This one's off a tap at Belmont Station in a growler. You want one and you probably need one. Oaky, hoppy, sweet and borderline barleywine-like.

Yeah, you need one. If you can't get one, get the 4-pack. No questions.

Big bottle. I think they're called bombers, but I don't want to start down that horrible path of Beer Advocate or RateBeer pretentiousness. So yeah, big bottle. I also had it on tap and it was better but chances are if you have it, it'll be in ... a big bottle.

So they're calling this a trippel, but I don't know why. To me, trippels are heavy, spicy, dark and woody. This is flowery and thick, almost like mead meets a European lager. Hits you up first with massive sugars and tiny citrus, and goes on to become a lightly spiced lager. A tasty brew and deceptively strong (7.5%, feels like a 3%) - you'll like it if you can get over the initial superflowers.

So, this beer has a very complex (but light) herbal thing (with brett!) going on upfront, then a bit of sizzle in the middle, then some nutty chocolate cake at the back. And then it comes back with something bready and sweet as it lingers on the palate.

And I can't really describe *any* of it; it utterly blows my mind (and ability to describe flavors). Highest rating ever, go buy 10 bottles RIGHT NOW. I am not joking.

A simply amazing concoction - an aged saison. The aging adds sweet malt on the intro, and a crisp hop burn at the outro, and everything is balanced oh so perfectly. It doesn't get much better than this.

A dark dark dark red; the label calls it a black and a red - which equals brown. However, it actually *is* a mixture of a red, with the nutty and powerful hops, and the black (i.e. porters) with the thick, almost coffee-like mouthfeel and coffee-bitter (as opposed to the citrusy hops-bitter) aftertaste. Every time I try it I'm hard-pressed to describe the deliciousness - but it *is* delicious. Will try again, many times.

No wait, I got it backwards. It's the coffee first, the flowery hops second, I think.

There's only one way to figure this out! Time to get some more.

Phase 1 of migration to CodeSquares is complete. You can read about the fun here.

I think most game systems are in the game solidly enough to start considering what qualifies as an alpha, or MVP (Minimum Viable Product). I'm thinking if you can walk around, pick up and equip stuff and have it make a difference, fight creatures who fight back, and be able to traverse levels at will with at least a vaguely logical loot system - that can be something that's for all intents and purposes "playable".

So let's see what we need to get there:

* Creatures pathing to player.
* Creatures pathing to items (weapons for starters) + smart pickup (based on weapon rating).
* Some actual creatures rather than placeholders (maybe five to begin with).
* Diagonal movement.
* Scrolling camera (this is a must before we over complicate things).
* Saving/loading levels + ascent/descent.

And I think that's it. I know there are outstanding bugs and massive TODOs, but it's not like an alpha is anything other than a headspace concept. This is more to define the things I need to be working first, in order to get the game into a certain playable state, before I start adding more features (i.e. more work) for myself.

Edit: Here's that scrolling camera tutorial: http://thedoglion.wordpress.com/2010/08/10/flashpunk-tutorial-03-camera-movement/

I've been struggling with trying to figure out the impetus for progress in the game. Other than striving for loot and stat improvement, there isn't really a lot of need or sense for a peon-like dungeon inhabitant to descend into the depths. I guess there could be a negative need, the need to procure food, but that doesn't strike me as a fun mechanic. Hunger can certainly be there as a side effect, but it shouldn't drive player progress; that just gets frustrating.

The other part that's tricky is the "story" rationale behind making you move forward. If this is a dungeon that's being invaded by lowly heroes, why not stay on level 1 right as they arrive and take out their noobish selves (level 1, right? that means level 1 heroes, more or less: easy pickings!)? So there needs to be some sort of sensible rationale for leaving the steady drip of XP and items.

One rationale would be that as you level up, they stop being a challenge. That's not very useful, though - and I guess here hunger could come in. But I never found it a satisfying mechanic in Nethack ...

So let's examine a few games "like this".

Nethack/Stone Soup - you have the Amulet of Yendor, the hunger, and running out of things to kill, i.e. the yearning for better loot and XP via the murder of increasingly stronger critters. However, I have no Amulet of Yendor for a reason; I'm a dungeon dweller so I'd want to protect it rather than own it. In addition, going in to "plunder" a dungeon immediately sets me against it - in Dweller, I want it to be obvious that I am working FOR the dungeon. I suppose my foozle could be a Lever of Isolation - someone needs to get in there and close it off from all those pesky heroes, and for some reason the Player has to be up to the task. Hmm, that might work. It's not what I was hoping for, but it would provide the rationale to continue.

What I was hoping for was to create a situation where you are forced to continue because the heroes coming into your "level" are getting smarter and stronger, until eventually you just can't hold them off. I realize now that Dungeon Keeper does this - the Lord of the Realm shows up as the last foozle you have to defeat before you can move on to the next realm. There's no real continuity in DK though, and I don't want to manage an overworld. This is just one dungeon. However, I can still provide a strong foozle at some sort of slightly randomized time that you have to flee - but I have to do it without killing the player, which seems tricky.

I was also thinking of a gate you have to secure - so it would be a per-level foozle. But what would make you continue lower then? The front door's locked, how are the heroes going to get in now? So that doesn't really work either, hmm. Maybe the heroes are holding the staircase to below, and you have to clear it? But that puts you against the dungeon again, and I really want the dungeon to be YOURS. There will be traps you can set and other things to help you along (special rooms to maybe build? a small selection thereof, anyway), so any pre-existing hero presence doesn't really work with that.

Then there's S.P.A.Z, which locks off each successive area behind a literal gate. The gate is held by the Authority, and you have to either bribe or destroy it on that "level" (in this case solar system) to continue. There's a foozle at the galaxy core that you have to get to, but each level is self-contained by the Gate. So I was thinking along those lines as well, but that doesn't really work with the Dweller fiction.

I think some combination of locking the level and the arrival of a Chief Foozle (announced appropriately) will do it. It will have to be obvious that you can't go against the Boss so you have to delve deeper. I can even make it work so that he has to secure the previous level and find out how you escaped, and in the meantime other, lesser heroes start finding your new lair (the next level). Of course you take them out so they can't go back and report. Hmm, this might actually work!

I was reading the Terraria thread on QT3 and someone commented on its reward loop. I.e., instead of being incremental like roguelikes or RPGs - get a piece of loot to improve attack or defense by a small percentage - Terraria rather gives you new tools at certain points that drastically alter how you play the game. The grappling hook vastly changes verticality; a decent set of armor makes dungeons places of adventure rather than terror, etc. The downside is that there is only one "upgrade" path ...

Well, I guess that's only partially true. You can go for the phaseblade first or other better weapons instead (I'm not that far yet) but there's nothing really preventing you from getting it all eventually.

Stone Soup varies your play by giving you a ridiculous assortment of classes and races, each with their own unique perks and handicaps. Once you're set however, you pretty much do the incremental improvement thing. One vampire assassin playthrough will probably be the same as another, within reason.

Dungeons of Dredmor looks like it has a modular skill tree system where you decide what you're going to tinker with when going in, but it looks like you can expand as you go along into just about anything (not sure about this until I get to play it) else that you fancy. It then keeps you updated on your progress amongst the three branches: fighter, wizard or rogue.

I'm thinking I'd like a combination of Dredmor and Terraria. You will only ever play one type of generic dungeon monster (TM), but you'll gain different, game-changing abilities later on. The trick will be to come up with different things that you can do in terms of a roguelike, and enough of them to make things interesting. I can start with basics such as negotiation, traps and weapon masteries - but I think we can get really flavorful since this is all monster lore.

Should be fun. Perhaps I need to start a lore book.

Running Lucid Lynx now.

More game diaries soon, plus, I have got to get "tags" in here somehow. Do I still remember how to create d.net modules? Probably not.

Also, switching to froggyfish while I try to figure out a domain name I want to live under. At least froggyfish is 100% mine!

I had to fix some collision weirdness, and there's still some left to debug. For some reason, it appears that my critters only hit each other once, and then get locked next to each other in a mortal staring contest. Not sure what's going on, but I wonder if it has to do with maybe not resetting the collision array somehow. Needs a bit more debugging time, which has been in short supply lately.

However! The code for player hitting - and killing - an NPC is in, and works perfectly, even to the removal of said NPC from the game board. I still have to do things like XP gain calculations, loot drops (NPCs don't really have loot right now) armor mitigation calculations and random hit fluctuations (maybe? I haven't decided yet if I should hit for fixed value or just do crits and normal) but the basic logic of hit->take damage work, which is pretty sweet. Also, seeing creatures hitting each other in the combat log is pretty rad too, even if it's all random right now.

Next up - and probably for a while - is fleshing all of that out. In addition to the items listed above I still need to create NPC tables just like item tables, consider how dungeon level affects stats, and ... hm, no actually that's that. Oh no, I lied - NPC pathfinding.

Recap:
- NPCs need loot
- NPCs need monster races, classes and levels
- NPCs need pathing and objectives for pathing (better loot? player? mortal enemy sighted?)
- combat variables such as armor and hit randomization, and critical hits
- XP gain
- combat debug

And of course all the other bugs listed in GitHub. Good times ahead but the bottom line is: I can make games. That's pretty awesome.

I added actual NPCs (rather than just the one) onto the level and gave them some basic movement which will do in a pinch. I also stubbed out some very basic combat code - doesn't do anything yet but once I write the processing code it should at least be able to do the hit/counter math, when initiated by player. No autonomous critter combat yet, but maybe tomorrow? We'll see.

It's pretty neat to watch them mill around in the level, that's for sure. I definitely have to clean up some of the code, as I'm already running into problems created by copy/pasting the collision code. (don't copy/paste code, etc)