Porting to SDL took about a week. A little bit more than I thought, because it turned out that text rendering and audio playback are a bit lacking (actually, they are not part of the core library, and of much lower quality). So I had to search for replacement libraries. They seem to work well, but I still need to test them on platforms other than Linux. I sincerely hope that the game gets more stable after the whole ordeal of moving away from SFML.

After the last three weeks of refactoring and platform stuff, I finally had some time for gameplay changes! I added wildlife to the maps. So far: deer, foxes and boars. Their simple AI tries to run away from everything else and attack only when adjacent to another creature. Other creatures normally don’t chase nor attack wildlife.

I also added some extra settlements to maps. They don’t take much part in the game except just being there and adding variety. For now they are: human, elven and lizardman cottages, and dwarf and kobold caves. Besides the usual civilians, they now also have a small number of guards. I want to add a lot more content like that (and also some surprises and mysteries), but probably not all of it in this release.

Finally, I worked a bit on sending game event statistics to the server. It was already used in the last update for stats on retired dungeons, but it was somewhat broken. This time it should be more reliable and I will get richer data. It will super useful to have when working on gameplay, and also to know about any problems that might happening in the game. The statistics are of course completely anonymous, and you’ll be able to opt-out in the settings. I’ll also display text with all the details, so you’ll know exactly what is being gathered.

I’ll talk soon about more gameplay changes. At the moment I predict Alpha19 to come out in the beginning of July.