Current state of Delve

I thought I'd make a post about Delve development since I've been pretty quiet here!

May and June were pretty slow in terms of coding progress. No real reason other than I got distracted by summer and other games and hobbies. But I also decided on a pretty significant change: instead of one big dungeon, Delve would consist of a series of a smaller dungeons, largely in part because I wanted more reasons for the player to return to the surface and visit the town. Mostly this plays out in the form of a few fetch quests. You discover something in one dungeon and then an NPC gives you information (or mere hints) you'll need to proceed.

How mysterious :o
I've mostly finished this all up, including implemented two more styles of dungeon map: one for towers and one that generates levels that look a little more like traditional rogue/hack style dungeons.

So now I need to fill those dungeons up with monsters to fight. I'd been cribbing off of D&D for the most part in early development but I wanted to switch to a system where most of your abilities and damage output would come from your gear. No more XP and levelling up! If you want to be a fighter-type you'll equip a lot of warrior-type gear. A spellcaster? Spellcasting goodies. Deeper in the dungeon you'll find better gear or ways to upgrade your existing gear.

 I'm starting to think about how things like. "By the time the player is at, say, level 8 of the dungeon they should have X HP. A weak monster should do approximately Y damage per turn and it should take on average 2 hits for the player to kill them." Then I can figure out how much in the way of goodies and how powerful the player should be. So far this has involved a bunch of scribbling on paper. But I'm hoping that having some numbers on paper (or...in a spreadsheet??) it will make decisions about what stats to give to monsters and how to distribute them in the dungeon a bit quicker.

I can't say when the next release will be. It all depends how long I spend waffling over the progression mechanics. But I'd like to have the next version be fully playable from the start to some kind of an end/win condition. Like all software developers ever I am incredibly bad at estimating how long things will take and my ideas around progression are inchoate in the extreme right now. I'd like to have something out by the end of October though.