Summary of development in 2016

Dec, 31

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.