Well personally I do like a little resting for thematic purposes if nothing else, not to mention say finding a few good places like healing fountains or shrines in the dungeon sinse it makes it feel far more like exploring and far more worth risking if you might find something good. If I always go into every fight with %100 health I sort of feel the fights don't matter, that was why I made the meals suggestion.

One game I saw, puppet nightmares (a very interesting browser mmorpg with a nice combat system but rather too stat heavy in places and slightly lacking description), had a nice answer. There, each dungeon literally was just a set of fights. Each fight you finished successfully increased your winning streak counter, which increased the chances of finding good quality rewards after each battle. There was a heal button, which would completely heal your entire party, but using it reset your winning streak, though not your position in the dungeon, meaning that dungeons are a big game of chicken. (or at least until you can go in with an uba level party and just murder your way through regardless).

Something like that might be fun for Entombed ii, at least as far as increasing the  chance of quality rewards for each successful battle go until the player either bales out and rrests to recover everything, or reaches the end of that dungeon level, though as I said I still like the idea of occasionally finding good or helpful places in the dungeon as well meaning that risking exploration is part of your over all stratogy.

@lukas, I believe Jason meant that he'd be using sapi on windows, and that ios/android ports would be problematic as separate issues, not as connected affairs. I would be interested in an ios port, but I don't particularly mind if it isn't ossible, indeed I'd much rather have a fully working and awsome windows version than time taken for an ios port as well. Don't get me wrong I love my Iphone, but I am quite happy having games for windows and games for Ios being separate entities and don't need to replicate my game library on every device to be happy.
Btw, I'm personally very excited on the modding possibilities and believe this will very much answer several cryticisms of the original angband. For example, want some more interesting monsters in the dungeon with unique attacks? bingo! want to change the location out of the dungeon? again, vuala! and of course with the possibility of people to create their own varient games and add things, the game's development could go on and on, heck some roguelikes that have allowed modding have been developed and are continually being developed now after about 20 years!

Hi,
Just wanted to drop in and express my excitement, I love entombed, it was the first audiogame I ever bought, and I look forward to seeing the project continue.
Best of luck to you.

Good news! I've got loading external sounds working. Normally, this is an easy thing to add, but I'm using the Unity game engine to make porting to Mac and iOS easier, so it's a little tricker than normal. So you can add your own custom sounds now.

The main reason I want to use SAPI is its ease of use and universal distribution. It's easy to time sounds with SAPI and most implementations across platforms will be similar. I remember adding jaws support to Entombed and it was a real nightmare. The .DLL had no documentation and supported very little other that saying text. You had no idea if the speech engine was speaking, or how to time your game sounds, and only made everything messier.

I'll consider adding other libraries only if they are well supported (jaws certainly wasn't) and don't cause me to rewrite the engine. If I can reliably interrupt text, and poll if the engine is currently still speaking, I might be able to add it.

I'll have a look at that library.

Clueless gamer question coming up.  Apologies in advance.  Heheheheh.

Concerning modding, if one person added a bunch of cool monsters, characters, items, etc., would those things only appear in that person's version of Entombed?  Or, does modding mean that any person could add monsters and things, and then everyone could see them in the game?

@Mirage, modding in this case means modifying the game, either to create the same game but with some extra content added, or something entirely different.  The person who modded the game would then distribute his/her modded version around as a separate program, essentially as a completely different game from the standard entombed ii game.

That is the way that Angband and I believe other roguelikes work. There is the standard angband, Vanilla Angband as it is called, then there ar lots of varients, everything from extentions of the original game with new monsters, techniques, character races etc, to games that change the location from the Angband dungeon and o something else.

The only thing I wonder about is how modding will work if Entombed ii is a commercial game, will you need to have bought the game to play the mods? I'm not sure how this works on steam, but I'm certainly very much  in favour of paying for the gme if it would help jason acquire sounds etc as well as compensate him for  what he does (I definitely got my money's worth out of entombed 1).

@Keyisful, that is a good idea, however it's not really how modding works. In games I've heard of modding being used like Angband, players don't get access to the game engine itself, ie, the underlying source code that does all the nuts an bolts type tasks like making sure souns play on time and linking all the files together. Players get a bunch of text files with the properties and descriptions of of in game objects  such as monsters, items etc, and some script files in an accessible scripting language (Jason already mentioned Lua), which they can then play with.

If you want a good example of modding, look at tactical battle.

I suppose Jason could create two versions, a paid version with all the content locked, and a mod version with just an example game and objects as code examples to work from, though that would make adding items to the original game somewhat difficult as  often modding involves additions to the original game rather than using the same engine to create new games, but we'll see what his plans aare around this.

One idea might be to set content limits. So, if it was like Entombed 1, even if you could mod the free version you could still only have up to 8 floors, 9 classes, and 15 different sorts of monster (I'm guessing on the monster numbers but I think there are about 15 different ones on the first 8 floors not counting heroes), while in the paid version you could be free to create as much content as you wanted, and only people with the paid version could run mods with more than the requisit numbers of specific things.

As to story sequences, well limited story is generally part of the roguelike genre,  they're all about wander into dungeon and kill boss with hugely complex mechanics and harsh death. However, I fully agree more atmospheric textual descriptions of monsters, items and areas in the dungeon would be a major plus and something which i did miss in the first entombed, after all it's far more scary when you know what a naal is and have a description of the dungeon floors getting more rocky, slimy and ominous as you go deeper (though as JAson said Entombed 2 is called the skull tower maybe we're going higher this time). then, if modding the game I am guessing it wouldn't be two difficult to have specific bits of text or background music play when the party reached specific points, meaning you could have something of an ongoing discovery. I'm not thinking a full on cyoa system here, just say specifying a floor and event and having that event read some text or play some music, for example floor 2 stairs: "this narrow, uneven set of steps plunges deeper into the gloom. Peering down in the light of your torch you make out what looks worryingly like blood stains, and hear a faint sound of voices from below, perhaps someone is in trouble"

Hi Dark, Jason and all,

thanks for the clarifications. If the speech delay and sound timing issues are the main concerns when deciding whether to use SAPI or screen readers on Windows, then I understand it completely and agree that SAPI is a much better choice in this regard. Wonder if the Tolk library can handle this stuff with screen readers. As the screen reader apis themselves do not provide this kind of control, as far as I've heard, it would probably have to be done through some kind of weird and sophisticated hacks or something like that. :-D

The usage of Unity is probably good news when it comes to portability. I'm not a Mac or Linux user, so I can't join those who are excited about a Mac version, but I would be really excited if an iOS version was eventually developed as well. Although, just like Dark, I agree that I have no problem with having separate games for Windows and iOS. Cross-platform games are nice but it's just not possible or realistically feasible to port every single one of them for various reasons.

I have to admit I'm not much into game mods myself but I certainly appreciate these capabilities available in a game. I'll be curious to see what people come up with eventually, and who knows, maybe I'll even contribute a mod myself one day, although I was not very interested in this kind of thing before. The flexibility that the integration of LUA into the game would most likely provide might win me over. :-)

And I'm glad to hear you got custom sounds to work already! That will really open up immense possibilities to the players.

Lukas

@Jason: its great that you've got tolk it working. I was looking forward to using it myself in my project once the exams are over.

@Ethin, jason  isn't a blind developer, so he wouldn't have any of the access issues with unity programming you mention, just as Sander and Richard didn't when creating the tester game extant.

@Lukas, the advantage of mods is that rather than game content just being limited to what the developer can add, other people can create small or large changes and additions to the game. These could be as simple as having the central game as normal but adding a bunch of additional monsters with new abilities and spells to throw at you, adding new playable races or jobs, or as complex as changing all the in game text and monsters to create a completely different location to the entombed dungeon.

As I said, modable games like Angband and some other roguelikes have been going for 20 years and are still having new content written for them now.

Thanks for the clarification, Dark.  I can't wait to see what Jason has in store for us this next go-round, and then what other players might come up with in the future.

@violinist, that is an interesting suggestion, that the dungeon levels get tougher as you progress. The problem though is this would need some major balancing, and I'm not sure recruiting low level characters would do it. Imagine you have a really tough fight that you only just get through so you decide to go back and rest. The problem however is then a few fights along the next level is tougher, so you need to go and rest again after finishing the fight, which would in turn make things tougher again, thus necessitating even more resting and so on onto a downward spiral. Methinks this sounds like a perfect way of increasing player frustration :.

Myself, if rests were factored into the generation of dungeon levels, I'd rather reward players for resting less than punish them for resting more, the way puppet nightmares does by increasing the chances of finding rare and valuable items the more fights you go on without resting.

On the recruitment angle, I fully agree extra characters to find and recruit lower down would be nice, but I'm not convinced on just having recruitment in the inn in town sinse thenit'd be far easy to treat characters as cannon fodder, or hange around until the game gives you a good combination. What I always liked about entombed and what made it such an extremely addictive game was the need to play with what you were dealt and make the best of it in terms of extra characters. If that meant a halfling fighter or an ogre mage so be it.

I'd suggest personally having chances of more characters appearing in the dungeon rather than at fixed points, and when rescued having a choice of whether characters continue on or not, though of course limiting the party size to prevent you acquiring an army. I'd also like to see some sort of costly resurrection other than skellification or the as yet rather buggy in Entombed reincarnation.

On the environment and roguery front, one thing I'd love to see in the game were characters specifically designed to be good with the environment but who would need protecting in combat (assuming that becomes possible). I think this was the intention with the thief and adventurer characters in the original Entombed, but unfortunately due to the hole chests and secret doors mechanic never really getting off the ground that didn't work out particularly well, however now is the chance to have lots of good stuff in the environment to play with and characters who have specialized in that.

One thing I was thinking about stealth is why not have an ambush skill, whereby if your sneaky character has ambush your party get to go first in combat and the enemy are less coordinated.