This round of development touched nearly every part of the dungeon experience, from the traps waiting in the forest to the way the world fits on screen. The common thread has been making the game more readable without giving away its secrets.

Traps for the outdoors

The forest now has its own trap vocabulary. Since there are no walls to hide conventional mechanisms in, it uses crumbling ground concealing spike pits, dangerous spore blossoms, and rigged chests that can trigger either hazard. Spike pits give you two moves to escape once you step on a weak spot. If you fail, the ground collapses, dealing damage and leaving a pit that blocks walking creatures while sparing fliers. The castle keeps its own version of the same trap, with flagstones instead of forest ground.

Also tightened the stage progression, bringing the castle down to 23 stages numbered 0 through 22 and giving the Library its own identity. The Laboratory keeps its green apparatus and its own mixture of enemies, while the Library gets warm brown tones, bookshelf pillars, and a different monster roster. Bosses, relic kits, merchants, and stage transitions were adjusted to follow the new structure.

Light Sources

Areas now have flickering light sources appropriate to their surroundings: torches in the caverns, candles in catacomb niches, wall lamps in the more elaborate rooms, and invisible hanging candelabra whose presence is revealed by their pools of light.

Getting the lighting right took several iterations. Initially, only the light sources themselves appeared to flicker. I extended the effect to the surrounding tiles, experimented with stronger brightness changes, and then dialed back the noise once the effect became too aggressive. Torches and candles remain the liveliest, candelabra fall somewhere in the middle, and lamps breathe more gently. The player now carries a torch with a six-and-a-half-tile radius.

Light affects the scenery, not the creatures or items standing in it. Their colors remain consistent, preserving their readability against the changing environment.

Better feedback during combat

Attacks now briefly show the tiles they reach using directional line characters. A plain sword covers one tile, while the enchanted variations reach farther. When an attack connects, a * appears over the target in place of the old color flash. Thrown relics use the same hit effect.

The goal is to make the mechanics legible at a glance: see where an attack travels, then see whether it landed. I also simplified the blood effect, removing the second stage that coloured the tile background red. Wounds now change the floor glyph alone.

Elsewhere, timed gates no longer explain that they will close soon, and pressed buttons now use _ rather than a dot that could be confused with the floor.

Rethinking the screen

The display options now offer three modes: Classic, DOS 8×8, and a new Large mode using the small font at 40 columns by 25 rows. The latter scales up the characters while showing only part of the map, with the number keys 1 and 2 scrolling left and right by eight columns. On mobile, the layout stays adapted to portrait screens.

I think the character size in the map is good, but the UI– I’ll just have to break the character grid and make it high res.

On the same line of giving up a bit on the correctness of the display (well, I’m already going overboard with the colors FWIW), I continue thinking of alternate options to characters:

• “hacked” BIOS fonts, retaining most of the appearance but adding some glyphs changing to be visual representations of things (like I’m doing already for the chests)
• 1bit tilesets, basically replacing all glyphs in both fonts for concrete representations.
• Colored tilesets, either 8×8 or 16×16 (learning to 16×16 Tiny Dungeon since 8×8 is too “chibi”)

Also, adding scrolling exposed a problem with the animated lighting: every redraw recentered the viewport on the player, making it impossible to explore other parts of the map without the view snapping back. The viewport now follows player movement, or the Look cursor while inspecting, rather than every animation frame.