Progress on my RPG roguelike game "Caverns & Dryads", and projects for it on 2025

 I've been working on the game intensively and making great progress.

I hope to have a version of the game that has the core features soon. When I have it, I will publish it at my sites and make it available. 

I also plan to promote the game through social sites as I continue adding featured.

It will be more exciting to players to follow the game development, for example as I add the procedural stories, quests, more spells, and so on.

There is a patreon page to support me in the development, both in encouragement and to get funds for buying books, resources, and all needed to take the game further.

What I wish most is to have a community of players. I wish others may enjoy the exploration and adventure features of the world I've created. 

Parallel to the game, I'm also going to make a tabletop version. 

Other project is to release some illustration books at Amazon, featuring different things, like fantasy landscapes of my game, photoreal and painterly illustrations of my heroine Tamzyn, and things like that. 

In these weeks I've added the spells and magic system, more combat features, fixed many bugs, and visual and music improvements.

I plan to add visual effects to spells, the mechanism of persistence of the play, and the basic events for cities and sanctuaries next. 

Stay tuned to follow the development and be the first to know when I release a public alpha. 

Now a bit of screens to let you see how it looks for now:

The title screen that is animated, and has a short music sequence to put you in the mental state of exploring and adventuring already. You just click anywhere to proceed.

Then there's the credit screen that has a curious effect that you'll see, and plays the main music theme. Here you can see a tutorial, start the play, and set the settings.

After clicking Play, you start the adventure. For now it starts on the Magical Forest, but I may add a short sequence for the beginning.

In this screen you can walk the place, clicking in one of the two paths that it offers to you. You can see what lays ahead at some distance. The cases show the most probable events, like story events, treasure, enemies, and so on, and the percentage that it will happen. 

You also have a series of bars to check yours status, and how many steps are you away from getting out of this place. This is important because the deeper you get in a place, the more dangerous monsters are, and in some of the places, there will be boss monsters too.

Although I used the word "level" here, the game has no levels. It has places, that can be more or less dangerous, but not levels. Your survival depends on the good decisions you take, not in a level advancement.

I think levels kill immersion and realism.

Once you finish a place, the world map appears. This is the screen. I still have to add a good icon for centering the map (x) and hiding the place names (N). A particle effect (green) shows which places you can go from where you are when you click on them. You have to discover your own journey.

Once you decide where to go, you confirm it, and our two heroes go there.

At some point Siuol, the wizard, may be able to use a teleport spell to travel to some places.

Sometimes you reach doors, that can be opened, for now, playing a small "guess the number" game. In the future you will be also able to crush the door by brute force, or use a spell to open them. There will also be other kinds of obstacles like overgrown ivy, crates, a river and so on, and maybe include mini games.

You can camp too. Camping involves some risk, that varies depending on the place, of being attacked by wandering monsters. But it makes you recover some life points and mana (magic).

Last, these are the screens for magic casting. I plan to also add visual and sound effects to make these screens more catchy and fun. You select first the main function of the spell, then its Realm (yeah I have to change the word Reign for Realm :D), and then a list of available spells appears.

Here we are casting the Attack-Fire spell Fireball!

There's also other screens for displaying the stats of the two characters that you control:

You can see there are several buttons in addition to their stats: armor and weapons, powers of the Dryad (the female character, Tamzyn), spells that the wizard Siou has,  and the Heart button is a summary of the relationship between they two.

Another main feature of the game is that the better their relationship is, it gives them advantages for combat, story, and even powers. It also makes the story more interesting, adding romance elements.

I will enter in more detail as I implement all this.

Hope you liked to see these screens! :) Thanks for reading and watching, and for your comments! :)