Hi all, and a late happy new year!
It has been an insanely long time since my last update here, but I am reaching the final stretch of work toward being finally able to post the first part of the full game (out of 3), so I thought I’d make a post reassuring the few that’d care that the game is in fact not dead, and that I am still working toward pushing out new content.
I had been hopefull that what I’ll call "Act 1" of Ruby Dungeon would be out by last September, but as y’all can see this very much has not been the case. In typical dev fashion, I severely underestimated how much work was left and how long that work would take.
Causes for the slow developpement
A large hindrance for my progress have been managing the daily duties of real life. Up until october I had the pri…
Hi all, and a late happy new year!
It has been an insanely long time since my last update here, but I am reaching the final stretch of work toward being finally able to post the first part of the full game (out of 3), so I thought I’d make a post reassuring the few that’d care that the game is in fact not dead, and that I am still working toward pushing out new content.
I had been hopefull that what I’ll call "Act 1" of Ruby Dungeon would be out by last September, but as y’all can see this very much has not been the case. In typical dev fashion, I severely underestimated how much work was left and how long that work would take.
Causes for the slow developpement
A large hindrance for my progress have been managing the daily duties of real life. Up until october I had the privilege of being able to work "full time" on game dev as a gap year (tho even that time was already divided by preparations for my return to school, having to find an apprenticeship, school and a place to live). I have then been extremely lucky on these areas, having gotten the job and school I hoped for and living in a comfortable place close to those.
Unfortunately, none of that is helpful toward the Ruby Dungeon cause, as I now have dramatically less time to work on the game, my progress being at least 4 times slower then it was prior to being back to school/work (when I get progress in at all).
Another reason why developpement has been slower then anticipated is the amount of unpredicted work that came with the ideas I had, particularily since I try to polish everything I do from the get go, both from a coding perspective and for the user experience. That mean that systems take a long time being implemented to the best of my solo dev abilities, and I also end up piling fixes and polishes and QoL features everytime I add something new or test the game, continuously increasing the workload as I go.
The good news
Starting from yesterday, I am now finally done adding features and fixes to the game as far as what’s planned. I may find a few more bugs that’ll need fixing on the way onward, as one always do, but the entirety of the issues and ideas I had piled up so far are now done and dusted. All that is left is purely content, that is text, images and music with minimal programming thanks to the systems I have put in place.
The non-spoiler QoL features added.
(only the notable stuff, it has been a year)
I have reworked the inventory system, making it now a lot more readable.
I have added a status menu that allow to get a clearer descriptions of the character’s state and stats, making them less obscure then the arbitrary icons and number used.
You can also check allies and ennemies status during combat, this is especially usefull since boss can sometimes have multiple limbs, and so the status will allow to inspect limbs without needing to try a physical attack on it first.
I also added a shortcut system that allow you to map inputs to items in your inventory, allowing you to use these items by writing these inputs during combat or exploration without the clunky navigation through the inventory every single time. Especially usefull for items you’d regularily use and would get tired to navigate to every single time, like the teleporter.
These shortcuts being made by each player for themselves, it’s a nice way to make your own mapping of usefull items to keys that make sense to you as you play. Only having to map the items you personally care about in a way you personally will remember and understand.
There are also smaller features that were added, like the fact you can also now access the options menu during the game while exploring or fighting (especially usefull to turn off the sound when you wanna switch to another activity without being able to save the game quite yet).
On the topic of sound, I have FINALLY figured out how to change the volume of sound effects independently, so now you don’t need to lower the sound of your entire computer to lower sound effects. I also added a system allowing musics to stay loaded, up to a certain number of songs that changeable in the settings. That way as you explore the loading time for the area’s music only happens once and then the music stays in memory.
This avoids the clunky lag there was each time you’d change area on lower end devices, which became pretty obnoxious when switching back and forth many times.
Also, this goes without saying, but ***MANY ***balance fixes have been done.
The spoiler progress I will only vaguely hint at
Beside all that, I have on the feature side added new ennemy types with hopefully funky mechanics, status effects were also added, and usefull utility items like a "heal over time" healing item and chalk that allow to write on doors, that writing then showing for everyone when exploring to hopefully help with navigation.
I have also added all the NPCs that were planned for the first part of the game, as well as all of the armor for it, more then doubling the amount of armor in the game, and, finally, I added 5 new areas out of the 11 planned for the update, and 1 more boss out of the 5 planned.
The latest of these newly implemented areas is more akin to 4 areas in a trenchcoat, having taken months of "developpement" (not accounting for the fact most of my time is no longer spent developping), with an amount of content that is in itself probably not that far off from the demo of the game. This area is the one hosting the second boss after the one from the demo, as well as some npcs and causing most of the new systems I had to implement. Hopefully it will be worth it, I personally think it is the most interesting area of the first act despite it also being a completely optionnal one-
On the more tech-y side
I have continuously improved the code, as I go I continue to figure out better ways to make things or end up giving a second pass to some less cleanly coded parts of the game, and have strived to always make the game easier to work with while also having made the game more reliable. One big improvement on the reliability is with the pop-up asking to confirm wether you want to quit when pressing ctrl-c, I had a lot of moments where pressing ctrl-c would close the game without the intended warning that I have now proofed from being a point of frustration. (ctrl-c is the shortcut ending processes happening on terminals in windows, so it’s good to catch this shortcut before it close the game and ensure this isn’t an unfortunate miss-input from the player).
For myself I made some usefull tools too, making error handling more elegant with a Logger class, and also added a Debug mode to the game that allow me to see errors pop during the game despite them now being caught, as well as the ability to select the starting area when launching the game (tho in a way the player will never be able to access)
I have also been able to make nice tooling to generate the code for all dialogs of the game via simple CSV files, nothing fancy but this makes my work a lot more simple and remove one of the main blocking points against putting more npcs into the game. Dialogs need to all be rigorously linked up by text ids to be localised properly (I have a LocaleKey class keeping all the distinct keys for every single text pieces in the game, then each locale file need to specify a text for that exact key, and the dialog then need to also reference that exact key. This isn’t so bad on it’s own, but repeated around 150 times over 4 hours it gets very annoying very quickly, so automatising that has been a major time saver since).
What is left
As mentionned, in total 11 areas and 5 bosses were planned to be added, for a total of 14 areas and 6 bosses in act 1 when taking into account content from the demo. (Btw "Act" is a pretty loosy goosily used term here, it’s just to say the game will be released in 3 parts but this isn’t a linear narrative kind of game).
As mentionned before, half the areas have been made and a boss has been added. Meaning that there’s only 6 areas and 4 bosses left to implement. Broadly, that’s 14 to 20 drawings for the areas and bosses, plus some small ennemy sprites, around 9 musics to be made, and texts for all of that as well as some small snippets of code for the special logic of bosses and the like.
If I was still full time, I’d consider it light work, and compared to all that was done I think it will be light work, but I am also no longer full time so even that will take a long while. Nonetheless, it’s safe to say I am in the final stretch before finally being able to let the baby out.
At the rythm I’m going at it will likely take a few months to make all the content I need to, and once I’m done I’ll probably make some more fixes to polish the new stuff up and give myself a few extra months to test the game and prepare a minimum amount of marketing material for it. Altho I despise working on marketing and likely will neglige it a large amount.
Nevertheless, I am very hopefull Act 1 will be coming out this year. Not a high bar to reach considering we’re in January, but the past year has taught me not to be overconfident in my time estimations...
Conclusion
That is pretty much it for this dev log, I have written written way too much for way too long, but such is the cost of not making regular devlogs before having a krilion features I guess.
Do not expect all of the "new stuff" mentionned above to be made public any time soon, as said in the conclusion.
I hope it isn’t frustrating for anyone to continue waiting so long for stuff to come out, and I know making small regular updates would be much better algorithmically, but I strongly believe playing the game chunk by chunk would lead to a worse experience then the 3 act release and I strive to make the experience as good as it can be for everyone.
Thank you to anyone taking the time to read even part of this extremely long log, and hoping to have y’all hear some more about the game not too long from now.
Get Ruby Dungeon (demo)
Ruby Dungeon (demo)
A roguelike dungeon crawler with authentic ASCII graphics
| Status | In development |
| Author | Bruoche |
| Genre | Role Playing |
| Tags | ascii, Dungeon Crawler, Fast-Paced, Retro, Roguelike, Roguelite, Text based, Turn-based, Turn-Based Combat |
| Languages | English, French |
| Accessibility | Color-blind friendly, High-contrast |
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