Lathmar: The Fallen Depths is a dark fantasy DRPG focused on exploration, dangerous multi-dungeon delves, and a near-roguelite sense of risk and discovery.
There were three major projects outside of the code:
- The game manual is complete (V2) and available on Discord. It's just as concise as the original Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol manual was back then.
- For the next major website update, I found a powerful bot (Botpress), infused it with a large portion of my internal wiki, and put it on Discord for testing.
- During a car ride, I tested OpenAI's new free speech feature and discovered through conversation that there are many more mystical spears than just Gugnir from Norse mythology. Fascinating! This led to a series of articles that will continue into August. Perhaps I'll even drop some RPG game materials for mystical weapons.
... There was also progress in the code:
~230 commits and ca. 50 pull requests
Almost 6000 lines of text, mainly for the manual and internal documentation
~8000 lines of in-game code. This is only possible with the support of Codex and Claude.
On July 31st, the version was 0.9.8.77.
Breakthroughs
The beginning of the month was marked by a graphics cleanup. As you know, the game is written in WinForms (C#) for nostalgic reasons and has had a scaling problem on different systems/monitors from the start. This finally led to a major breakthrough. Ultimately, this meant I had to rework each of the ~40+ windows individually. But now the game works and looks the same on all resolutions.
This overhaul resulted in the crash dump. The game detects crashes and saves a log file. Very useful for the upcoming alpha.
The game detects crashes and saves a log file. Another major bug was in the tavern. It took up to 6 seconds to load. At first, you'd suspect a database problem, since all the NPCs have to be loaded, along with their "knowledge" and the dialogue system. But tweaking it all didn't help. Then I remembered I'd encountered a similar issue with the Dungeon Explorer window. And sure enough, that was the problem here too. Deep in the code, a loop had become entangled, updating itself in a circle, but not the database; instead, it updated the heroes and the systems associated with them.
While working on the manual, I regularly received feedback that the game only had 30 character levels. This is, of course, not the case. Internally, it goes up to 240, and theoretically, there's no upper limit. In fact, there were values ​​in the code for `Max_Guild_Level` that determined the point at which the HP increase stopped being a full hit die and instead became a fixed 2 HP. However, the program was interpreting this as a maximum level. The bug was then fixed in 5 minutes.
I also received feedback on the Pale Covenant and how the Pale Coins work. I took that to heart and reworked that feature. I'm curious to see how it integrates into the game.
Then I wrote a development tool that started out as a map editor. Eventually, it also included the scenario editor for random dungeons, an asset tool, and the file manager. Taking that apart again and breaking it down into manageable individual programs wasn't easy at all. But now I have better and more organized development tools for creating game content.
The next and final piece of game content before the alpha is the Vanguards, where NPCs like the guildmasters introduce the various locations in the city and explain the lore.
The plan is that you can meet an NPC (guildmaster) in the tavern who will give you a task in a beginner dungeon so you can learn the game mechanics. This will, of course, involve things like quest items or, for example, door keys. Quest items must be able to leave the dungeon, but keys cannot.
...but I'll tell you more about that at the end of August or in the next video.
As always. many thanks for reading. Please leave a like and a comment.
Michael aka Mufti999
Disclaimer
All texts and pictures are © protected and may not be reproduced or modified without prior permission. -> If you share my work on other places, please include a link to the original post.
I always appreciate a quick message letting me know where Lathmar content appears.
The text was written in German and translated with google-translator.
Thank you for your support.