Hey everyone! It has been too long since I've made an update. Nonetheless, I have been actively working on this project and doing my best to make it better. I've greatly improved the UI experience for navigating rooms, as well as adding more content/dialog to the characters. I've also fixed a variety of bugs that I'll detail at the end of this post.

Improvements:

• Certain rooms now allow you to hide from monsters. Hiding requires a knowledge roll which when failed causes you to lose a turn. If successful, you hide in the room, allowing the monster to run past you and allow escape.
• More interaction has been added for various characters. This is still WIP.
• UI has been greatly improved, especially regarding navigating rooms. 
  • The map is now easier to use on mobile.
  • Rooms with stairs now have an icon for them.
• A dialog system has been added, making it easier to differentiate speech and actions.
• The intro has been updated to better match the theme.
• The tutorial has been updated.
• The map and UI bar are now hidden when starting the game.
• Added max item/omen/companion stats to the character sheet. These can be increased with certain items/omens.
• The locked room now actually locks the doors and requires a knowledge check (or a key). Tower, catacombs, and chasm had similar event updates.

Bug Fixes:

• Depending on how you died, there'd often be other options that you can take even after death. These buttons are hidden on death now.
• Some monsters couldn't be eaten and would still show as a threat on the map. This is no longer the case.
• Eating multiple prey caused their dialogs to not show up. Multiple prey dialogs will now show up as they are being digested.
• The flame spirit didn't disappear when becoming angry. This has been fixed.
• Tower, catacombs, and chasm said they prevented forward movement even though they didn't. They now will prevent forward movement.
• The game of life wouldn't despawn.

Future Plans:

Overall, I'm really happy with how things are progressing in this game. I have a busy life but this is one of my passion projects and I enjoy working on it. One of my main goals is having a fun replayable experience that is cohesive. I think this game has a lot of replayability and is fun, but the companions, monsters, items, etc... IMO don't seem to connect. Each item, event, etc. has different mechanics, but they don't really help explain the world. That is something I want to work on more, is having some kind of story/lore to bring the characters more to life, while still having some level of randomness.

Overall, my goals are:

• Finish filling in the interactions for the current characters.
• Improve the interactions with characters.
• For example, an enemy that becomes a companion should have different dialog.
• Characters should respond in some way to your death, or when you clutch a roll!
• Characters should respond to each other and their surroundings. Maybe certain companions don't get along with each other. Maybe they don't like the items you carry or the actions you take. etc...
• Add an end game. Right now there is no way to beat the game. This is something I'm still prototyping.
• Balance. In the last update, I made the game easier by making monsters appear only after finding the first omen. I think this might be too easy. I've played games where by the time a monster appears, I can one-shot them. I'll probably tinker with the probabilities here.
• Additionally, the monster's navigation isn't very smart. Currently, it's pretty easy to run from enemies, making them less threatening.

I appreciate it if you read this far. I'm hoping to make more updates regularly and respond to your feedback! Have a great day!

Nerd Stuff:

Many of these improvements and bug fixes came from creating new tools to make the process of discovering bugs and rendering UI easier. The map, for example, is entirely created using an HTML canvas with no external libraries. When I first started this project, I was handling the x and y coordinates manually, making it a painful process of trying to get all the components to line up properly. I fixed this by creating a sprite rendering engine that allowed me to place objects relative to the screen or other objects. Effectively, I could add center monsters based on the room they were in rather than having to calculate the room's position, then the camera position, then the center of the room, etc...

The other improvement I made is that this project is written in TWINE, which uses JavaScript and is highly flexible and easy to use. Twine does not check that the actual javascript is valid until it runs the passage (or room/item/event/omen in this case). So, when the game is mostly randomly generated, it's really hard to check that all passages work and haven't been broken by some other change. My code is written in typescript and then compiled into javascript, so all the functions I create have strict definitions but aren't validated when they are used in TWINE passages. To fix this, I created a validation process that parses out all of the javascript code from the twine files and attempts to compile it back into typescript using the definitions I have. This works well and found a lot of bugs that I missed. I would love to improve this process more in the future, maybe even finding a way to run TWINE as a simulation so I can test different scenarios automatically, but that might be overkill in this case. These types of tests, of course, will not find visual bugs, so there are some limitations in their value.