Dev diary

[LuRsT]

I'll write here entries on progress for this project, hopefully daily.

[LuRsT]

First day

• Added a little TODO to get things started.
• Added a cool image to the project

Starting things slowly 😃

[LuRsT]

Second Day

• Added requirements.txt and a draft to start structuring the program.
• Made the item be generated for each run
• Added a corpora of objects to assist in the generation of the item in the end of the tunnel. This will be also useful later for creating other objects in the corridor.

Example of current output

For years the corridor remained unexplored, until it was found out, that it held the precious 'ladle of stone', from them on, countless adventurers ventured into the depths of the corridor, looking for fame and fortune.

[LuRsT]

Third Day

Not much progress today, just improved the item generator a bit and worked on my other project https://github.com/LuRsT/dragn which will support part of the combat system later on.

I also realized I need to make some dictionaries with values for materials in items, so each has different attributes, resistance and strength for example.

[LuRsT]

Fourth Day

• Started working on the combat system, got a simple draft working with pretty boring output

• Since I want items to be very changeable, I thought out of having the materials determine the damage a weapon does, plus some modifiers from the weapon itself (since a sword will deal more damage than a dagger for example)

• Running python combat.py now, produces this very dry and boring output:

Human hits Orc with their Halberd
Orc hits Human with their Sword
Human hits Orc with their Halberd
Orc dies

It's a good starting point for improving the text later, potentially summarizing it like The Human made short work of the orc. And some better alternatives ways of saying that a character hit the other.

[LuRsT]

Fifth Day

• Made materials damage modifier an int rather than a die, since the materials shouldn't have that much of a difference in damage.
• Added race to Character
• I'm liking the direction I'm going with the modular objects, but I may be going crazy with too many options, I need to stop so I can focus on the text.
• Added a quick draft for how the corridor run will kind of look like, here is how it looks like now running python draft.py:

For years the corridor remained unexplored, until it was found out, that it held the precious 'hand mirror of bronze', from them on, countless adventurers ventured into the depths of the corridor, looking for fam
e and fortune.                                                                                                                                                                                                     
Human hits Orc with their Magic Sword                                                                                                                                                                              
Ulfric dies                                                                                                                                                                                                        
Arnold sighs in relief and continues...                                                                                                                                                                            
Human hits Orc with their Magic Sword                    
Orc hits Human with their Sword
Human hits Orc with their Magic Sword      
Ulfric dies                                                                                                                                                                                                        
Arnold sighs in relief and continues...
Human hits Orc with their Magic Sword
Orc hits Human with their Sword                                                                                                                                                                                    
Human hits Orc with their Magic Sword                                                                                                                                                                              
Ulfric dies                                                                                       
Arnold sighs in relief and continues...                                                                                                                                                                            
Human hits Orc with their Magic Sword                                                                                                                                                                              
Ulfric dies                                                                               
Arnold sighs in relief and continues...                                           
Human hits Orc with their Magic Sword
Orc hits Human with their Sword
Human hits Orc with their Magic Sword      
Ulfric dies                       
Arnold sighs in relief and continues...
None                          

So, a long way to get there :)

• Had a shower thought about how the corridor could be created by throwing a warrior with a special weapon against many random enemies until they die, resurrecting and becoming the boss of the corridor. The amount of enemies they defeated would become the length of the corridor.

[LuRsT]

Sixth Day

• Changed weapons to have a kind + material, both determine the difficulty to hit and the damage the weapon deals. I may later add more modifiers, but this allows me to play around with creating many weapons to use.

[LuRsT]

Seventh Day

• Didn't do anything since I was ill 😷

[LuRsT]

Eighth day

• I implemented an Item model and added some logic to complete the full draft. Will publish on my entry.

[LuRsT]

Ninth day

• Started working on making the corridor an object rather than just a list, it should be able to shuffle itself in a smart way and hold most of the state between and during runs.

[LuRsT]

Tenth Day

• Added more races, adventurers can be dwarves, humans or elf.
• Added more races for enemies too, the Ogre is the most OP.
• Added food so the adventurers don't go hungry, food gives more health
• Added treasure (weapons) to the corridor for adventurers to pick up
• Started working on the story of items
• Released the first version with a pdf preview 😃

[LuRsT]

Eleventh day

Incredibly productive morning:

• Adventurers now either remain in the corridor (if they die), three goblins spawn in their place (if they die but are weak), 5 orcs spawn in their place (if they reach the end).
• Lots of refactoring, so now I don't deal with prints anymore, but just a list of strings, this increased my productivity.
• Fixed a bug where the weapons were not being recreated (This will come in handy when I add more attributes or names to weapons the more kills they have)
• Food now only heal until maximum health
• Characters loot weapons from enemies, I'm trying to make it so no weapon gets destroyed, everything is recycled
• Added an appendix so it shows all the creatures in the corridor and the weapons and their stats.

[LuRsT]

Twelfth Day

• I've been pondering on how to make the corridor more interesting, the fact that it gets harder and harder the more adventurers go through and adventurers are always created the same way, makes it quite unbalanced.
• I also checked the weapons, which are as of now:

Iron Sword           Damage: D4 2 	Difficulty: 1, 2 	Value: 3
Steel Sword          Damage: D4 4 	Difficulty: 1, 3 	Value: 4
Mithril Sword        Damage: D4 8 	Difficulty: 1, 1 	Value: 10
Iron Greatsword      Damage: D20 2 	Difficulty: 6, 2 	Value: 14
Steel Greatsword     Damage: D20 4 	Difficulty: 6, 3 	Value: 15
Mithril Greatsword   Damage: D20 8 	Difficulty: 6, 1 	Value: 21
Iron Mace            Damage: D12 2 	Difficulty: 4, 2 	Value: 8
Steel Mace           Damage: D12 4 	Difficulty: 4, 3 	Value: 9
Mithril Mace         Damage: D12 8 	Difficulty: 4, 1 	Value: 15
Iron Halberd         Damage: D6 2 	Difficulty: 4, 2 	Value: 2
Steel Halberd        Damage: D6 4 	Difficulty: 4, 3 	Value: 3
Mithril Halberd      Damage: D6 8 	Difficulty: 4, 1 	Value: 9

So, the damage die comes from the weapon kind, and the number in front is the modifier from the material, the difficulty is how easy it is to attack, the higher, the worst. The value is just a simple calculation I do to make characters pick the best weapon, but there's something bad here because the Iron Greatsword is better than most Mithril weapons, which doesn't make sense, so I want to improve the weapon system a bit

[LuRsT]

Thirteenth Day

• Some productive procrastination led me to work on the epub (creating all the markdown files per chapter etc). I'm just missing the links to things now, so the appendix can be used to see all pages where a weapon was used.

Evening

• I added a few features this evening which may make everything a lot more interesting:
  • Added Scrolls which heal or damage the adventurer
  • Made the characters become zombies when they resurrect, meaning that once they die as zombie, they disappear.
  • The weapons that are not used disappear from the corridor, there's plenty of them from all the characters, but I need to tweak this further.

[LuRsT]

Fourteenth Day

• Now that weapons drop when zombies die, it's too easy for an adventurer to pick up a very strong weapon, and since weapons are now also disappearing if they are not used, we end up with just a few weapons with all the kills.

Evening

• I had another idea. The corridor will change. Depending on the number and type of creatures it contains.
• Now the corridor becomes a tomb and spawns more zombies. This is just the first step 😃
• Tomorrow I will add another stage where zombies become skeletons when they die and after that, they disappear.
• Will release version 3

[LuRsT]

Fifteenth Day

• Insomnia allowed to improve the book structure quite a bit. Pandoc can be a pain sometimes.
• We have links from appendix to chapters and chapters are split into their own pages.
• Characters now have a last name to avoid repetition.
• Will release version 4 (epub and pdf versions from now on)

Evening

• Added initiative roll so it's not always the adventurer the one who starts the fight

[LuRsT]

Seventeenth Day

Forgot to write here yesterday, but here is what I did:

• The corridor now changes whenever a character reaches the end, if there's an item, they become the boss, if they defeat the current boss, they become the boss.
• The corridor also changes in name, so it can be a corridor, a tomb, a crypt, a dungeon, and a lair.
• Those names don't do anything for now, but I'd like for each to have different creatures that show up in between runs.
• I also changed many things to make the corridor easier to go through:
  • 5 enemies as a starting point
  • no Ogres

[LuRsT]

Eighteenth Day

• Added random stats to characters, this is one attempt at making potentially adventurers that can complete the corridor after it captures a boss, since now it's pretty hard to get two successful runs in a book (30 chapters, I bet I could get more if I was generating more).

[LuRsT]

Twentieth Day

Haven't had much inspiration lately.

• Made zombies weaker then normal characters, by reducing their dex and armor
• Made bosses become zombies to make it easier

[LuRsT]

Twenty-Fifth day

Haven't done much, but I'm starting to think that it's pretty much just gold platting now. I need to improve a lot of the text generated, particularly fights, and other intros and character descriptions.

I simply increase the chapter numbers to maybe 250 to hit the 50,000 chars. Hopefully it will have a good flow, I checked for 100 and it does.

Today:

• Changed how corridor types behave (becoming a lair will spawn an ogre only, a tomb will bring up zombies...)
• Little text fixes and other improvements.

[LuRsT]

Last day

I haven't done anything since the last update, today given I'll have very little time, my plan is to just clean up a bit and more specifically:

• Write fights in one paragrah
• Make some sentences not as repetitive
• Also need to add different monsters spawning for different types of "corridor"
• Pump the number of runs to 250 and see the output, if towards the end, it gets too easy, or repetitive, I'll change the number of enemies

Hopefully I can do most of it and publish the final result

ALL DONE!!! Finally, I am still not completely happy, but done beats perfect, so I'm going to publish this version as final for this years #NaNoGenMo