KeeperRL -- a rogue-like Dungeon Keeper clone

[Bibbimbop]

A one-man project to do something like a Dungeon Keeper and Dwarf Fortress hybrid.

Released on Steam, GOG and itchio and perhaps somewhere else. 25% off. Looking to read some impressions.

Like DK, you create an evil lair and choose what traps to place where, and which constructions to build in order to enable summoning which minions. There are five villages of different good races lying around the cliffside into which you have mined your lair. The surrounding villages will eventually come raiding, or you can wipe them out pre-emptively.

Like DF, you mine for ores and manage your minions as they craft and produce the items they will equip. You also have the dual play modes of being a keeper trying to survive attacks from the villages, or being an adventurer trying to clear a dungeon. You can beat the attacking villages as a dungeon keeper, and then become an adventurer and try to clear your own dungeon.

Notably unlike DF, however, there's an accessible and easy mouse-driven UI.

http://keeperrl.com/

 

[Konjad]

Looks interesting, I'll will follow it's development.

 

[m_s0]

This might be a dumb question, but what the hell is the answer to "what creature does all the digging?" I'm trying to register on the KeeperRL forums and I can't for the life of me figure that one out.

 

[Angthoron]

Isn't that the imps?

 

[Berekän]

Don't enable the robots

 

[m_s0]

Yup, didn't connect it with DK for some reason

 

[Catweasel]

Looks like a fun merging of DK and DF, hoping it leans more toward DK personally.

 

[Raapys]

So far it doesn't appear to lean much towards anything. That might well be the fastest I've ever grown bored with a game, alpha not withstanding.

 

[Incantatar]

Awesome game. Just played the first time and already won. I guess that means it's too easy @ easy. Next game will be at hard difficulty.

 

[Agesilaus]

It's fun, but it gets boring incredibly quickly. I finished it on hard and aggressive, and... yeah. Done.

Just race to Golems, set up a long corridor and with an alarm and gas, let the iron golems take care of business. Even better if you can get a poison dragon to die in the corridor so that the enemy literally never gets more than 10 steps inside the doorway.

 

[Xor]

It's fun, but it gets boring incredibly quickly. I finished it on hard and aggressive, and... yeah. Done.

Just race to Golems, set up a long corridor and with an alarm and gas, let the iron golems take care of business. Even better if you can get a poison dragon to die in the corridor so that the enemy literally never gets more than 10 steps inside the doorway.

The game is still in alpha. This is exactly why early access is awful and needs to go away. People play a game in its unfinished state, beat it, and get bored. Great way to generate a "meh" reaction to something that might actually be really good when finished.

The game itself has a very interesting concept but I have concerns about the execution. Will keep an eye on this to see how it turns out closer to release.

 

[Incantatar]

It's fun, but it gets boring incredibly quickly. I finished it on hard and aggressive, and... yeah. Done.

Exactly right.

But he's still working at it. Hope it will get more challenging soon.

 

[covr]

So, the new version is out. With ASCII and tileset gfx, only the latter is paid version. Anyone have tried it?

 

[Makabb]

It's on steam EA for 11$

 

[tindrli]

did anyone tried it recently?

 

[Ranarama]

The dev has been changing it a whole bunch. He changed how rooms and furniture work and so on, as well as changing it from a single large map to a region system with smaller maps. This also means other players dungeons work as a place to raid. Of course even that was months ago, so who knows what the current state is.

I had fun. It's probably worth another look if you had it and got bored before.

 

[MI.Tex]

This is awesome, it's a combination of dungeon keeper, dwarf fortress and other theme games, when it will be completed it has the potential to be the best game of its kind to date.

Also the price is a steal, 8$, everyone should get it.

 

[Makabb]

alpha 26 released

 

[Galdred]

What is the current state of the game now? Is development still active?

 

[Galdred]

After releasing the last Alpha 29 fixes I've been very busy with adding new, shiny features to your favorite game! In order to keep you excited for KeeperRL Alpha 30, here is a quick rundown of what's coming.

Playable Gnomes faction

Almost all mods add new playable factions to the game, so it's obvious that this is something that players crave. At the same time I want to make sure that new factions offer significant new gameplay experience, and aren't just reskins of existing mechanics. The new Gnomes faction will do exactly this! Being expert craftsmen by nature, gnomes dominate by constructing automatons, advanced traps, and other machinery. Automatons are assembled from basic parts, and every configuration offers different capabilities. You can create your own custom builds! Another thing that's unique about this faction is that there is no unique Keeper creature. The success of you base will depend on keeping any of the gnomes alive.

Minion titles and kill lists

I've set out to make minions feel more personal, and less like expendable cannon fodder. The game will track their kills, and give them titles for killing tribe leaders, along with significant bonuses. The Keeper will also write poems about your minions' triumphs and failures.

Group activity disabling

One of the oldest feature request was to allow disabling chosen activities for larger groups of minions. This is now possible!

White Knight faction additions

Thanks to the generosity of Archdiggle, the author of the Dig Realm mod, who kindly agreed for some of their sprites to be used in vanilla, the White Knight faction receives new minions and structures. The main addition is a group of angelic minions.

Mod merging


I've implemented further improvements to the modding system, and now one or more mods can be merged together. This means two things:

• Modders no longer need to copy the entire vanilla content to add their changes. Every mod consist of only what it changes or adds, even if it's a single line.
• Multiple mods can be used at the same time!

Custom map layouts

Modders can now circumvent the built-in procedural town generator and use their pre-made map layouts. The towns 'skins' (wall, floor, furniture types, etc) and defined separately, which lets you easily generate a lot of different-looking towns.

New spells and traps

New types of effects will arrive in Alpha 30: a spell that animates weapons, a trap (or spell) that sets off other traps in its vicinity, an effect which covers you in oil (and makes you flammable), and others.

Multi-weapon combat

Creatures will be able to attack with multiple weapons and body parts in a single turn. This includes multi-wielding weapons if one possesses the appropriate skill and number of limbs, and using extra intrinsic attacks, like poisonous bites, kicks, etc. This feature makes certain creatures, like werewolves and vampires, much more interesting and powerful.

Secrets

I'm not going to spoil you with details, but in the future KeeperRL will have an 'ultra' ending, which will requires finding secrets and beating special areas and bosses.. Alpha 30 will include some new, hidden levels that are part of this. I'm curious to see how quickly you can find them!

Making Zombies Great Again!

Last but not least, zombies will receive their long due power-up! They will possess a 'swarmer' trait, which makes them more powerful when more zombies are around. Therefore a large horde of zombies will be extremely dangerous!

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

https://store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/329970/view/2792752124085392064

Warlord mode and moddable map generation
I'm slowly wrapping up the Alpha 31 update, and while it won't be nearly as massive as the previous patch, it will bring two very interesting features.

Warlord mode

Having to say 'goodbye' to your Keeper when retiring a dungeon can be sad for some players, and I've noticed that a lot of you like to share screenshots of your retired dungeons, and your Keepers' stats. To give your retired dungeons a longer life, I've added a new 'Warlord' mode, in which you once again take your retired Keeper and your minions on an escapade against other retired dungeons.

In this mode you don't have access to your retired dungeon any more, but you assemble a team out of all your minions, and travel between other retired dungeons of your choice.

Since the games will be quite short, the warlord mode will give you an opportunity to come back to KeeperRL in short bursts, without having to start another dungeon or adventurer game. It will also let you visit many more retired dungeons.

The new mode unlocks once you retire your first dungeon.

Moddable map generation

As I've hinted in the past, I've been working on a scripting language dedicated to procedural map generation. The language is now incorporated into KeeperRL, and several maps in the game already use it. The benefits over the old system, besides moddability, is much faster iteration, since generated maps can be viewed using a command line utility without having to start the game and manually walking to the area that you're working on.

Almost all map generation algorithms currently used in KeeperRL are available in the script, so there is huge potential for modders to customize their own maps.

A testing build of Alpha 31 with the new features will be released on Steam soon, and meanwhile you can take a peek at the very preliminary documentation of the script.

 

[Theodora]

What is the current state of the game now? Is development still active?

It's a slow burn, but there's no sign it's stopping.

 

[Cryomancer]

Purchased the game thanks of that video. "it fells like a cross between rimworld, dungeon keeper..."

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

https://keeperrl.com/combat-improvements/

Incoming combat improvements


The turn-based ‘roguelike’ mode is an important and distinguishing feature of KeeperRL, yet something that still causes a lot of friction for players. The main problem is that roguelikes are normally single-character games (outside of an occasional pet or companion), in which you make very frequent and fine-grained decisions. But in KeeperRL you typically lead teams of unlimited size, which either makes you dependent on disappointing team AI or forces you to take control of every team member, which slows down the game massively.

Improving the AI should make the experience much more pleasant, in particular for non-melee units, which until now had a tendency to get killed in the front lines of combat. The first, and biggest challenge was to identify effectively which units are non-melee, since a lousy bow doesn’t turn an ogre into an archer. Ultimately the melee/ranged designation will be explicitly stated in creature definitions, which is something that modders will have to remember when adding new ranged fighters. The player will also have an option to override this setting for every minion, so you’ll be able to tell your ogre with a bow to stay in the back of the squad.

Once a creature is known to avoid melee combat, the game checks for any offensive spells and abilities, and keeps just enough distance from the enemy to take a shot at them. The same logic will be used for non-combat creatures, like imps, which will automatically avoid enemies altogether.

KeeperRL has special squad AI that causes creatures to assemble in simple line formations. To make it work nicely with non-melee creatures I’ve made them stay two lines behind by default. The game will also need to take special care of healer creatures, who have to stay close to the melee fighters, but at the same time try not to get slaughtered in combat.

All these ideas are tricky to implement, since they need to work for all types of creatures and in different scenarios ranging from open areas to tight corridors. To help the AI a bit more, I’ve given more experienced archers and mages the ability to shoot past their allies, which you can notice in the above gif. This should make them even more effective and overall combat more satisfying.

While tweaking ranged combat, I’ve also added a warning for when you’re about to attack you own minions with a spell or arrow, which should take care of the confusing situations when your own minion turns against you.

There has also been a more internal change, which reworked ranged weapons as spells/abilities. This makes it easier to define weapons with special properties, such as cooldowns, custom effects, attacks that hit multiple enemies at once, etc.

In other news, to give you more crazy experiences, the game will now feature a ‘polymorph’ spell. It will have a few variants and will be used by creatures in several different situations. I’m intentionally keeping the details vague in order to make the surprises more exciting. I encourage modders to check this feature out, since it allows creating some new, fun gameplay.

I’ve also added a new ‘load game’ menu, which will come before the character creation screen, because you usually load games more often than start new onces (unless you’re very new to the game, ha, ha). It’s very likely that I’ll also design a wholly new main menu for the upcoming update.

 

[TheDiceMustRoll]

Bought it on a whim because I don't like War for the Overworld.

Anyway, how do you drop items from someone's inventory. My overlord has been lugging around 800 gp for weeks now

 

[Filthy Sauce]

Bought it on a whim because I don't like War for the Overworld.

Anyway, how do you drop items from someone's inventory. My overlord has been lugging around 800 gp for weeks now

It's been a long time, but I think you have to build a treasure chest and they will use it for a GP drop point.