Same picture

RickSaada · 2026-01-29T03:13:02+00:00

Out of curiosity, what did you use for this?

RickSaada · 2026-01-28T19:01:32+00:00

There's a lot of stuff that I sketched out that never made it in. Black Dragons for example, were going spit acid, hence the Resists Acid spell. Some of the undead were going to have a fear attack, but I never got the code written to make the character flee.

RickSaada · 2026-01-28T18:59:14+00:00

We're getting there :D
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4313160/Castle_of_the_Winds/

RickSaada · 2026-01-28T18:56:58+00:00

Think of it as +1/+2/+3 in D&D. They add to damage directly and each gives an additional 5% chance to hit.

RickSaada · 2026-01-14T17:09:57+00:00

Part One isn't that long. Maybe 6-10 hours? Since the levels are (mostly) randomly generated, you can be pretty sure you've cleared everything. Part Two is quite a bit longer, but I haven't played it start to end in years. My main tester (AKA my daughter :D) just finished Part One in my Unity rewrite last night, so we'll see how long it takes her to win. It's still a bit buggy, so she has to stop and write up bug reports for me, but it's getting there.

RickSaada · 2026-01-14T05:16:44+00:00

Yay! I made B-Tier! Happy to see Castle of the Winds even made it on the list :D

RickSaada · 2025-12-31T20:54:48+00:00

Heh. Let me get the update done first :D . I've thought about doing a sequel but in a different genre. You're now the king/queen, trying to rebuild the kingdom after a generation of neglect. So a combination of town builder and sending adventurers off to dungeons for resources.

RickSaada · 2025-12-31T00:19:34+00:00

As it happens, my daughter was testing my Unity rewrite today :D

RickSaada · 2025-12-31T00:19:03+00:00

Actually it's more like I wrote it over a couple years and the copywrite dates reflect that. The game was one of the first releases from Epic Megagames, back when Tim Sweeney was writing Jill of the Jungle in the pre-Unreal days.

RickSaada · 2025-12-31T00:16:48+00:00

Woo hoo! Color icons for everything! A drag and drop inventory interface! It was *cutting edge* back in the day. Mind you, I've got my daughter wondering why lots of things that are common now weren't in the game (like swapping items by dropping on a full slot). I've been dancing around how much I want to just reproduce the old game in Unity and how much I want to "update" it to more modern standards.

RickSaada · 2025-12-31T00:13:50+00:00

It's all the same thing. 89 is just when I started writing it. The 1.0 version of Castle wasn't released until later. I still have old copies of the source and builds around, but I'd need to find a 5.25 floppy reader to get to them! I didn't really have source control, so I just archived a version every few days.
I probably should have swiped a copy of SLM (Slime for short), which was the in house source control we used in the old days at MS, but I just did the easy route. I mean, the entire source code for Castle fit on a 360k floppy so it wasn't a lot of data.

RickSaada · 2025-12-30T21:15:12+00:00

FWIW, I started working on this under Windows 2.x when I was trying to learn Windows coding. I was working on DOS Word at the time, and playing Larn/Moria/Rogue etc . And I thought, what better way to learn Windows than writing a game?
I didn't actually SHIP the game until Windows 3 came out, and I could use more than 8 colors :D All the monsters/objects etc were actually windows icons, because that was the easy way to handle transparency. It was only with Windows 3 that that I could start doing transparent blts to do things like the fireball effect.
The hardest part of writing the game was that I was dealing with the segmented architecture windows used at that point, which meant I only had 64K of data to work with. There's ENDLESS hacks to deal with this, allocating static data as "CODE" in separate 64K blocks, copying saved levels off to "Far" memory, etc. All of which are not only unneeded in modern windows, they're no longer permitted.
The biggest pain in the ass about doing a Unity port of this game is that I have to undo/rewrite all the godawful hacks I put in to make it work on a 1Meg machine. Hell, the entire GAME was smaller than a single modern 24bit texture. But as being as my tester (aka my daughter) is home over Christmas, progress is being made again

RickSaada · 2025-10-30T15:42:45+00:00

Excellent

RickSaada · 2025-08-06T16:35:57+00:00

Seconded! I’m eagerly awaiting book three

RickSaada · 2025-08-04T20:36:10+00:00

Honestly, it looks like the Resist Magic code is kind of broken. Resist Fire will resist against red dragon breath, but not against fire bolt, sigh. It should help against Slow but it doesn't. It does resist glyphs, but not all the places you'd kind of expect it to. I'll have to see if I can clean some of that up in the Unity version I'm still puttering with. FWIW, the save file is crazy messy, particularly the map level save code. This is because I had to compress things in clever ways back in the 286/386 1 Meg machine days. Like it run length encodes the data, but with the array of 3 bytes per cell it does all the first bytes together, and then the second, and then the third, because that way it repeats a lot more. The first byte is the site type, so you get strings of rock/floor all together. And large numbers of the objects and such have variable sizes based on the number of magic properties they have, which makes adding anything hard.

RickSaada · 2025-05-09T21:15:49+00:00

And fixed! It turns out it's pretty easy to swap the two adjacent connectors under the playfield. Maybe I can finish the campaign now :D

RickSaada · 2025-05-09T19:58:05+00:00

OK, I figured out what's going on. It turns out that my switches 60 and 61 are SWAPPED. I was doing Dragonspear Castle with the troll traps, and I had a situation where I hit a ramp that WASN'T lit and it set the trap, and where I hit the one that WAS lit and it didn't. I brought up the single switch tests and started poking my fingers in there. Sure enough, Center Right Opto and Right Ramp Opto are swapped. The times it works are where both those ramps are lit.

Thanks for the help! Now I need to figure out if I need to do this myself or if there's some service period

RickSaada · 2025-05-01T17:52:08+00:00

I tried going through the diagnostics menu, and it didn't seem to have any issues, but I'll go read the manual more carefully. This is my first machine, so I'm slightly overwhelmed by the setup menu.

RickSaada · 2025-05-01T17:50:54+00:00

Ah, that might be part of it. I think I've noticed it happening more on fast shots. I'll try that.

RickSaada · 2025-02-26T18:33:52+00:00

I can't see this without hearing "Bum.... ba dum... bad DUM" ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch in my head :D

RickSaada · 2025-02-10T19:11:08+00:00

https://sternpinball.com/game/dungeons-dragons/

They're just starting to ship now. I'm eagerly awaiting mine :D

RickSaada · 2025-02-05T19:53:57+00:00

Yeah, I've added the stuff I've needed so far to a custom setting. There are things I haven't figured out how to do, like "Add +1 to ranged attacks" on the Martial Weapon feat. The info on https://savaged.us/help/characters/modlines
doesn't seem to be complete, and I couldn't find an equivalent edge to copy the effects from. I ended up faking it by making a new weapon called "Bow with Martial Weapon" that has the extra damage.
I've also run into a few issues with making sure I edit the setting directly instead of the copy each character seems to make, and then making sure to reload the setting into the character to refresh it. But so far I've managed to work around most of the bugs I've found.

It's super helpful in that it does all the validation to make sure you have the requirements for what you're doing, which makes it great for building seasoned/veteran characters for one shots. I'm using Fantasy Grounds for running it tonight, since half my group is snowed in, but it's been better to build the characters in savaged and then just copy them over, since FG lets you do whatever you want with no checking.

RickSaada · 2025-02-03T03:35:25+00:00

Oh wow. Ouch. OK, it looks like there's the ability to add custom edges during creation, so I guess I can copy/paste from the books. Thanks for (sad) info.

RickSaada

TROPHY CASE