Iteration 9 - "Levels" and polish

So, I haven't had the time I wanted to work on magecrawl this week, but the ideas keep coming. I have over 50 major/minor/bug fixes I wish I could get into this iteration. Before an iteration, I try to come up with a "theme" tying together what I hope to accomplish in the next few months. This iteration (9), the theme is "Levels and polish". It also may be the last iteration before I move onto the next stage of my development plan.

The "levels" in the theme refer to varying levels of difficulty in challenges, not different floors connected by stairs (which I already have). For example, the wolf that attacks you at the very beginning of the game should be different than the wolf pack that hounds you a few levels later when you have better equipment and skills. The quality of treasure should also vary based on depth.

My current idea is to create an engine that creates these monsters and items on the fly. For example, asking for a level 3 monster could create a fast (+1 lv, 25% faster), strong (+1 lv 25% dmg) base kobold (base creature). Or it could create a experience goblin (+2 stat levels). A combination of traits (such as fast, strong, special abilities) and stat levels (more hp, etc). A similar system would exist for items, so creating a level 5 sword could return a masterwork wooden sword or a crude iron sword. Each quality grade and material would contribute to the effective level of the item, along with any enchantments.

I think this system should help me balance magecrawl's difficult curve. Manually creating monster and item stats based on paper calculations is difficult and time consuming.

In addition to "levels", I have a huge number of polish issues that I'd like to implement. They range from the status effect ideas I listed here to internal refactoring to improving monster AI.

As I mentioned, this might be the last "iteration" of magecrawl. I think I laid this out on some other post, but finding it escaped me. The idea of iterations are to fill out functionality needed in the game engine and GUI needed for a "real" game. After I feel like I have enough functionality, I'm planning on moving to "slices". Slice would be a portion of the full planned game, from top to bottom. For example, the first slice could be implementing the entire fire skill tree and all its spells, and flushing out sections of the dungeon. The game itself would be a full (albeit shallow) game. After releasing that, I'd take another slice of say the water tree and more dungeon sections.

Well I should get off to coding...