• Fixed an issue that caused solitary villains like dragons to never raid.
  
• Fixed an issue with calculating area of influence on the world map that made some sites inaccessible.
  
• Increased minion sleep time to 200 turns so that succubi can take their time.

• Fixed an issue that caused solitary villains like dragons to never raid.
  
• Fixed an issue with calculating area of influence on the world map that made some sites inaccessible.
  
• Increased minion sleep time to 200 turns so that succubi can take their time.

One of the big things that KeeperRL is still missing is a good system of capturing and exploiting prisoners. I'm committed to fixing that in the coming patch, although I don't have a very clear vision yet. I'll lay out what I've come up with so far, and I hope to get some feedback from you.

At the moment prisoners can only be captured inside your own dungeon, and the rules of how it's done are hidden, so the system is unclear and random for the player. The main goal is to make the requirements explicit, so it's clear what you need to do to capture a prisoner.



The main approach that I'm looking at is using the immigration UI. In the example screenshot above the player can schedule capturing of prisoners, provided that the prison is big enough. Once the orders are placed, minions will try to capture prisoners at the nearest opportunity, for example when raiding a village.

The disadvantage of this system is that if the player forgets to place the order before a battle, they will lose the opportunity to capture anyone. It's also unclear how captured prisoners should travel back to your dungeon. Should they join the raiding team and return with them? What if you want to continue raiding, are you going to drag the prisoners with you to the next battle? They could also return by themselves, but it wouldn't be realistic - they could easily escape.



A much simpler idea is to implement prisoners as regular immigrants. The two requirements would be building a prison and capturing a village. The remaining civilians in the village would, at the press of a button, turn into prisoners and come to your dungeon.

Just like above, having prisoners travel alone would be unrealistic. The idea also seems too automated and lacking any challenge. The system also doesn't easily accommodate capturing non-civilians. One major advantage is that it's very easy to explain to and to use by the player.

There are some vague ideas of gamifying capturing a bit more, so that it requires more effort or strategy from the player than just killing enemies. A special "slave master" minion could be the only one capable of taking prisoners or there could be a special weapon, like a throwing net, or a trap. But I'm afraid of making the system unwieldy and requiring too much micromanagement.

Once prisoners are captured, we need to decide what to do with them. The current options are execution, which aggravates enemies, torture, which produces mana, or having them supplement your imp force. Every captured creature turns into a generic prisoner minion, and they are all identical.

There are a few ways to make things more interesting. One is letting prisoners retain their identity, making some more useful at certain tasks than others. Or even letting them join your armed forces. I think enemies should also try to break in and free prisoners.

I was also thinking about making prisoners more essential for progression by limiting the capabilities of imps. For example after some length of digging the rock could become harder and only possible to mine by prisoners. Same thing could be done to some or all minerals. Acquiring a large number of prisoners would thus be critical to have a successful dungeon.

All of the above are just ideas floating in my head or being partly implemented. I'll do a lot of playtesting before I settle on a solution, and I also expect that things will need to be refined in later patches. Hopefully I can come up with a system that will add a lot of meat to the game. Meanwhile, I'm eager to hear your thoughts!

One of the big things that KeeperRL is still missing is a good system of capturing and exploiting prisoners. I'm committed to fixing that in the coming patch, although I don't have a very clear vision yet. I'll lay out what I've come up with so far, and I hope to get some feedback from you.

At the moment prisoners can only be captured inside your own dungeon, and the rules of how it's done are hidden, so the system is unclear and random for the player. The main goal is to make the requirements explicit, so it's clear what you need to do to capture a prisoner.



The main approach that I'm looking at is using the immigration UI. In the example screenshot above the player can schedule capturing of prisoners, provided that the prison is big enough. Once the orders are placed, minions will try to capture prisoners at the nearest opportunity, for example when raiding a village.

The disadvantage of this system is that if the player forgets to place the order before a battle, they will lose the opportunity to capture anyone. It's also unclear how captured prisoners should travel back to your dungeon. Should they join the raiding team and return with them? What if you want to continue raiding, are you going to drag the prisoners with you to the next battle? They could also return by themselves, but it wouldn't be realistic - they could easily escape.



A much simpler idea is to implement prisoners as regular immigrants. The two requirements would be building a prison and capturing a village. The remaining civilians in the village would, at the press of a button, turn into prisoners and come to your dungeon.

Just like above, having prisoners travel alone would be unrealistic. The idea also seems too automated and lacking any challenge. The system also doesn't easily accommodate capturing non-civilians. One major advantage is that it's very easy to explain to and to use by the player.

There are some vague ideas of gamifying capturing a bit more, so that it requires more effort or strategy from the player than just killing enemies. A special "slave master" minion could be the only one capable of taking prisoners or there could be a special weapon, like a throwing net, or a trap. But I'm afraid of making the system unwieldy and requiring too much micromanagement.

Once prisoners are captured, we need to decide what to do with them. The current options are execution, which aggravates enemies, torture, which produces mana, or having them supplement your imp force. Every captured creature turns into a generic prisoner minion, and they are all identical.

There are a few ways to make things more interesting. One is letting prisoners retain their identity, making some more useful at certain tasks than others. Or even letting them join your armed forces. I think enemies should also try to break in and free prisoners.

I was also thinking about making prisoners more essential for progression by limiting the capabilities of imps. For example after some length of digging the rock could become harder and only possible to mine by prisoners. Same thing could be done to some or all minerals. Acquiring a large number of prisoners would thus be critical to have a successful dungeon.

All of the above are just ideas floating in my head or being partly implemented. I'll do a lot of playtesting before I settle on a solution, and I also expect that things will need to be refined in later patches. Hopefully I can come up with a system that will add a lot of meat to the game. Meanwhile, I'm eager to hear your thoughts!

After releasing a few bug fixing patches to Alpha23, I got right down to working on the next major update. I'll give you a summary of things that are already implemented, and in future posts I'll talk about more plans for Alpha24.

The first thing I decided to work on was polishing the full-control mode. It has become an important feature of the game, so fixing the very rough edges is high priority, especially that I got a lot of complaints.

The first issue was the chaotic move order of team members. The movement system in KeeperRL was very flexible, allowing varying speeds of different creatures. Unfortunately this made team members "overtake" each other in the movement queue in a very unpredictable manner. The only way to solve this issue was to change to a proper turn-based system, where every creature normally gets one move per turn. This allows processing creatures in a "stable" order, which can be altered by the player, for example if they want to postpone one team member's move (without them losing their turn). As another "win", a player-controlled creature that has a speed buff and gets two moves per turn can perform them in sequence. The "slow" debuff makes creatures skip every second turn.

What are the disadvantages the new system? Creatures lose the fine-grained speed attribute, and almost everyone moves at the same speed. I don't think this will have a negative impact on the game, but if it's a major issue then it's possible to add more speed levels, where a creature gets an extra move every other turn, every three turns, etc. This emulates the old system very well, while having an advantage of being much more predictable.

Having that change out of the way, I added the UI to manage team members, where you can see and change the move order and can decide if a minion is controlled manually or by AI. This also makes the way for UI for giving orders to the AI, which many players ask about, although this feature will likely not come in Alpha24.

I have big hopes that these changes will make the full-control mode much easier to use and more fun.



The screenshot above reveals another new feature. Every creature now has a set of intrinsic attacks, which by default are active when it is not wielding a weapon. Each attack is attached to a body part, and is made unavailable when the body part is lost or injured. If a creature has multiple attacks, then one is chosen randomly when attacking. It is possible to make attacks active even while wielding a weapon, which is useful if a creature can inflict a poisonous bite, for example.

The feature gives me a lot of new options for designing creatures, and should result in some new interesting gameplay. Note that every attack can be inherited by a doppelganger!

Here are the intrinsic attacks that have made it into the game so far:

• Fist
• Kick
• Claw
• Fang
• Touch
• Bird beak
• Unicorn horn

Every attack can have an optional extra effect, for example inflicting poison or insanity (by the ghost), or something more magical by the unicorn horn.

A slightly related feature that I plan to add is that some creatures, when killed, will drop a body part with the corresponding attack, which can be used as a conventional weapon. A unicorn horn and dragon fangs come to mind as examples. This should be fun!

One more feature that I'd like to present is related to world generation. Until now, the home of every villain was generated almost identically, which got boring very quickly. But now, the game can generate a villain on the "bones" of another one, as if they conquered and captured their home. In the screenshot below, the dragon is occupying a castle after having killed all the knights. It functions as a normal dragon villain in the game, and having the castle and knight skeletons is just a way to mix things up, without changing the gameplay in a major way. The dragon can also be generated on the top of an elementalist tower or in the dwarf cave. There are all sorts of combinations possible for various villains.

After releasing a few bug fixing patches to Alpha23, I got right down to working on the next major update. I'll give you a summary of things that are already implemented, and in future posts I'll talk about more plans for Alpha24.

The first thing I decided to work on was polishing the full-control mode. It has become an important feature of the game, so fixing the very rough edges is high priority, especially that I got a lot of complaints.

The first issue was the chaotic move order of team members. The movement system in KeeperRL was very flexible, allowing varying speeds of different creatures. Unfortunately this made team members "overtake" each other in the movement queue in a very unpredictable manner. The only way to solve this issue was to change to a proper turn-based system, where every creature normally gets one move per turn. This allows processing creatures in a "stable" order, which can be altered by the player, for example if they want to postpone one team member's move (without them losing their turn). As another "win", a player-controlled creature that has a speed buff and gets two moves per turn can perform them in sequence. The "slow" debuff makes creatures skip every second turn.

What are the disadvantages the new system? Creatures lose the fine-grained speed attribute, and almost everyone moves at the same speed. I don't think this will have a negative impact on the game, but if it's a major issue then it's possible to add more speed levels, where a creature gets an extra move every other turn, every three turns, etc. This emulates the old system very well, while having an advantage of being much more predictable.

Having that change out of the way, I added the UI to manage team members, where you can see and change the move order and can decide if a minion is controlled manually or by AI. This also makes the way for UI for giving orders to the AI, which many players ask about, although this feature will likely not come in Alpha24.

I have big hopes that these changes will make the full-control mode much easier to use and more fun.



The screenshot above reveals another new feature. Every creature now has a set of intrinsic attacks, which by default are active when it is not wielding a weapon. Each attack is attached to a body part, and is made unavailable when the body part is lost or injured. If a creature has multiple attacks, then one is chosen randomly when attacking. It is possible to make attacks active even while wielding a weapon, which is useful if a creature can inflict a poisonous bite, for example.

The feature gives me a lot of new options for designing creatures, and should result in some new interesting gameplay. Note that every attack can be inherited by a doppelganger!

Here are the intrinsic attacks that have made it into the game so far:

• Fist
• Kick
• Claw
• Fang
• Touch
• Bird beak
• Unicorn horn

Every attack can have an optional extra effect, for example inflicting poison or insanity (by the ghost), or something more magical by the unicorn horn.

A slightly related feature that I plan to add is that some creatures, when killed, will drop a body part with the corresponding attack, which can be used as a conventional weapon. A unicorn horn and dragon fangs come to mind as examples. This should be fun!

One more feature that I'd like to present is related to world generation. Until now, the home of every villain was generated almost identically, which got boring very quickly. But now, the game can generate a villain on the "bones" of another one, as if they conquered and captured their home. In the screenshot below, the dragon is occupying a castle after having killed all the knights. It functions as a normal dragon villain in the game, and having the castle and knight skeletons is just a way to mix things up, without changing the gameplay in a major way. The dragon can also be generated on the top of an elementalist tower or in the dwarf cave. There are all sorts of combinations possible for various villains.

Today's patch includes some important gameplay changes, and a few bug fixes. I still haven't tracked down the graphical glitching issue that makes the game unplayable for some players. If you experience this, and would like to help with the investigation, please contact me.

• Mana reward is no longer limited to the first enemy of a type.
  
• Human village on home map reward upped to 100 mana.
  
• Minions train 40% faster.
  
• Bandits, lizardmen and ant worker attackers are weaker in endless mode.
  
• Villain creatures heal slowly over time.
  
• Fixed map generator crashes and slow-downs.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused wounded attackers to retreat immediately.
  
• Game no longer crashes when some files aren't found, and displays an info message instead.
  
• Added diagnostics to track down some crashes.

Today's patch includes some important gameplay changes, and a few bug fixes. I still haven't tracked down the graphical glitching issue that makes the game unplayable for some players. If you experience this, and would like to help with the investigation, please contact me.

• Mana reward is no longer limited to the first enemy of a type.
  
• Human village on home map reward upped to 100 mana.
  
• Minions train 40% faster.
  
• Bandits, lizardmen and ant worker attackers are weaker in endless mode.
  
• Villain creatures heal slowly over time.
  
• Fixed map generator crashes and slow-downs.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused wounded attackers to retreat immediately.
  
• Game no longer crashes when some files aren't found, and displays an info message instead.
  
• Added diagnostics to track down some crashes.

This is a very small patch. I'm still working on fixing a couple more bugs, including a graphics corruption that happens on some platforms, so expect more patches soon.

• Fixed a bug that made imps confused and idle when tree cutting tasks were placed behind fog of war.
  
• Removed the Halloween kids and pumpkins.

This is a very small patch. I'm still working on fixing a couple more bugs, including a graphics corruption that happens on some platforms, so expect more patches soon.

• Fixed a bug that made imps confused and idle when tree cutting tasks were placed behind fog of war.
  
• Removed the Halloween kids and pumpkins.