need objectives in order to be ‘games’, i wonder why ‘better understanding another human’ isn’t a valid ‘objective’

games need ‘challenges’ and ‘rules’, isn’t ‘empathy’ a challenge, aren’t preconceptions of normativity a ‘rule’" -  Leigh Alexander writing on Twitter

Raph poses a number of questions himself in reply, but frames the overall mode of a game as being a conversation between designer and player; and argues that the types of art games which Leigh is defending the conversation is a monologue because the designer of these games takes away player choice. He draws such a strong response from the community he criticises because he's defending the conventional position against a more radical interpretation, but he also picks the wrong point to make and the wrong analogy to make it with. Andrew Vanden Bossche has already written about the fallacy of choice in games: in short, games are interesting because they do not give the player unlimited choice, but a selection of choices from a restricted palette. Raph's analogy of games as conversation fails for the most part because it is so rare to see a game redesigned after the wide release - although this may hold somewhat true for games with long public development cycles (Minecraft) or in limited alpha and beta releases.

I've been meaning to write about one of the more remarkable achievements in game playing I've seen for some time but haven't had the opportunity until now to do so. ggoDeye, a regular participant (and 8 time winner) in the Brogue weekend contest, and organiser until recently of the mid-week contests, recently achieved what could be described as the pinnacle of achievement of Brogue 1.7.2: a 'mastery' victory in a competition. A mastery victory is where you leave the dungeon at level 40 with all 25 lumenstones it is possible to get in the game. Short of conducts, there is no other way of beating the game more conclusively in the current version (in earlier versions it was theoretically possible to get to level 100 although no one had).

In the tradition of Brogue a maximum lumenstone victory usually means that the game has been broken in some important way, and a game balance fix will almost always be forthcoming in a future version of the game. Indeed, ggoDeye writes in the victory post of the jelly master build he used requiring almost superhuman levels of concentration to get this victory:

By D19 I had 30+ jellies and the ability to isolate and destroy dar parties. [...] I was so exhausted and frustrated that I took all of Sunday off from playing so that I wouldn’t do something stupid and blow my first real shot at a max lumenstone run in a contest. [...] Throughout this run I gained valuable insights into what I think of as jelly “herd physics.”
- Low HP allies can essentially teleport to the other side of the herd by shifting the herd’s inertia through shifting its center of mass (you). I once noticed a dar priestess move 20+ squares in a single turn as the direction of the herd reversed and higher HP jellies continued to displace her. I used this phenomenon to keep crucial allies alive when they were low on HP.
-High HP, fast moving allies can stick to the center of mass (@) better than anything else.

[...] While I have always enjoyed jelly master builds, I had not come anywhere close to fully grasping their true power and utility before last week. 1.7 has introduced bloodworts and superior ally AI and has really opened the doors on making this a reliable and predictable build option for securing max lumenstones. I’m fairly confident that I can turn just about any seed with a wand of domination and either a staff of tunneling or a charm of shattering (all before D17?) into a max lumen run now. However, I am certain that I will never be willing to do it again with a staff of tunneling. This run took me over 16 hours to pull off and I would not recommend it to anyone who wants to continue enjoying this game for the foreseeable future. This ended up being the most mind-numbing and eye-straining gaming experience of my entire life.

A quick couple of notes on the above commentary. A jelly is a monster in Brogue which doesn't inflict much damage but splits when you hit it into two jellies each with half the hit points. These new jellies do not regenerate naturally, but can recover with a source of healing such as the gas released by a pod from a bloodwort plant, or if they learn the healing spell from a dar (dark elf) priestess by consuming the corpse after gaining sufficient experience to do so. The wand of domination allows you to take control of a jelly and its children, and a jelly master build is a character who relies on having a swarm of jellies (up to 100 on a level) fighting on their behalf, and staffs of tunnelling and charms of shattering allow you to open up the dungeon by destroying walls so your allies can surround enemy monsters.

ggoDeye specifically uses the term herd physics because in Brogue there is no mechanism with which you can directly control your allies: they move simply based on the direction you move in in combination with the game AI, and knowledge of the surrounding terrain and enemy positions. Several items give you more granular control by allowing you for instance to build walls to block movement, or entrance a monster to have it move in the direction opposite to yourself, but none of these have the scalability necessary to benefit a jelly master. So in effect you are controlling tens of monsters at a time with a single 8 way movement each turn.

(Intriguingly, the 'teleportation' mechanic ggoDeye describes is known as enexto() in Nethack after the function that displaces monsters into adjacent grids as they push past each other, and is used in tool assisted speedruns of that game.)

The process ggoDeye goes through in this game is nothing like a conversation: it is more like mountain climbing, or an ultra marathon. We can appreciate ggoDeye's performance because it is on one level a pinnacle of achievement which is unlikely to be duplicated in the same way we can appreciate athletic success. But trying to find a sport analogy to fit games to is ultimately circular because sports are often games, and games can be enjoyed like sports - which means any comparison we make between the two will be clouded.

There is another performance comparison that is more appropriate than a sporting one - that of playing a piece of music. People have compared music and games before: both have groups of 'indies' and in some ways this comparison is more appropriate than games as films, but I'm suggesting here that game players rather than game designers are the actual performers in this analogy.

If we extend this idea of player as performer, what role does the game designer have? Song writer is the most obvious - but I'm going to suggest that Raph's formalist argument is about game designer as the maker of a ludic instrument; and while art (and many AAA) games take the position that a game designer is a song writer, they are in fact constructing instruments that only support one song.

(Or more facetiously, I tweeted this as "A game designer is an instrument maker who thinks they're a song writer and everyone else mistakes for a musician.")

The counter argument of course, is that the instrument may only play one song, but it is a song worth learning to sing.

And while this is mostly a metaphor, you can watch Chris Novello literally play Mario in a way that you have never seen before.

As for ggoDeye, he's chosen to play an instrument that many agree is a finely tuned work of art, and he's bent it it ways its creator only mostly intended. But as hinted in the title of this post, this piece was also a swansong, and he's moved on from playing Brogue to starting a business with his wife, leaving behind a recording of his melody and the notes he's made while playing. I wish him all the best.

86856527

Assuming you count 7DRLs as roguelikes, I've just beaten my second roguelike ever: Michael Brough's 86856527. I suspect this is the game that Keith Burgun is trying to make with Auro - you should go play it (and ideally beat it) before reading any further as what I'm about to say involves spoilers. For the record, I got 21 points, using three programs.

I'm going to commit the cardinal sin of back seat redesigning a 7DRL - or at least part of it. The programs in the game are generally 'top tier' in the sense they are equally useful for their cost, although there are some programs which are clearly great in combination. I'm going to focus on the few programs which are 'second tier' in the sense they are missing one of either overall utility or interesting synergy: the four I feel fall into this category are ANTI_V, KILL_D, DCRPT and to a lesser extent BOMB - I'm still undecided about POLY although the suggestions below indirectly buff it.

The first three second tier abilities are all enemy specific, and are still useful in the sense that every enemy is a distinct challenge, but they don't have much synergy with anything else, and are still not powerful enough to be necessarily a win-button against their specific nemesis. The challenge of course is figuring out how to improve them while keeping close to the terse descriptions in the current game. My suggestions are ANTI_V should change to 'Damage all virus for $', KILL_D should change to 'Destroy nearest Daemon[s] for [two energy symbol squiggles]' and DCRPT should remain unchanged but end up with a buffed implementation.

Rather that using ANTI_V and KILL_D to directly credit the player, the floor grid under these affected enemies should get an additional credit or energy when the ability is used provided it hasn't already been siphoned. This allows the player to take advantage of the level entry spawns to increase the overall floor grid values, and gives POLY a purpose beyond helping destroy enemies.

DCRPT should be buffed so that while you have it active, you are given additional information about the play area. My initial thoughts were along the lines of having one block with ???? for the program/score and ? for the alert level on each level which DCRPT would reveal, until I realised that there is one other fact which is hidden which would be useful to know: the identify of spawning enemies. DCRPT should reveal what each enemy spawning is instead of the Transmission icon, giving you an extra turn to plan how to handle incoming enemy(s).

BOMB is incredibly useful given that it doesn't take time to use: but it has the downside of destroying adjacent walls which would otherwise channel enemies towards you. I'd like to see the floor exposed by bombing walls to get either energy or credits like other floor sections, to compensate for this and add a further level of strategy to bombs.

As for further program ideas - I'm sure there are plenty, but I like the sparsity of the current design. I am going to suggest one, borrowing an ability in Auro, because it seems to me that the movement abilities .WARP and .PUSH are the most useful and interesting part of the game, and to those, I'd like to add .FORK.

.FORK costs two (or three?) credits, and allows you to 'Make one move freely'. Since using a program takes no time, .FORK allows you to move without your enemies responding - but also make illegal moves such as moving towards an enemy (when you'd normally attack), move onto an enemy or wall, and move off the edge of the play area, warping from north to south or east to west edge or vice versa. Fork allows you to .DEBUG suicide in the finest Nethack tradition and it costs credits to fulfil the old adage that time is money and to try to prevent .EXCH/.SIPH+ abuse.

John R

As the author of a widely lauded alternate history short story featuring John Riccitiello as the protagonist, I feel like I should comment on recent events. But it turns out Stephen Totilo has done the hard work for me, writing a thoughtful piece about the man, if not the company he lead.

John to me sounds like several company owners I have had the pleasure of working with - people with integrity, but also intelligence who have inspired those around them. A CEO is responsible for two things: communicating the vision of the company, and holding ultimate responsibility for its execution. You may criticise the decisions he has made, but it sounds like he has made those decisions with consistency and in view of the long term plan for EA.

It is often the case that people forget it is what someone hasn't done which is just as important as what they have done. EA has not gone bankrupt, or become worthless, the CEO has not left under a cloud or in ambiguous circumstances, the company has not become completely risk averse. People may hate EA, and by extension its CEO, because of the SimCity launch fiasco, but it is exciting to see so many people care about a game in the obscure city builder genre, as opposed to just another FPS.

For the record, I completely disagree with always on DRM and to a large extent with the software as a service model (Fuck you Google), but I can see why EA has made those choices - if not why they have failed to communicate them clearly.

Early coverage

86856527, Bump (Free Indie Gam.es, Metafilter), Sunk Coast, 24 Killers

More to come. And feel free to follow the results at 7drl.org and hit up Adam Smith on twitter if you want RPS to check out your 7DRL contribution.

UnBrogue 1.1.3 released

This version is intended to primarily be a bug fix release. I'm distributing through Dropbox as the Berlios backend required to upload releases is down at the moment - Windows, OS/X.

Known issues

- Monsters will not flee through water.

Changes for 1.1.3

- Rename 'stagger' to 'hit' in bolt damage description text (Requested by tinyrodent).

- Add combat message when a fire bolt is blocked by a shield.

- Armor of burden increases armor class by one for every two strength requirement increased.

- Armor of immolation increases immolation chance at +2 or higher enchantment.

- Add more toads to wand/staff of Toads.

- Added wands/staffs of Detonation.

- Adjust power curve of spiders created by Talisman of Spiders (Requested by ggoDeye).

- Add brief note about noise level of armor in description (Suggested by Creaphis).

- Allow charms to start with up to +3 enchantment.

- Cursed weapons, armor, shields, rings no longer generated in reward rooms (From 1.7.2).

- Staffs, rings, wands identified when you enter a reward room rather than when you pick the item up (From 1.7.2).

- Ensure bolts of slowing last at least two turns (so that the status effect applies and is visible for at least a turn).

- Add missing charm descriptions.

- Items affected by a talisman of rune mastery now display their full effects.

- Your allies cannot learn healing from Dar Priestesses.

- Fix to prevent fire bolts double hitting the last target they penetrate to (Reported by tinyrodent). 

- Fix crash when impaling a blinking monster (Reported by tinyrodent).

- Fix non-runic items appearing in runic reward rooms (Reported by tinyrodent).

- Fix force, cursed weapon descriptions.

- Fix cursed armor names.

- Fix bug where stolen items altar would detect everything on level (Reported by thaumato).

- Fix bug where shattering would always shatter reflective monsters.

- Fix bug where canceling using a staff when it had no charges would destroy it.

- Fix bug where canceling using a staff would use a charge and a turn.

- Fix bug where wearing another talisman when you couldn't remove a talisman due to your inventory load out would delete it.

- Fix bug where you could equip a talisman of [spoiler] while you are wearing cursed armor.

- Fix bug where multi-bolt items would use additional turns.

- Fix a variety of typos (reported by tinyrodent).

- Fix some rune descriptions (reported by tinyrodent).

- Fix negation not negating shields (reported by ggoDeye).

- Fix bug preventing obstruction being removed by tunneling.

- Fix staffs of tunneling not tunneling the correct number of grids.

- Fix scrolls of identifying not identifying all wands and staffs.

- Fix length of displayed path when targeting range limited wands.

- Fix elixir of light.

SEO

For anyone trying to find the Three Moves Ahead episode featuring Vertex Dispenser it is episode 128, from about the 36 minute mark. (From this twitter query). Not mentioned in the show notes, so I'm mentioning it here in case anyone else is searching for this iota of information.

Also, fuck Google.

Sidelines

Num­ber of entries for 7DRLC 2012 (last year’s chal­lenge): 100.
Num­ber of entries for 7DRLC 2013 (this year’s chal­lenge): 253 (so far). [Edit for the history books: 357 entries, at least 139 successes].

I feel like I should be handing out polystyrene cups full of water and cheering people on.

Curation

Indie Statik features a roguelike primer you could point your friends and family at to help understand the breadth of the genre. (Although by breadth, it seems to favour off-the-wall concept and tile sets).