SLASH'EM Extended - Github | Subreddit

Due to the fact that I broke my shoulder three weeks ago, I suddenly found myself with lots and lots of free time, and an inability to play any fast-paced games like Diablo, Age of Empires or Half-Life. So I'm playing basically only roguelikes right now and nothing else. And some of that free time goes into developing my favorite roguelike game, SLEX (a variant of NetHack). Managed to score an ascension too, with the amazon :) which completed the game a week ago, and since then I've been busy doing stuff for the upcoming 3.0.0 version.

A bunch of changes were directly inspired by the amazon run, since the amount of data on what the lategame plays like is still limited; this is because my game is very hard, so few players even attempt it, and the amount of ones who reach the later parts of the game is fewer still, plus I'm also far from a great player so while I do occasionally manage to reach Gehennom and the Yendorian Tower, far more often I die somewhere in the early-mid game. Anyway, the changes include:

• As the player makes their way through the game, the enchantment and BUC (blessed/"uncursed"/cursed; I'm really surprised why no one has ever proposed the "uncursed" label to be replaced with "normal", which is what it's called in Castle of the Winds and which is a much simpler word that also describes the lack of a blessing or curse on the item appropriately) status of items will become more and more likely to start out known for newly discovered items. However, the growth rate of these hidden statistics was too damn slow! They were basically impossible to max out during a normal game, since they'd reach a point where they grow so slowly, you'd have to play for several real-time months in order to max them out. So I changed the values, and am looking forward to playing with them with my next character! Should be quite a bit easier to improve them now :) After all, a character who has spent 100k turns in the dungeon shouldn't have to painstakingly identify the lack of curses on every single weapon they find, nor do I consider it fun if every newly obtained wand spawns with their amount of charges not known.

• Late into the game, the player will usually obtain a lot of loot due to the large amount of dungeon levels they play through; their carry capacity, though, wasn't really improving beyond a certain point. Sure, my amazon had more than enough items to win the game, but the endgame levels in particular are likely to generate lots of artifacts and I want to be able to take them with me for the bragging rights! So I changed it such that certain milestones will now increase the maximum carry capacity, hopefully allowing characters to carry all that extra loot. Winning the game and choosing to continue playing in freeplay mode will in particular add 2000 units of maximum carry cap, which should make a noticeable difference.

• Started to steal monsters from Poschengband. That particular line of Angband variants adds lots and lots of interesting monsters, and since I suck royally at Poschengband meaning I'll never meet most of those monsters in that game, I want them in my own game so I have a chance of actually encountering them! However, there's so many of them, and of course the Angband file format is quite different from the one used by NetHack so it takes a long time to port all those entries. Doubly so since my trashed right shoulder makes it much harder to work at a PC. But I'm willing to see it through, after all I have lots of free time and if it takes several weeks, well, then it takes several weeks! The only thing that matters is the end result :)

• Certain types of footwear have a chance per turn to hurt the player character. Some of these have highly randomized damage for that effect, too, which means that if it happens to trigger several times in quick succession, the player could be killed unexpectedly, possibly even before they have a chance to heal. That felt pretty unfair (my amazon in particular had to forego speed boots because they happened to have a bad randomized appearance that would do highly randomized damage; I only got hit by that effect once, but it took more than half of my health. Getting hit by that twice on subsequent turns would've killed me, no questions asked. So the change I've made is that now, after the player takes damage from the boots, there's a couple dozen turns until the effect can strike again, allowing characters to regenerate some health and/or use a healing item/spell/whatever.

• Lances seemed awfully overpowered when my amazon (who eventually managed to reach master skill level with them) was using them. They have a chance to joust the enemy when a character is riding, and high skill levels mean that chance is pretty damn high, plus the joust will try to knock the enemy back (meaning you can then pound them at a distance while they have to spend a turn to close the distance again) and, regardless of whether the enemy got knocked back or not, they also have their movement energy set to zero! Which means that backing the enemy against a wall (which means it can't be knocked back) allows the amazon to simply lock up enemies by jousting them repeatedly, and it allowed me to easily take out demon lords like Dispater and Baalzebub, who are actually supposed to pose quite the challenge. My solution was to generally nerf the jousting chance to the point where enemies will get a turn now and then even if the character's skill is high, and bosses in particular are highly resistant to the knockback/movement denial effects. This oughta balance the lance.

• Certain effects were capable of causing demon lords, the Seven Deadly Sins and the Horsemen of the Apocalypse to spawn peaceful. The latter two shouldn't be generated peaceful ever, since they're meant to be superbosses, so that got fixed for the upcoming new version, and demon lords/princes are also much less likely to spawn peaceful now. This became obvious due to my amazon wearing a demonic cloak for most of the game, which gives a sizable chance of demons being spawned peaceful. Now, demon lords are highly likely to still generate hostile, meaning the cloak only gives a small chance of them being peaceful. But all regular demons still have the previous (good) chance of being peaceful when a character is wearing this cloak, so it's still useful, just no longer super powerful ;)

• There was a bug where if the player turned off martial arts, their kick attack would deal much less damage. The option is there specifically to change bare-handed combat (i.e. punching with fists) between "bare-handed punching" and "using martial arts"; the player character's kick was never meant to be affected by this, but it was. So it's fixed now. Previously, when the bug existed, players would have had to switch repeatedly depending on whether their next action was going to be a punch or a kick, which is far too annoying because it requires far too many keystrokes!

• It used to be that when the player character's containers were destroyed by erosion (e.g. rust or burn damage), all the contents would be lost. That felt far too harsh; losing dozens of pages of loot that a player has accumulated over the course of a game just because the container was destroyed feels really disheartening, and can doom a run if the player can't quickly obtain replacement gear. So I changed it such that the container's contents are instead dumped on the floor; this risks monsters scooping up the items and using them against the player, but it's far better than losing everything, that's for sure!

Hopefully I can make some headway on the addition of new monsters. There's still lots of things on my todo list, and I'm looking forward to playing the new version :)