I’ve released an update of Dungeon Mercenary. In short, the four best things:

• Standalone .exe executable for Windows (works in GameJolt’s Client)

• Dash moves (Shift + move)

• Special attacks (Alt + move) for daggers, falchions, swords, and small axes

• Better font in menus (not monospaced anymore)

Details are listed below. Happy dungeon crawling! Let the best mercenary win :-)

As usual, feedback is very welcome.

New features

• For Windows, the game is now shipped as a .exe. No need to install Java anymore. Woot! The windows release gained some weight though (it went from 10Mb to 70Mb).

• Added 1/ dash move and 2/ special attacks for light weapons (daggers, swords, falchions, and the small axe). Check out this video to see dash and special attacks in action.

  • A dash move is triggered by pressing Shift when moving. Heavy gear (heavy shields and armors) reduces your dash distance.

  • A special attack is triggered by pressing Alt when moving (think Alternative attack). When wielding two weapons, use right Alt and left Alt to request the special attack of the corresponding hand (if only wielding one weapon with a special attack, both Alt work). Special attacks allow more late-game strategies for the light weapons (assassin style: wield two daggers for the entire game!).

    • The dagger’s special attack is to slit the opponent’s throat (well, if he has one), which kills him instantly. That’s the best special attack!

    • The falchion and the small axe special attacks push away adjacent opponents.

    • The sword’s special attack has been borrowed from brogue’s rapier: it automatically hits an opponent two cells away (as in a plunge attack), dealing extra damage in the process.

  Both dash move and special attacks have cooldowns.

• Added suggestions to help new players:

  • When you’re about to die and have a special attack available, suggest to use it (if applicable)

  • When you’re about to die and have a life or health potion in your inventory, suggest to drink it.

  Suggestions are shown only once per session when playing in a browser. On desktop, they are shown only once in a lifetime (to reboot them, delete the lines containing SUGGESTION in the file .hgames/dm/preferences, in your personal directory).

• In game menus use a non monospaced-font (the same one as the text panels describing items), which is much easier to read: check out the enhancement.

• Reduced size of saves by 30% (from roughly 100Ko per level to 70Ko).

• Restore behavior that similar successive messages in the info panel (at the top of screen) are aggregated (example: You step on short grass. (x4)). I broke this behavior in release 16.05.30.

• Make Backspace (or mouse Previous) go back to the previous menu (if any).

• Reduced flying distance of monsters affected by the force runic (distance now equals the level of the runic).

Bug Fixes

• Corrected a bug that could split packs of monsters (when placing them at level creation) and avoid placing them. It was happening when the log Avoiding to place a monster twice in a group. This is a bug that should be corrected, despite that I can circumvent it was written.

• Web version: capture the following keypresses: Space, Enter, Backspace, arrows, and the numpad; so that they don’t trigger your browser’s events. This fixes that the arrows would move the webpage when playing in a frame (i.e. not in fullscreen). I missed the problem because it wasn’t affecting my browser, but people on #libgdx told me. Thanks to them!

• Corrected that message Blown away by your hit, the foo crashes against the … was shown when the foo was hitting your armor/shield of force.

• Corrected a bug that the game could (rarely) crash after your first move, after loading a previously-saved game, in depths greater or equal than 3.