As you might have noticed, not much was going on here in December and January. Indeed, I took a two month break from working on KeeperRL. This was planned well in advance, but I feel I didn’t announce it loudly enough, and some players were confused and worried. Sorry for that. But now I’m back! And the development of KeeperRL continues under full steam.

I had some time to think about the future of the game, and decided that it’s the right time to move forward with a major feature that I’ve been planning for over one year: the campaign mode. I call it that, but the idea is actually a little bit different from campaigns found in similar games. You’ll get a first taste of it in Alpha18, but here’s a short summary:

• You’ll be building one base throughout the whole campaign.
• There will be an overworld map with locations that you can ‘zoom’ into. Each location will be a separate map the size of about 1/4 of current maps (area-wise).
• You’ll be able to travel to any location while controlling a team of minions, but your base will be limited to your starting location.
• Every major enemy will occupy a separate location. Of course you’ll be free to take your minions and fight the enemies, and they will attack you back.
• The enemies will include bases built by other players and shared via the server, with their inhabitants controlled by AI.
• Not everything out there will be hostile. Trading and alliances are planned.

The purpose of the campaign mode is to increase the length of play, and to include more player-generated content in the game. I know you guys build better dungeons than my proc-generation!

Later on I will announce another major feature, and altogether it should move the game to completely new grounds. In any case, it will be material for versions Alpha19 and later. I’m sure you’ll be very excited to see all of this. I am!

Now off to work! I hope you guys have some patience before I can come up with Alpha18 🙂