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Interested in an old school style of gaming? Well I've been working on a text based RPG off and on for a couple of months now called the Chronicles of Asku. It's current production stage is a very playable alpha![/font]

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[color=#253340]In a little town a few miles from the city Anokii, villagers were mysteriously vanishing and returning to the village as the walking dead. Samil heard rumors of these disturbances and sets off to the town. While there, he meets a young hero with great potential and promise. Sensing a potential general in the young hero, Samil decides to test the hero’s core and task the hero with finding the cause of the odd occurrences. He senses something dark coming from the late King Drake’s tomb and suggest that the hero starts his investigation there. The hero descends into the tomb and fights through floors filled with walking dead and other abominations too horrible to mention. As the hero descends, the hero uncovers various fragments of Asku’s history through the generals that were buried with the king and were woken from their eternal slumber. Finally the hero confronts the risen corpse of King Drake and must defeat him in battle. [/font]

[font=comic sans ms, cursive][color=#253340]If you're interested, please head over to asku.codeplex.com download the game, and leave some feedback! You don't have to necessarily bug hunt for me (I have some friends that are already doing that for me), but feedback on the game in general will be greatly appreciated. The code is open source on the website that I linked to anyone interested. It's being coded in C#![/font]

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Updated the game this morning, here are the patch notes:

The Chronicles of Asku

Alpha 3.0

GO TO: C:\TheChroniclesOfAsku and open up the PlayerData file. Then delete all of the true or false statements at the bottom of the file if you want your character to be compatible with this update! There should be 4 at the bottom, then a number, then another one above it! DELETE ALL of them!

· Fixed a bug that causes the player and Joachim not to have their stats reset after a fight.
· Fixed a bug that caused the game not to check to see if the player had appropriate funds before buying something in the store.
· Fixed a bug with bosses loot tables and stats not being allocated properly for loot drops
· Increased stats of level 10 health and healing items bought off the store to help make the fight with Joachim easier on the player.
· Fixed a typo
· Added the version of the game to the name of the game in the title box.
· Reduced the point where mobs will heal themselves. This change is intended to give mobs more time to damage the player before they have to heal themselves since the player will often times out damage the heal. This is intended to increase the challenge.
· Implemented the second phase of the death count! You will now be able to track how many deaths you have had facing the armies of evil!
· Discontinued the tracking of which tomb floors have been completed, the save file would become too large with that many complete checks
· Added Floor Six to the tomb!
· Added Floor Seven to the tomb!
· Added Floor Eight to the tomb!
· Added Floor Nine to the tomb!
· Added Floor Ten to the tomb!
· Raised the level cap to 16!

The Chronicles of Asku

Alpha 3.1

· Fixed a bug on Floor 3 that caused the player not to be reset to "alive" after dying
· Adjusted Kuthin's displayed level to 15
· Corrected a huge bug which caused the players health to increase by a heal bonus item as opposed to a health bonus items, rendering health bonus items useless

The Chronicles of Asku

Alpha 4.0

· Added Floor Eleven to the Tomb!
· Added Floor Twelve to the Tomb!
· Added Floor Thirteen to the Tomb!
· Added Floor Fourteen to the Tomb!
· Added Floor Fifteen to the Tomb!
· Raised the level cap to 20!
· Added level 20 armor to the shop

The Chronicles of Asku Alpha Update 5 and Beyond:
What to Expect

First off, I want to establish a few facts about the game:

• Level 50 will be the level cap
• The current state of the game (U4) has HALF of the tomb floors in the game (these are the tomb floors for King Drake's tomb, and does not include any "end game" dungeons)
• These 15 floors that are currently in game only provide 20 out of 50 levels worth of experience, and the next 15 floors need to net the player 30 more levels
• I do not want to make each tomb floor progressively longer than the last one in the sense of what it would look like on a map, however, increasing the mobs per floor is always an option
So where am I going to go with this?
• Floors 16-20 will take the players from level 20-30 (that's approximately 2 levels per floor, and having the boss give xp accordingly)
• Floors 21-25 will bring you to level 40
• Floors 26-30 will bring you to level 50


All of this means that each new update will raise the cap by more than past updates, adding more coding/numbers adjusting/balancing time to the development for each update. It will also mean the creation of 2 sets of gear for the store per update as opposed to 0-1 sets of gear put in the store in past updates. All of this will add to the development time spent on each update, but will not affect the overall development time on the project (since it would have to be done anyway).


Now, as to the future...

• 15 more tomb floors to go, 30 more levels to gain

• Each boss will have 5 items of loot to drop. During the leveling game, the chance for a certain piece of loot to drop from a boss is 1/5, or 20%, guaranteeing a new drop first run but may make it take awhile to get your last drop since the odds are, you have a 4/5 chance of having something drop that you already have. During endgame, I'm considering decreasing the drop chance of each item to 1/10, or 10%, and each boss will still only have 5 items to drop. This will increase the grind needed to get the gear from a boss (and that gear will be needed to survive the next boss fight, without it, you'll be dead before you can blink). Now, I know that gear grinds are an artificial way to keep players playing the game longer, but I think if it is done right, it can still be fun... and yes, it will make the game last longer. If the drop rate is too low for end game, I will adjust this in patches

• For the release version of the game (I will be coming back to the game every so often to add updates with new dungeons to grind through), I'm hopping between a 10 floor dungeon and a 20 floor dungeon. If I go with the 10 floor dungeon, every other floor will be a boss floor. If I go with the 20 floor dungeon, it will be like the leveling game, every 5 floors = boss floor.

• The beta phase for the game will began when the leveling game is content complete. The endgame dungeon will be added to the game over the course of the beta phase's lifetime. The beta phase will also include polishing certain pieces of the game that need polish, fixing bugs, and making some changes. I have a list of stuff that needs to be worked on during the beta phase, but not all of it will make it due to the interest of time and how long it would take to code.

• Once I'm fairly happy that I have a complete and fun game, the game will exit the beta phase and go into its released (finished) version

• I'm thinking that the first content update after "release" I will add a new 5 floor dungeon. Each floor will have a boss and a few trash mobs leading up to the boss. I'm thinking this may come between 1 month and 2 months after release

• Just because I'm adding content after "release" doesn't mean the release version isn't the finished version. The content updates after release will just be for fun on my part and whenever I have the time or feel like it

• Expect the finished version of the game sometime next month (I'm aiming for before the 20th).