More updates, and Lua scripting

OK, time for another update.

Since the last post I have finished the “team duel to the death” feature and hope to get this released fairly soon. If people like this then I will consider adding a team option to all quests, but let’s see how it goes for now.

I’ve also been working on some minor improvements and bug fixes (you can see a list here: http://www.knightsgame.org.uk:8000/timeline).

Another big change I am looking into is adding Lua scripting to the game. Someone suggested this on the forums a while back — the idea is that people would be able to add their own new features to the game by writing simple Lua scripts, instead of having to hack the C++ code. I think this is a good idea as I personally don’t have that much free time to work on Knights, so anything that can allow users to help me out by adding new stuff themselves has to be a good thing.

Some things that could be enabled by Lua scripting are:

1. Changing the way the dungeon generator works, to allow new types of dungeon layout, procedurally generated dungeon rooms, etc.
2. New monsters. This could mean new monster types (with different strength, speed etc) or new AI behaviours (by allowing monster AI to be controlled by scripts).
3. New tile types.
4. New item types, including new types of wands or new potion/scroll effects for example.
5. New quests (e.g. by allowing the victory conditions to be modified from scripts).

I should say that these are all just ideas at the moment and it is going to be quite a lot of effort to actually implement all of that. However it should be possible to proceed incrementally, so I can start by making one small part of the game scriptable (item types for example), and then add new scripting features gradually as time goes on. This should allow me to continue adding other features in parallel with the scripting and also maybe get feedback on the scripting system from an early stage.