Now that the lighting and field of vision was in place, it is time to add some dangers to the cave. My first idea was to add static traps. Traps that consist of a line of dangerous material that damages you if you walk through it. I implemented it and immediately found that the traps look like water streams instead of ‘traps’. So I changed the color to purple and renamed them acid streams.
The acid streams allow me to tinker with stats, hit points to be exact. (I’ll figure out a proper vocabulary along the way, for now I’m sticking with D&D terms.) Crossing an acid stream causes 0-3 HP damage, where 0 is the most likely outcome. Also: most of the acid streams emit a very soft light to make it easy to detect them at a distance.
Traps attempt 2. This time the traps are actual proper traps. Nasty devices that shoot at you if you touch the trigger wire.
Of course the trigger wire is not visible to the player, who has has to guess which way the trap is aligned. If you are able to touch the trap, you disable it. And if you guess wrong, you receive 4 HP worth of damage.
But even more importantly: this is where darkness starts to play a factor in the game. So its time to explain the grand idea that my enthusiasm is built upon. The basic twist of Dark Mines is that there are monsters, but you don’t actually get to see them, as they hide in the dark. Or more specifically: they emit darkness to stay hidden. Monsters in Dark Mines are extremely dangerous and your hero knows this. He cannot and will not fight them. Even worse: if your hero has been in their presence for too long, he will flee for his life and exit the level.
Now in order to make it interesting: darkness can contain one of three things: monsters, traps or special treasure. The special treasure being dark ore, the stuff that emits darkness.
OK, back to traps. The trap needs to emit darkness. I already have light sources increase the light intensity of a tile, so I edited them so that they could also reduce the light intensity. And after some (and then some) tweaking I got this.
If you look carefully you can see that the shape of the lighted area is very different from other images. It is not a round shape of lighter tiles, but the shape is ‘dented’ where the trap is.
At this stage I decided it was time to fix those unnaturally bright tiles amidst all my carefully calculated lighting. I changed the loading of graphics so that it automatically calculated several versions of each tile with decreasing brightness. Now finally the ore tiles do not stand out anymore :)
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