An update and development and other things

Not much to report. I have been working on the GOAP AI, which hasn't really gone anywhere. It's proving hard to represent the world state meaningfully in a set of booleans.

I've also been fixing some of the bug backlog, some good fixes going in there.

Other free time has been spent on Swords & Sorcery: Underworld and Occult Chronicles. Both great, I highly recommend them. Alas the little boy isn't going to sleep on my lap in front of computer games any more. My future gaming time may suffer as I'm forced to react to his new found mobility...

Where We Are

It's been a quiet three months.

Not for me; Connor is three months old now.

No, it's been quiet for development Escape From The Maze. Very quiet.

I have done a few things: replaced Attack Rate a better implementation, removed base stat boosting at level up (it becomes a bonus option rather than something you can spend a modifier point on), added some minor content, and tweaked a few things.

There was a complaint on the project page that the source distro wouldn't compile. This is valid, because it's just a roll up of the source code. He raises a good point though, and I'll aim to have a working source distro up before I upload the next release. That'll come when I have some free time...

I have been playing some Frayed Knights, it puts the little boy to sleep. I recommend it, although it's a very different flavour of Wizardry clone to what I'm aiming for.

On Balance

Balance.

It's hard. 

I remember someone from the World Of Warcraft team talking about the giant spreadsheets that they used to balance the game. Suddenly that approach doesn't sound so bad.

Progress has been slow, partly because I've had very little free time, partly because this automated balance approach is hard. I'm pondering taking a breather on Balance and implementing some features.

Here's where we are:

Combat classes 1v1 victory at lvl 1-30 vs the Reference Foe

I've been trying to define a Reference Foe at each level. This graph shows the wins of a single combat character versus the Reference Foe of that level. I've spent a lot of time tuning the Reference Foe, and this is the best I've got. For a "Balanced" progression, I would hope for 0.5 across the board.

Yeah. Hard.

One positive here: the Monk graph climbs nicely, as might be expected from the current Monk progression of bonuses. Monks are clearly overpowered at high levels, but it's nice to see the input data validated in the results.

I do still think that automated balancing is the way forward, but maybe it's time to get some features in too.

Unrelated update #1:
The wife is at 25 weeks. All is well except for the outlook of my free time...

Unrelated update #2:
Crazy Cleve has finally got Grimoire up on a funding site. I encourage anyone reading this to go and invest in his work, I have.
http://www.indiegogo.com/grimoireforever
Go get it.