You can now help test Alpha21 on Mac and Linux. Please report any issues in the comments below or on the Steam community forum.

PS. The official Alpha21 release is very close now!

You can now help test Alpha21 on Mac and Linux. Please report any issues in the comments below or on the Steam community forum.

PS. The official Alpha21 release is very close now!

You can now playtest Alpha21 on Steam! To do this, opt into the dev beta branch in the game's properties in your library. For now only Windows builds are available (both 64 and 32-bit).

Please post any feedback in the comments section or in the discussions. The patch will be ready for release once I get rid of all bugs!

You can now playtest Alpha21 on Steam! To do this, opt into the dev beta branch in the game's properties in your library. For now only Windows builds are available (both 64 and 32-bit).

Please post any feedback in the comments section or in the discussions. The patch will be ready for release once I get rid of all bugs!

The battle for the next release is underway. The new immigration system is mostly finished, and only needs some more playtesting and balancing. It turned out to be quite a beast to implement, even though it doesn't appear very complicated from the player's perspective. But it sure solves a lot of gameplay issues!

A few months ago I promised new gameplay modes, and I'm working on them right now. The main obstacle so far has been the campaign starting screen, which has always been pretty cramped, and now I need to squeeze in some more knobs and dials. From now on it will also be used for single map configuration, which will make it easier to add more settings for that mode.



Unfortunately I have to hold off the release of the endless mode for now, as there are still a few loose ends in terms of gameplay to figure out, and I want to wrap things up as soon as possible, so that Alpha21 can arrive soon. So for now you will only see the addition of a new "campaign" mode, and the current mode being renamed to "free play".

On the bright side, female avatars for Keepers and Adventurers are finally arriving! I also took this opportunity to improve the Adventurer's looks. Here they are:



For now the avatar choice has little effect on gameplay, except that the females are weaker and more dextrous, and the starting spell of male keepers will be "strength". I hope to add more differences here in future updates. Ideas are welcome.

I don't have any estimates yet on when Alpha21 will be out, but I hope to be able to post a testing build for volunteers in a week or two. Or at least as soon as I plow through the remaining list of bugs and features.

The battle for the next release is underway. The new immigration system is mostly finished, and only needs some more playtesting and balancing. It turned out to be quite a beast to implement, even though it doesn't appear very complicated from the player's perspective. But it sure solves a lot of gameplay issues!

A few months ago I promised new gameplay modes, and I'm working on them right now. The main obstacle so far has been the campaign starting screen, which has always been pretty cramped, and now I need to squeeze in some more knobs and dials. From now on it will also be used for single map configuration, which will make it easier to add more settings for that mode.



Unfortunately I have to hold off the release of the endless mode for now, as there are still a few loose ends in terms of gameplay to figure out, and I want to wrap things up as soon as possible, so that Alpha21 can arrive soon. So for now you will only see the addition of a new "campaign" mode, and the current mode being renamed to "free play".

On the bright side, female avatars for Keepers and Adventurers are finally arriving! I also took this opportunity to improve the Adventurer's looks. Here they are:



For now the avatar choice has little effect on gameplay, except that the females are weaker and more dextrous, and the starting spell of male keepers will be "strength". I hope to add more differences here in future updates. Ideas are welcome.

I don't have any estimates yet on when Alpha21 will be out, but I hope to be able to post a testing build for volunteers in a week or two. Or at least as soon as I plow through the remaining list of bugs and features.

Another year of development has passed like a lighting! As promised, here is a short summary of what has been going on in KeeperRL land.

There were only 3 major updates this year, compared to 5 in 2015. On the bright side, they contained big gameplay improvements: campaign mode with retired dungeons controlled by AI, adventurer campaign, free furniture and floor placement, and manual production. They all required tons of architectural changes, which is why the updates took quite long.

In addition, I managed to complete a lof of technical work, like moving graphics and audio from the SFML library to SDL + OpenGL. Besides getting rid of some bugs, it allowed some nice UI improvements, like the pretty mouse cursor, and smoother text scrolling (ready to be released in Alpha21). The framerate has also improved drastically, although optimization is more of a continuous battle, and it's not over yet. :)

At Alpha19 the game started gathering anonymous statistics, which gave me a lot of insight into how people are playing the game. Below is a breakdown of what types of games players choose. It seems that adding the campaign mode was a good idea, although a number of players still like the single map mode.

Note that single map games are not broken down into keeper and adventurer types, due to my oversight in the tracking system.



KeeperRL's difficulty can be read from the percentage of won games. The graph below also shows that over half of keeper mode games are left unfinished, which is a bit worrying. Presumably these are games where the player got bored or was unhappy with his or her dungeon. I'm going to add further tracking to figure out why this is hapenning.



Finally, the chart below, courtesy of Steam, shows how much time players spend in the game. About 25% of players have only played the game for less than an hour, and the median time played is 3h:38m. I'm not happy with these numbers, and they suggest that KeeperRL doesn't have a lot of replay value. Most likely it needs big additions of content. Adding a tutorial should also help with keeping more players engaged with the game.



In terms of sales, 2016 has been good, with around 7000 units sold, compared to 11000 in 2015. The previous year saw the release on Steam Early Access though, so there is no surprise here. What's important is that I have a stable income and can continue working on the game full time without any distractions. :)

Time to talk about plans for 2017 :) . With most major gameplay features more or less finished (and a few more coming in early 2017), I think that I will have quite a lot of extra time to add more content. I don't think that the length of individual games will change much (maybe with the exception of the new endless mode), but I want to add a lot of random events and encounters, which should make invidual games more engaging, and more varied between playthroughs. And I will also add more secrets :) . In other words, the kind of things that make roguelike games very replayable.

I don't think that KeeperRL will leave early access in 2017. Perhaps it will reach something close to a beta stage, after which I'll focus more on polishing the gameplay, bugfixing, visual and audio improvement, etc. But it's a very wild guess, as the project lives its own life, and I've never managed to predict its future as far as a year ahead :) . All I know is that it looks bright, and I can't wait to see what's going to happen.

I wish all the best in the new year to all the fans of my game, and I hope you have loads of fun with KeeperRL, and a little bit with other games, too. :P

Another year of development has passed like a lighting! As promised, here is a short summary of what has been going on in KeeperRL land.

There were only 3 major updates this year, compared to 5 in 2015. On the bright side, they contained big gameplay improvements: campaign mode with retired dungeons controlled by AI, adventurer campaign, free furniture and floor placement, and manual production. They all required tons of architectural changes, which is why the updates took quite long.

In addition, I managed to complete a lof of technical work, like moving graphics and audio from the SFML library to SDL + OpenGL. Besides getting rid of some bugs, it allowed some nice UI improvements, like the pretty mouse cursor, and smoother text scrolling (ready to be released in Alpha21). The framerate has also improved drastically, although optimization is more of a continuous battle, and it's not over yet. :)

At Alpha19 the game started gathering anonymous statistics, which gave me a lot of insight into how people are playing the game. Below is a breakdown of what types of games players choose. It seems that adding the campaign mode was a good idea, although a number of players still like the single map mode.

Note that single map games are not broken down into keeper and adventurer types, due to my oversight in the tracking system.



KeeperRL's difficulty can be read from the percentage of won games. The graph below also shows that over half of keeper mode games are left unfinished, which is a bit worrying. Presumably these are games where the player got bored or was unhappy with his or her dungeon. I'm going to add further tracking to figure out why this is hapenning.



Finally, the chart below, courtesy of Steam, shows how much time players spend in the game. About 25% of players have only played the game for less than an hour, and the median time played is 3h:38m. I'm not happy with these numbers, and they suggest that KeeperRL doesn't have a lot of replay value. Most likely it needs big additions of content. Adding a tutorial should also help with keeping more players engaged with the game.



In terms of sales, 2016 has been good, with around 7000 units sold, compared to 11000 in 2015. The previous year saw the release on Steam Early Access though, so there is no surprise here. What's important is that I have a stable income and can continue working on the game full time without any distractions. :)

Time to talk about plans for 2017 :) . With most major gameplay features more or less finished (and a few more coming in early 2017), I think that I will have quite a lot of extra time to add more content. I don't think that the length of individual games will change much (maybe with the exception of the new endless mode), but I want to add a lot of random events and encounters, which should make invidual games more engaging, and more varied between playthroughs. And I will also add more secrets :) . In other words, the kind of things that make roguelike games very replayable.

I don't think that KeeperRL will leave early access in 2017. Perhaps it will reach something close to a beta stage, after which I'll focus more on polishing the gameplay, bugfixing, visual and audio improvement, etc. But it's a very wild guess, as the project lives its own life, and I've never managed to predict its future as far as a year ahead :) . All I know is that it looks bright, and I can't wait to see what's going to happen.

I wish all the best in the new year to all the fans of my game, and I hope you have loads of fun with KeeperRL, and a little bit with other games, too. :P

In the last week I’ve been mostly busy with adding more functionality to the new immigration system. There is now a nice help screen containing almost all minions that you can get in the game, along with their requirements and other information. You can set to automatically accept or reject specific minions, and you can auto-accept all immigrants (which is almost like going back to the old, random immigration) or turn off the immigration altogether.

I put a lot of effort to adapt the new system to almost all methods of acquiring minions. This means that you will use it to spawn imps, recruit allies, and use pregnant succubi to mutate humanoids and beasts. I’m very happy about it, as some of these mechanics used to be pretty hidden, and the new system makes them much more visible to the player.



There is still a lot of tweaking left regarding the immigration rate, and the choice of which immigrants to present. As I said before, you will mostly be presented immigrants that you can immediately accept, but from time to time there will be one with some extra requirements, and you will have fulfill them in a limited time window. Sometimes an immigrant won’t be shown at all, for example any of the demons before you have built at least one demon shrine.

It’s almost time to leave for the holidays, and I’ll be without my development machine for almost two weeks. I’ll reserve some time to play-test the new features though, and next week I’ll make a post summarizing the development in the last year.

In the last week I’ve been mostly busy with adding more functionality to the new immigration system. There is now a nice help screen containing almost all minions that you can get in the game, along with their requirements and other information. You can set to automatically accept or reject specific minions, and you can auto-accept all immigrants (which is almost like going back to the old, random immigration) or turn off the immigration altogether.

I put a lot of effort to adapt the new system to almost all methods of acquiring minions. This means that you will use it to spawn imps, recruit allies, and use pregnant succubi to mutate humanoids and beasts. I’m very happy about it, as some of these mechanics used to be pretty hidden, and the new system makes them much more visible to the player.



There is still a lot of tweaking left regarding the immigration rate, and the choice of which immigrants to present. As I said before, you will mostly be presented immigrants that you can immediately accept, but from time to time there will be one with some extra requirements, and you will have fulfill them in a limited time window. Sometimes an immigrant won’t be shown at all, for example any of the demons before you have built at least one demon shrine.

It’s almost time to leave for the holidays, and I’ll be without my development machine for almost two weeks. I’ll reserve some time to play-test the new features though, and next week I’ll make a post summarizing the development in the last year.