XNA engine

Hello everyone,

So much time has passed. I've been away from my online life and making games for months. Thanks to some new opportunities it looks like the time has come for me to return to active development again :)

And what better way to restart my venture than putting out new updates for my games ;)
I will share some details about my short term plans soon, but I'm devoting this entry to a long-overdue I Am Overburdened update!

Update

Version 1.2.0 is live and the highlight of it is the save-game feature! Besides this one major addition, it is mostly a bug-fix and tweak build.

Save & Exit

Finally the game can be suspended in the dungeon and continued later. Since a full play-through is relatively short plus I Am Overburdened is primarily a rogue-like and save-scumming would undermine this core idea so only one save slot exists. Of course more could be added with slots only having a continue option if there are genuine requests for it, but I think the game works well this way.

This is more like a convenience feature to be able to stop playing at any point you wish and finish the run when you have the time to spare.

The pause menu had to be reorganized a bit, since it was already crammed. As you can see it's cleaner now and the last option saves and closes the game.

I would like to create a more technical post too about this specific feature. Kind of like a tutorial about aspects of save systems. Let me know if you are interested!

Immediate (Save &) Exit

The immediate exit hot-key was remapped from F10 to F9. Sorry about this change, it was a necessity (os/platform reasons), but as a bright side it also supports saving the game. So now if you hit F9 during play and the game could be continued (e.g.: the player is not dead :) ), the state will be saved just like when saving and exiting using the pause menu. This change is already reflected in the input guide.

Pesky bugs

I've been working on the game on and off in short bursts in the last months and alongside with the community I discovered some problems too. I fixed quite a few things so I'm simply going to list them:

• Few items and their related skills could cause a crash under super specific circumstances. It's not likely many of you run into these issues, but if your play was interrupted by a crash I'm sorry.
  
  
  

• Certain item skills with persisting effects (e.g.: Fear, Cripple) could get stuck or be triggered on freshly summoned/resurrected monsters in rare cases. These were not visible, but could affect how well you did, so my apologies for the occasional unfair (de-)buffs.
  
  
  

• The positioning of hallucinations from toxicity effects (e.g.: Toad monsters, poison in potion) were not correctly randomized. These hallucinated monsters were always placed in the upper-left quarter of the map, breaking the illusion. Now this is fixed.
  
  
  

• A while ago I added item-slot notifications to item pickups and chests when standing nearby. It did not occur to me though, that with this modification the treasury pickups and chests triggered unnecessary ones too. Oops, fixed!
  
  
  

In balance

With this update balance tweaks found their way into the game too. There were still some complaints regarding this aspect, so I made normal mode a tad bit harder and nightmare difficulty a tiny bit more forgiving. These are not substantial changes, only slightly affecting the pickup and chest spawn rates. Another extra is "near death" detection. Simply put if you end up in a really bad situation at some point, the game tries not to punish you even harder on the next dungeon level :D
These changes are subtle, so they keep the game challenging, but they were introduced to make it more fair at the same time.

Boss confusion

Some people found the boss level corpses confusing. I don't know if the new version will work out better (this is not the first time I change this :S ), but now the number of corpses (below the one serving as the story hint) are tied to the unlock progress of the boss entry in the monster book.

I know some other unlocks still need more and better hints too. I'm going to work on these problems in the near future...

Am I still alive?

Yes, pretty much. Due to personal and financial reasons I had to put full-time game development on hold for a long while, but I'm back now and I will be working on my projects in the upcoming months. Before I vanished from the face of the INTERNETZ I teased possible ports and a bigger content update for I Am Overburdened. These are not forgotten and progressing well ;) In a week or two I will reveal more details about my plans.

Until then, have a fun-filled time.
Thanks for reading and take care!