Roguefort Playtest · published
Roguefort Playtest — 0.11.0
Hey everyone, another big update tonight, and some big news. This is the pre-open-beta update!
For those open beta testers who are seeing this for the first time, welcome to Roguefort. I hope you enjoy the playtest beta and please do join Discord if you haven't already. I am grateful for any feedback and suggestions. The game has been built by the core playtest team and myself - so it is very much a testament to the roguelike community.
OK, enough sappy stuff. Onto the reason we are here:
Everything below is either new content or a fix to something you reported. Thanks as always for that and please see notes for who reported/suggested what in brackets.
Happy affineuring (affinage?)
Tim
Added — The Adventurer's Journal (courtesy of SamV's suggestion)
- A journal you keep yourself, opened with Q or from the panel hub. Two things
have a home there - lines you pin out of the Event Log, and free-form notes you write.
- The Event Log has a search box and a pin gutter. Enter pins the selected line,
and a pinned line is marked so you can see it in the flow of play.
- A pin can be annotated after the fact, so the log line records what happened
and your note records what you made of it.
- Everything is stamped with the date, the turn and where you were standing.
- Tabs for All, Pinned and Notes, with search and sorting across them.
- Fully operable from the keyboard: / focuses the log search, n opens a new
note, s cycles the sort order. All three stand down while you are typing.
- The journal is saved per character, and it is written to a second local copy
on every change so a crash cannot take your notes with it.
Added — Faction emblems
- The four factions have commissioned pixel emblems, and they now carry the
screens where you declare an allegiance. Kudos to AMAZING artist Bladimir on fiverr.com. He is also doing the upgrade/perks card art (over 300 of them) - more on that soon.
- Character creation renders your faction's emblem over a lit backdrop of its
own colours, with drifting motes and slow accent rays. Switching faction
dissolves one scene into the next, and the new emblem materialises upward out
of nothing.
- The Terroir Attunement screen at level-up uses the same art. The backdrop
follows whichever tradition you are hovering, and every card carries its
faction's emblem rather than the old generic discipline icon.
- A tradition you have not unlocked shows as a dark silhouette. If your standing
with that faction has reached Honored the silhouette catches a glint, which is
the screen telling you the ceremony is available to you.
- Committing to a tradition plays a short emblem ceremony. It can be skipped.
Added — Pets new mechanics and quality of life (for both pets and players)
Everything in this section came out of R1's write-up, and much of it had been in the works for months, in lesser and greater states of completion. So, it was great timing to just go for it and clean it all up, test, and put it all on the main branch of the game.
- A knocked-out companion no longer disappears. It limps home to its stable,
rests for a while, and comes back. You are warned as the recovery window
approaches, the panel shows the countdown and the recovering state, and a
Revive Tonic cuts the rest short. The old behaviour was a silent timer that
deleted the animal with no message at all.
- Companions earn assist experience from any kill they were near, not only from
blows they landed themselves. Killing blows pay a bonus that scales with what
died. Feeding, clearing a dungeon floor and turning in a quest all pay the
whole party.
- The beast handler stocks Training Treats and three tonics — Ironhide Salve,
Mighty Marrow and Heartwood Tonic — which grant small permanent stat gains.
They are capped per animal, applied from a new Supplements section in the
companion panel, and they survive levelling and growth.
- What you feed a pet now matters. A treat is worth more than a cooked meal,
which is worth more than raw meat, which is worth more than bread, and every
meal grants a little experience.
- New companions default to Defensive. A one-time order is suggested when an
animal is badly hurt.
- The panel spells out what the happiness and loyalty thresholds actually do,
the total of any boosts applied, and the state of a recovering animal.
Changed — Moods that were only ever flavour
- Calm, Serene and Resolve did nothing. They were broken and essentilly mood text with no mechanic
behind them - the wiring was all messed up. They are wired to real channels now: Calm quiets your footsteps,
Serene helps you shrug off status effects, and Resolve sharpens your chance to
land a critical hit.
- BLISTERED did nothing to the player. Nothing in the game read the mark, so
being scorched was cosmetic. It now burns for damage over time, and dragon
breath against an already-blistered player hits considerably harder.
- The tooltips state the actual numbers, so you can check the effect rather than
take the mood's word for it.
Fixed — Status effects and what the tooltips tell you
- Hovering Calm told you where it came from and how long it would last, but not
what it did. That turned out to describe the whole class of effect tooltips
rather than one of them. Buff hovers described their source, debuff hovers
were a label and a timer, and the Character Panel's Active Effects list had no
effect text at all. Every hover states its effect now.
- The Character Panel also never read the remaining duration, so adventure buffs
showed no timer anywhere. They do now.
- Cursed ground took two points of vision off you and displayed nothing. There
was no descriptor for it, and an effect with no descriptor draws no chip, so
the curse was completely invisible while it was on you. It renders now.
Fixed — Where you start and who owns the ground
- Every origin now begins on its own faction's soil. Three separate reports came
down to the same thing: the golden name card at the start of a run reads
whichever faction owns the tile you spawned on, and the map's politics did not
match the authored starting villages. The Thymerock highland belt and
Brinehold's Strand hamlets are formally their factions' ground now, which the
card, trespassing, patrols and the world map all follow.
- The starting spawn will no longer place you off your own village's ground or
past the second danger band.
- On a procedural world the card falls back to the faction you actually chose,
rather than announcing "The Unsettled Marches".
- The name card never drew at all in 2.5D or first person. Those modes had the
fade and the letterboxing but not the card itself.
- Greenbridge had no market entrance. A Grasse-Verdenne starting village with no
riftstone means no route to The Old Mouth at all, for the whole run. It has a
market stone on the town square now, and every settlement is checked for
exactly one market entrance rather than trusted to have stamped one.
- Canon records the two claims. The highland march and the Strand enter the
Dominion's ledger in the lore, with glossary entries to match.
Fixed — Creatures and people (thank you ArkHaven)
- Travelling merchants were not people. The waystone caravan spawned them as
bare wildlife: no clothes, so they rendered as the naked base doll, and no
protection, so a single bump killed one — with a wildlife health bar over
their head and an offer to tame them on right-click. They are clothed and
talkable now, a bump is a conversation, and a deliberate ranged attack
scatters the caravan rather than leaving a corpse.
- That prompted a sweep of everything else built by hand rather than through the
creature registry, because an unresolvable sprite fails silently. Marsh wisps
were completely invisible. The once-per-world Talking Monument was wearing a
ghost's body. All three roaming bosses were wearing the wrong bodies
entirely — the Hollow Hart as a hydra, the Cinder-King as a demon, the
Gravewalker as a ghost.
- Cold resistance was granted in seven places and read in none. Frost morel
fondue, frostmint curd and the Auroral Warmth blessing all handed you a buff
that no code consumed. It cancels blizzard and snow penalties now, and shows a
chip while it is running.
- Mythic beasts appeared far too often. Three Frost Ewes turned up inside about
a hundred turns. A mythic sighting had no repeat suppression of any kind:
mythics deliberately skip the density cap that limits ordinary animals, and in
deep wilds at night the game attempts a spawn nearly every turn, so the roll
fired constantly. That is a designed-in rate, not bad luck. The same mythic can
no longer exist twice at once, and a sighting puts that beast on a cooldown of
a full day and night. Simulated against the real save, six sightings in three
hundred turns became one.
- Children are shorter than adults. The squashed child proportions existed all
along, but almost every path that draws a character dropped the flag — so kids
rendered at adult height everywhere except water and sanctuary tiles, and
popped taller mid-walk.
Fixed — HUD and numbers
- Phantom wood and stone on old saves. The migration that moved resources out of
the old counter and into your bag ran once and only once, but several paths
still wrote into that counter afterwards — vendor resource packs, grants made
with a full backpack, worker carry overflow, refunds from undone builds. A
counter refilled after the migration never folded again, and because it counts
as spendable regardless of where you are standing, the HUD showed amounts no
bag or container could account for. The fold now runs on every load.
- Then a brand-new save showed ten wood and five stone at turn zero. The
every-load fold only covered loading, and new-game setup seeded that same old
counter directly — so every fresh save was born needing the migration and
stayed phantom until its first save and reload. New games grant real planks and
stone as items now.
- Vendor resource packs give you actual materials rather than invisible credit.
- Gold sits in the leftmost slot of the resource readout. The wood and stone
entries grow and shrink as their "(+N stored)" suffix changes with what is in
reach, which shoved the gold number sideways every turn.
Fixed — Art and sprites
- Arrows, bolts and sling stones still rendered as cheese after last patch's fix.
The fix was real but unreachable: the ammunition branch sat below a catch-all
for consumable items, and every round the game actually creates is marked
consumable so it stacks. The test passed because it used raw templates, which
carry no such mark.
- A census for that same pattern found two more. Treasure maps and mounts had no
sprite branch at all and were also drawing as cheese. Maps read as a scroll and
mounts as a riding animal now.
- Tim did a 10 second fixer upper on two really REALLY bad placeholder tiles - the wisp and the boat.
Fixed — Interface
- The hub bank chests were mouse-only. The panel never took control of the
keyboard, so the arrow keys walked your character around underneath the open
panel and Tab opened the panel hub on top of it. Arrows and Tab move between
the columns now, Enter deposits and takes, and the selected row scrolls into
view.
- Page Up in the inventory left the header and paper doll out of frame. It moved
the selection to the weapon slot and scrolled only far enough to make that slot
barely visible.
- Holding Down until the selection wrapped from the bottom back to the top had
the same shortfall. Every path that wraps to the top shows the whole top now.
- The mastery choice modal has been given a family-coloured wash, tier pips and a
short celebration on confirm. Your choice is delivered exactly once and cannot
be dropped, including if the modal is closed underneath you.
- The level-up modal gets the same treatment adapted to how it is actually used.
Allocation stays instant, so mashing points into an attribute overlaps the
effects cleanly instead of making you wait for them.
Known issues
- The journal is saved per character and is not synchronised in co-op. A joining
player keeps their own pins and notes rather than sharing the host's.
- The new mythic sighting cooldown was tuned by simulating the real save rather
than by playing it. If mythics have gone from too common to never, that is
exactly the thing to report.
- Calm, Serene and Resolve effects now do something, but I worry it's too mild because I didn't wanna break something - let me know if it's too boring and I'll pep up the numbers.