I shall be releasing an update to both The Lords of Midnight and Doomdark’s Revenge toward the end of June. This is the “Summer Solstice” update.

There are currently three fixes.

• Problem with Android rotation.
• Cowardly lords can still enter a battle.
• Characters are no longer correctly tinted by the time of day on the landscape.

Along with these fixes there will be a couple of new features. These features will be driven by the new gameplay rule system. The idea being that you can additionally enable certain features that will have an affect on how the game plays.

I have been planning this for a while and intended to introduce it with the c# rebuild that I am working on (slowly), but after requesting features for possible inclusion in regular updates I have decided to bring it forward. It gives an easy way to extend gameplay options.

Neil Swanson contacted me with a few ideas for new features and they have been rolled in to the gameplay rules.

I’ve also always intended to have a game difficulty mode: easy, medium, hard. So the intention is to use this in conjunction with the gameplay rules to leverage different types of play.

The following rules have been slated for development and have issues created for them on my GitHub repos. There are likely a few things to consider for them, so details may change.

• DDR – Original terrain travel times
• DDR – Armies attack when near an enemy
• DDR – Armies will continue a battle without just randomly leaving
• LOM – Cup of Dreams can replenish overnight
• LOM – Varied initial start positions
• LOM – Utarg of Utarg can become disloyal
• LOM – Doomdark will go after Morkin heavily if the Ice Crown is picked up
• LOM – Doomdark will guard the Ice Crown more heavily
• LOM – Change quest completion rules to align with Mike’s original intention
• LOM – Fey are not recruitable
• DDR – Fast Tunnels
• LOM/DDR – Impassable mountains
• LOM/DDR – AI Impassable mountains

The plan is to have the last 4 in the Solstice update, and the work on Impassable Mountains already almost complete.

It’s interesting that when you think of a simple one line description of a feature, how complex it can become when you start to develop it. For example, impassable mountains are just that. LoM and DDR already have a concept of impassable terrain with the Frozen and Icy Wastes, so dropping in Mountains seems simple enough until….

What happens if the friend/enemy is in a mountain? You need to disable approach and battle. Out of that comes the concept of AI Impassable mountains to stop the AI characters from freely moving around the map. But that has its own issues.

What happens when a lord loses a fight and runs away. Well in LoM they only leave on location and there is already a check that it’s not Frozen Wastes, so that becomes straight forward. But in DDR they move up to 3 locations away. It checks that the target location is not Icy Wastes but not if the locations to get there are. Which is why you can currently be bounced in to the Plains of Anvoril if you enter battle up against the Icy Wastes surrounding it.

In DDR special objects are randomly placed on the map. So they can’t be placed on a mountain, but technically they can’t be placed anywhere that can’t be accessed. There are a handful of locations that would be problematic. So either the map needs to be edited to make those locations accessible, or they need to be marked as un-accessible, or we need to allow particular lords or races to not be affected by Impassable Mountains – like say Giants and Dwarves. The later make sense as there are a few Dwarven fortresses that are locked away in the mountains.