Angband 3.5-dev

[Magnate]

So we had a devmeet today, the first one since takkaria stepped down. I have to eat my words - it seems to be working pretty well without a maintainer.

Anyway, the good news is that fizzix will be Release Manager for the 3.4 series.

The even better news is that I've had some awesome ideas for 3.5 .....

Crafting
So I think it would be really cool if you could make stuff. Potions, scrolls, weapons, armour, all that stuff. I think each character should be able to choose a "profession", totally independent of race and class, which indicates the area s/he's chosen to focus on when making stuff. So for example you could choose Alchemy, if you want to make potions; Inscription, if you want to make scrolls; Blacksmithing, if you want to make metal armour and weapons; Leatherworking if you want to make lighter armour with cool stuff and so on. You'll need to find recipes/formulae to make these things, but it should be easy enough to balance another few hundred items which are only of use to chars who have chosen that profession.

Gathering
There's obviously going to have to be ingredients for these recipes - Sangband already has the metal chunks that will do fine for Blacksmithing. As well as being found lying around these could be mined out of mineral veins. For alchemy you'd need herbs (which could double as a source of ink pigments for inscription), so we'd have to have those growing in the dungeon. For leatherworking you'd need hides, so we could allow you to skin monsters.

Actually it'd probably work better if these were profession skills too, because skinning a demon for demonhide is way harder than skinning a giant snake for snakeskin. That means that each character needs to be allowed two professions, really - one gathering and one making. Though there's nothing to stop you having two of the same type I guess.

Secondary professions
Now here's where I had some totally cool ideas. How about being able to cook food that had various healing/stat-boosting properties? Kind of like potions only you didn't need to be an alchemist. And how about being able to make your own bandages, in case you run out of potions. And what about being able to catch fish??

No, ok, that's just silly.

[Zyphyr]

Quite amusing.

[ekolis]

Is it April Fools Day yet in London? No? Hmm, intriguing...

[Shockbolt]

Please don't turn Angband into a crafting game...

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Please don't add new junk items...

I'd much prefer crafting that uses the existing items as components. That way crafting would actually reduce the number of junk items.

[ghengiz]

Angband 3.5 = Morrowind the roguelike LOL

Look at the date of Magnate's post
If he's serious, we have an example of bad timing

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Ouch! Fooled me.

[Djabanete]

What about pets, when are you going to add them?

[nppangband]

@Magnate - Can the devteam please make sure you all code it so it's easy to patch to the variants, OK? Cheers!

[Djabanete]

Also I'm thinking it's about time to merge mage and priest spells. You can cross-index them by AD&D school (Conjuration, Enchantment, Divination, etc) and Hengband realm (Death, Sorcery, Crusade, etc). And instead of mana you should upgrade to the more modern "cooldown rate" for a more hack-and-slash feel. This will add more character customization and addictive gameplay.

Also: slow-motion playbacks.