Tag Archives: new features

If there were vague fears for the future itching in the depths of men’s minds…

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The following is the list of outstanding items that are currently on my feature list. The intention is to add all of these over the next few releases. They all have a varying level of difficulty to implement and some will be quick wins. I’m not going to commit to an order or when as much will depend on me being on a roll or not, but I will place a marker against the ones I original intended for the Summer Solstice release. If you would like to discuss the items in any more detail, please feel free to following the links to my GitHub page for each item.

panel_select, panel_think – Add Next/Previous buttons for Desktop – Summer Solstice

panel_select and panel_think need an additional Next/Previous buttons for moving through the pages. The mobile pager is not always obvious.

Option – Don’t swap after successful approach – Summer Solstice

Give the option to stop the auto switch to the newly recruited lord after an approach. Maybe this could be Enable / Disable / Ask with default being Enabled.

Option – Auto Seek – Summer Solstice

Add option to auto seek when entering a location. Doomdark’s Revenge already does this as seek is not a player action. Maybe it could be?

Option – Auto Approach – Summer Solstice

Add an option to auto approach when entering a location in LoM or when trying to move in to a location DDR.

Game Difficulty – LOM/DDR – battle algorithms

Adjust battle algorithms to give Doomguard more success. This would be a difficulty option.

Game Difficulty – LOM – Armies

Add more armies tracking Luxor, Morkin in LoM. This would be a difficulty option.

Game Difficulty – LOM – IceFear / Moonring

The ice fear is calculated based on Morkin’s distance from the Ice Crown and the distance from the warm glow of luxor. The ice fear is then fed in to other calculations.

increase the falling rate of Invigorated/tired, bold/afraid, + effect on + distance to Moon ring. This would be a difficulty option.

LOM: Campaign for Novel

Create a campaign that would mirror changes made for the Novel.

  • Lord of Silence
  • Tarithel the Fey
  • Utarg changing sides
  • Tunnel to the Tower of Doom

LOM: Gameplay Rule – Varied start positions

Allow various different start positions for the lords. Needs some thought to whom this should affect.

LOM: Gameplay Rule – Replenish Cup of Dreams

LoM – Locations that have a Cup of Dreams have the ability to respawn after x amount of time. This could be altered by the difficulty mode. Other ‘things’ could also be respawned. This would not be dissimilar to how DDR works.

DDR: Gameplay Rule – Armies continue to fight after attacking.

Currently in Doomdark’s Revenge AI Lords have the habit of leaving a fight. This option would make them act like LoM and stay until death or other lords leave. Another potential option would be for them to leave if they consider they are losing… Could also be linked to difficulty.

DDR: Gameplay Rule – Armies attack when near an enemy

Currently AI lords have the habit of not attacking enemies that are close by, unlike LoM. This feature would make them act more like LoM. Could also be linked to difficulty.

DDR: Gameplay Rule – Adjust lord death rules – Summer Solstice

In Doomdark’s Revenge the death rules for Lords should be tweaked to be more like LoM, meaning that can’t die until their army is wiped out. And not if attacking a critter with an army.

panel_map: Add Pinch and Zoom

  1. Add Pinch and Zoom to map for Mobile
  2. Add Shift and Mouse move for Desktop

Add guide and novella to embedded browser

Rather than open in a external browser, open the novella and guide in a embedded browser.

Is it any less hopeful than defending the Plains of Blood?

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lom_map
Last night I submitted a new version to the Apple App Store. The review process usually takes a week. So hopefully release 1.06 will be ready for Monday 18th.
Unfortunately during my device testing, I found a problem with one of the new features, and made an 11th hour decision to drop it from this release. The feature in question was the Map Pinch and Zoom. The problem was that not all the graphic elements were scaling correctly and during the zoom the focus point of the map was changing. The end result was that it was a little messy and I wasn’t happy letting it out. An evening of work will see the problem fixed, but to do that would mean delaying this release, and I’m painfully aware that the slow down problem needs resolving. So I decided to pull the feature. I know it would be have easy to just delay the release, but I need a working version ready and available on the 18th…

Thankfully, the Android version doesn’t need to be submitted until the end of the week, so I will make the changes and hopefully have the Android version ship with the feature. As long as testing this week proves everything to be working correctly, I will submit another Apple version with just this new feature as soon as possible.

I will upload the current version to the test servers tonight, as I would like it to take a good test pounding this week.

After this month release schedules will be slowed down, and I will go back to utilising the test process more fully!

His war-cry rang out across the still dawn

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This weekend should see the submission of Version 1.06 of The Lords of Midnight. It has a number of fixes and a couple of new features.It will likely be the last update, aside from a major bug fix, for the next month or so. Once reason for this is that I think I have exhausted a number of minor additions that I wanted to include. Over the month since the initial release, I have added about 20 new features, tweaked a number of features, and obviously had a number of fixes. I think somewhere in the region of 60 work items have gone into the last month.

Most of the bug fixes have not been major, but they do polish the game. Luckily, most of the changes should not had too much affect on players, unless you are particularly familiar with the workings of the original. I’m pretty happy now that the next release will bring the game as close to the original game play as I can get. I have a couple of more tests to do on a couple of possible problems with the AI over the next few days – just to ascertain if they are problems or not. But my initial gut feeling says they are not, but the proof is in the pudding.

Some of the feature changes again give the game more polish, but also help move toward Doomdark’s Revenge. So they have been worth the extra effort.

The main reason for not pushing out any more changes is that I need to move forward. I need to spend the next month getting the Desktop version complete. To be honest there isn’t much to do, but some of it is fiddly work. The identified changes are currently:-

1. Mouse Pointer – There needs to be one along with the context of what it is doing.
2. Resolution selector – The user needs to be able to choose which resolution to run in.
3. Full screen – The user needs to be able to toggle running full screen or in a window.
4. Graphics – The underlying assets need streamlining.

Of the above, option 4 is of interest, because I am hoping that this will help reduce the size of the assets required for the mobile version, and make it easier to include graphic sets in later releases.

After that, I can’t honestly see much that must be changed to make the desktop version. I play it all the time on my desktop. The above changes just tidy it up.

Once the desktop version is complete and shipped, I can then move on to Doomdark’s Revenge.

Over the months that I develop Revenge, I will trickle more features into LoM. But I will only start that once I break that back of the initial development. I would like to release a version by the middle of the year that includes some difficulty level changes and new scenarios. I would be nice for you to be able to replay the game a number of ways with different challenges.