Soulthieves.
Thumping: This is the skill employed when you attack with a buckler. Bucklers are small, light shield weapons that, while not as effective in outright blocking attacks as larger shields, are well suited for parrying and may be used in a more offensive role. Primarily, thumping is less about dealing damage - though it's quite possible for a skilled thumper to cause quite a bit of pain with a buckler - and more about stunning and distracting. Thumping may serve to reduce an opponent's accuracy, or it may open them up to your own attacks with your main weapon. A skilled thumper will also be better at parrying with bucklers. Highly skilled thumpers may even be able to thump with regular shields. Unlike other weapons, thumping weapons are better suited to your off hand than your main hand. Keep in mind that these are defence-first weapons, and may thus be frustrating to train for offence. With the right skills and a little Agility, however, you can learn to thump more effectively. Thump thump.
There has been a good amount of work done on Soulthieves. I wound up scaling back ambitions as far as game saving goes. Soft saves - that is, setting simple checkpoints - no longer write anything to the hard disk, so there's no permanency to them whatsoever. I don't know if that'd actually be feasible, but my goal is to just limit the amount of data that gets written to disk, if any; it should all remain in volatile memory. I'm not gonna provide a fallback for crashes and cheaters when a full save option is available.
Aside from re-adding the missile combat skills, refining a few others and writing up a few descriptions, I also added a bunch of new skills, including Thumping, Foraging, Chandlery (candlemaking), Fletchery (arrowmaking), and Forestry. I also tweaked race and class skill assignments to incorporate the new and the old. And, as usual, some new commands were added, forcing tweaks there as well.
Another thing I've been considering is keymap adaptations. I did a little research and wrote up the following.
As an English Canadian myself, I use the standard US qwerty keyboard layout. In placing the many, many keyboard commands in this game, I've considered how I might set commands mnemonically and colocate related commands, all while placing commands in appropriately accessible places as much as possible as well as following familiar roguelike conventions. However, there's clearly a bias; my default keymaps are designed for the US keyboard.
Now, this won't always be a problem for international players, as many of you use the US qwerty layout anyway, perhaps because you're programmers or IT buffs, or perhaps because you're fans of North American culture for some perverse reason. But then there are others that use more local layouts. The default keymaps may be a problem for you; they may be located in seemingly haphazard and stupid ways. Some symbols may not even be readily accessible to you ('$' for the shopping cart, for example). For you all, it may take some time for you to remap commands in the keymap dialog, although it's important to remember that every command is available in the menu bar, so for some less common commands it may not be a big deal to locate them accessibly; you have the option of mapping those commands to no key, if you wish.
If I've noticed anything about roguelikes in my few years on this rock, it's that they're enjoyed in places as diverse as the locales of Oggamund, from Feedlig Bay to the Great Northern Wastes... I mean, from Brazil to Belarus, California to Queensland, and points between and beyond. My intention is to make an honest effort to create keymaps for different Roman layouts to include with future versions of Soulthieves in the Shadows, and anyone who uses a non-US keyboard could obviously help me greatly by suggesting how I might implement such keymaps in as user-friendly a way as possible, since it wouldn't be too easy for me to map commands for a keyboard I've never used before. I might be doing this for free, but I'd still like people to be able to enjoy my creation without breaking their wrists.
So, yes. This is an important matter to consider. The layouts I've identified so far as high priority - the layouts I would intend on including with the first full version release - are the French Canadian, UK/Irish, German and Swedish/Finnish layouts. A Portuguese layout would be a good idea as well, though Portugal and Brazil appear to have some differences so it's hard to say which it should be. Obviously there'd be a sort of mechanic for users to help me expand the selection, though, so I gotta remember not to get too insane with this. It's still all academic at this point, anyway.
So, there. Update.
There has been a good amount of work done on Soulthieves. I wound up scaling back ambitions as far as game saving goes. Soft saves - that is, setting simple checkpoints - no longer write anything to the hard disk, so there's no permanency to them whatsoever. I don't know if that'd actually be feasible, but my goal is to just limit the amount of data that gets written to disk, if any; it should all remain in volatile memory. I'm not gonna provide a fallback for crashes and cheaters when a full save option is available.
Aside from re-adding the missile combat skills, refining a few others and writing up a few descriptions, I also added a bunch of new skills, including Thumping, Foraging, Chandlery (candlemaking), Fletchery (arrowmaking), and Forestry. I also tweaked race and class skill assignments to incorporate the new and the old. And, as usual, some new commands were added, forcing tweaks there as well.
Another thing I've been considering is keymap adaptations. I did a little research and wrote up the following.
As an English Canadian myself, I use the standard US qwerty keyboard layout. In placing the many, many keyboard commands in this game, I've considered how I might set commands mnemonically and colocate related commands, all while placing commands in appropriately accessible places as much as possible as well as following familiar roguelike conventions. However, there's clearly a bias; my default keymaps are designed for the US keyboard.
Now, this won't always be a problem for international players, as many of you use the US qwerty layout anyway, perhaps because you're programmers or IT buffs, or perhaps because you're fans of North American culture for some perverse reason. But then there are others that use more local layouts. The default keymaps may be a problem for you; they may be located in seemingly haphazard and stupid ways. Some symbols may not even be readily accessible to you ('$' for the shopping cart, for example). For you all, it may take some time for you to remap commands in the keymap dialog, although it's important to remember that every command is available in the menu bar, so for some less common commands it may not be a big deal to locate them accessibly; you have the option of mapping those commands to no key, if you wish.
If I've noticed anything about roguelikes in my few years on this rock, it's that they're enjoyed in places as diverse as the locales of Oggamund, from Feedlig Bay to the Great Northern Wastes... I mean, from Brazil to Belarus, California to Queensland, and points between and beyond. My intention is to make an honest effort to create keymaps for different Roman layouts to include with future versions of Soulthieves in the Shadows, and anyone who uses a non-US keyboard could obviously help me greatly by suggesting how I might implement such keymaps in as user-friendly a way as possible, since it wouldn't be too easy for me to map commands for a keyboard I've never used before. I might be doing this for free, but I'd still like people to be able to enjoy my creation without breaking their wrists.
So, yes. This is an important matter to consider. The layouts I've identified so far as high priority - the layouts I would intend on including with the first full version release - are the French Canadian, UK/Irish, German and Swedish/Finnish layouts. A Portuguese layout would be a good idea as well, though Portugal and Brazil appear to have some differences so it's hard to say which it should be. Obviously there'd be a sort of mechanic for users to help me expand the selection, though, so I gotta remember not to get too insane with this. It's still all academic at this point, anyway.
So, there. Update.