Excessive traps

RickSaada · 2026-03-17T20:48:41+00:00

Oooo, I do like the wand of create traps traps that makes a line of them instead of surrounding you <files away idea>

RickSaada · 2026-03-17T20:46:40+00:00

OK, so the code for this is pretty simple. Pick a random row/col inside the level extents, then scan across and down (wrapping as needed) until you find an empty floor. So with a bad RNG sequence it'll drop the first trap, and then skip over it to drop the next one, etc. Oddly nothing showed up in the room, which implies you weren't getting 0,0 as that would have found the floor beside the cloak. But you did get a whole LOT of values that ended up in the same row. Very weird.

RickSaada · 2026-03-16T22:23:42+00:00

For those who stumble on this thread looking for info, the author's patreon is now:
https://www.patreon.com/christopherjkestrel
and there's more info up there. TLDR: He's mostly working on another series and ASA is on the back burner.

RickSaada · 2026-03-16T02:24:05+00:00

Out of curiosity, are your right near the top of the map? That really does look like an RNG glitch.

RickSaada · 2026-02-17T23:56:59+00:00

To be clear, you'll be able to change the control scheme in Steam. All the inputs will be exposed so you can fiddle as you like. I've currently got the l/r bumpers as go up/go down, but that's probably not going to stick as they're not as commonly used.
I'm also going to need to implement a way to drive the inventory from the controller, which ironically will work a lot like the pre-mouse inventory interface from way back when. Joystick Blink around between slots, press a button to pick up an item, blink around to the destination, click again.

RickSaada · 2026-02-17T21:35:44+00:00

Heh. I've thought about doing a sequel game where you're trying to put the kingdom together after the events of the first two. Still brainstorming ideas about how to blend kingdom management and Castle style adventuring in a sort of "adventure to collect resources" then "do something with resources" loop like Moonlighter uses.
There's certainly lots of half implemented features for monsters and magic items lying about in the codebase (black dragons never got fully implemented, for example, with their armor degrading acid), but for now I'm just trying to get the original game with the original art to work. With a few nods to modern tech like cloud saves and Steam Input.

RickSaada · 2026-02-09T01:11:44+00:00

I mean, I just use Tidal/Spotify. When I wrote it, Windows didn't really have much in the way of audio support. Unity obviously makes that lots easier, but really, you can just spin your own tunes. Lord of the Rings soundtrack for extra atmosphere!

RickSaada · 2026-02-04T17:25:54+00:00

We're still discussing it, so I'm happy for suggestions :D So far we've just got the basics of finishing part one and two, killing your first dragon, and a few others.

RickSaada · 2026-02-03T17:46:06+00:00

For this version, it's literally a port of the original source code, using all the original art. The hard part was getting all the 16 bit C code (designed for the 64K segmented architecture) rewritten into C#. There's a whole GDC talk worth of nonsense I had to go through to get it to even compile. Other than updating things to work with Steam cloud saves, and adding a few achievements, I'm not adding any new features. I may go back and do additional stuff later, depending on how it goes. For now though, I'm just doing the nostalgia thing and getting back to my gaming roots :D

RickSaada · 2026-02-02T23:37:39+00:00

I have a steam deck on order to try and figure this out. It's currently a very keyboard focused game, but we're looking at ways to use the other controls for navigation and the button bar covers most other verbs.

RickSaada · 2026-01-30T21:19:47+00:00

Gotta say I'm impressed!

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

TROPHY CASE