BydoEmpire

I've had good luck at bigger flea market game booths, but I've also seen some in retro game shops here and there. Nothing at garage sales for many, many years.

It's not very slick, but I think this works, but I found a bunch of pretty serious bugs I introduced in the last few days trying to fix other bugs. For example, in fixing the AI code for the enemy wizard getting 'stuck' on the trees, I accidentally made the statue enemies move at maximum speed, which was kind of funny. When you got close, they came to life and swarmed on top of you like a homing missile and killed you right away. That was a good one. In adding the level select, I occasionally stomped over the room with the stairs, so if you started on levels 3 or 4 there was no way to win. So... I fixed everything I know about. I tested new games on each level, continuing after dying, starting a new game after winning, etc. 6/15/21 - added level select - press SELECT on the main menu to cycle through starting level. You'll see a treasure icon in the lower right: Blank (default) - Level 1 (magic bolt level 1) Gold Coins - Level 2 (all weapons at level 1) Gem - Level 3 (all weapons at level 2) Treasure Chest - Level 4 (all weapons at level 3) This only applies if you start a New Game. If you Continue a previous game after dying, you will continue on whatever level you died on. This seems most logical to me. - fixed bug w/ statue enemies moving too fast - I added one pixel to the "knock back" effect of lightning, making it a bit more powerful - tweaked enemy speed and spawn chances, so hopefully the earlier levels are a bit more challenging Literally 0 bytes left in ROM. Fixing some of the bugs I caused required a bit of hackery. It's getting precarious in there. The code looks more like spaghetti each day. Let me know if you find anything serious. I don't think I can add any scoring changes for level select. I know the wave spell (previously arrow) gets stuck in walls occasionally, that's been there a while, but I think I'm going to have to mark that bug "Known Shippable." I might look through the bounce code and tweak a few things but no promises on that one. wizd_210615.bas.a78

That's pretty much the way I've got it working now, if you start on a level > 1, you get all weapons (as you should have gotten them all on level 1) and they're at the appropriate level. You do not start with any magic items, but everything you could have found on prior levels (that you skipped) will be available. If you start on level 4, for example, you'll find all the magic items in that level. I'm not sure I want to give a starting score if you start on higher levels, though. I think there should be some incentive for starting from the beginning, but this option also lets you just play and finish the game if you don't have the time. I'll think about it...

Never having owned a 3DO, I'd like to play some of those games. Not sure how many I'd actually buy, but that D&D Slayer game always looked really cool for one.

Currently if you complete a level, you get a 100 point for each room you've visited. If you visit all 64 rooms on a level, you get 10,000 points. Is that what you mean, or do you mean that if you start on level 2, for example, just start your score at 5,000 or something like that?

I think I have a good way to do a simple level select. I want to be careful not to break anything, especially continuing, so I want to test a bit more before posting anything but it's looking promising.

I saw it was confusing when the wizard killed you around 2:30 - what happens is he teleports you to an opposite corner of the maze. I think there's a little randomness. I usually use the wave spell on the wizard, but the lightning is actually pretty good too because it does so much damage.

I could probably let you always just select the starting level from the main menu (even if it's a secret option). You'd miss out on points starting on higher levels, but that's okay. I'd have to think about how to allocate spells and magic items, too. For difficulty, I may speed up a few enemies that appear in the first two levels. I could add some of the tougher ones like snakes to level 1 also. That might be a nice bit of variety.

I've dealt with it on and off over the years, but I'm in a pretty good state now. Melatonin + unisom almost every night, and another medication for a different issue but it impacts sleep. One random little thing that surprisingly has helped me lately is focusing on breathing slowly. Count seconds for each in and out breath and try to do them evenly and as long as possible. I don't count anymore, but just focus on breathing slowly. Generally, stress is the biggest factor. Not being able to shut my brain off when I wake up randomly in the middle of the night.

Thanks for that - I don't think I have the ROM space for a password continue feature - I did add a continue from the last level you died on. That would be really good to have, though, it takes me over an hour to go through the whole game and that's knowing exactly what I'm doing. I'll mull this over, maybe there's something I can squeeze in. WRT the difficulty, I totally agree. It doesn't really start getting fun until pretty far along. The whole first level is kind of a wash and I almost never even get hit unless I'm being sloppy... but I'm too close to it, and it's hard to see the forest for the trees. I don't want to make it too hard or too confusing for people that haven't played it much. I was thinking about ways to make it more engaging earlier, and I upped the spawn rate a bit early on but probably needs more tweaking.

June 13, 2021 Update: - fixed enemies occasionally wandering off the right side of the screen - fixed bug with chasing enemies getting stuck on walls (especially the wizard) That would be pretty cool, I've got about 70 bytes left in ROM, I'll see if I can make something work. wizd_210613.bas.a78

It's great to see @Blues_Bloody's label artwork, too! Makes it seem more "real."

Thanks for playing Wizard's Dungeon on the special show @ZeroPage Homebrew - that wizard exploit at the end was hilarious. A little while back I fixed an exploit that Crossbow found, where when there was only one tree in that room, you could use your lightning through the tree and kill him while he just sat there. I'll have to tweak it a bit. When I fixed the enemy sprites not overlapping the walls as much, I made them more likely to get stuck. I've noticed this with bats a little, but it wasn't a big deal. It's a bigger deal with the final boss!

I definitely agree they were a product of the time and the three systems that used them didn't implement them well - it wasn't the number pad, it was the rest of the controller . I would also say you could make the argument that since no modern controller has joysticks either, then joysticks also a dead-end design. ... that doesn't mean I don't still like them and prefer them for certain types of games.