The Tavern

I was wondering if the Devs could give us mortals an idea of the changes we can hope to see in the near and far future? Obviously these won't be things that are definite (as we all know how ideas and implementation changes over time) but it'd be nice to know what the plans are for this, and future versions. I've just been reading the Dwarf Fortress arc plans and I thought it'd be nice to hear what big changes are coming up so that the community could pitch in and discuss them (and so that we can all get excited!)

The development wiki is full of
your question. https://crawl.develz.org/wiki/doku.php?id=start

Crawl has nothing like DF's arcs. We have a working game and while there are endless possibilities to improve it, we won't try to turn it into something it is not, a tactical dungeon crawl with enough scope to feature a little strategy.

Apart from that, developers will have their own ideas what's most important. For me, it is all about

• balance: remove no-brainers among spells, weapons etc.
• diversification: monsters, branches, gods, species (remove/modify/perhaps add)
• interface: we've gone some way, but a lot more can be done

Personally, I believe the game could support 27 nicely diverse gods, species and backgrounds. But there is no need to hurry on that one.

Well obviously it's very different, I just meant things like the new skill system and octopodes are the big things for 0.9, and I just wondered if there were any other big changes coming along. Interesting to think that crawl may one day have 27 gods, thats a lot of choice!

We're focusing on 0.9 release so we haven't yet discussed what will be in 0.10. We'll probably start by putting on the 0.10 planning all the things planned for 0.9 and which didn't make it in.
The big things I personally have planned to do are:

• AI improvements.
• Various interface improvements.
• Permanent buffs.
• Better travelling with allies.

We also have a new abyss contributed by bmh which looks like it won't be ready in time for 0.9. I'd really like to address god wraths. Upgrading spiders to a full branch would be awesome. Something needs to be done about feature mimics. Weapons, fighting (both melee and ranged) and stats need some rebalance too. Anyway, we'll talk about that more end of august. Once the tournament is over, the real planning for next version will begin.

Ah that's exactly the page I was looking for. Do you think it might be a good idea to sticky it/make a sticky'd thread at the top of the GDD forum so that people don't suggest stuff that's already being done?
Also, I really like the idea of better travelling and perma buffs, although AI improvements sounds scary

There are plenty of ideas. By which I mean ideas agreed upon by the devteam which "just" need to be coded. We have added some as Implementables: http://tinyurl.com/6e5lq72
Not being able to code is no good excuse, for then you could draw tiles, create vaults or write speech

I currently want to work on more maps. What about of some large thematic maps, like buildings or natural environments to feature some sort of an optional "quest" ? the more the better I think, to avoid spoiling and always having a challenge.

The ideas of adding more branches or portal vaults is always exciting but I foresee that eventually their number will be limited to a reasonable number of maps to be able to win the game, though hardly.

I would like to code something but unfortunately I have no time currently and although I've seen the code it's difficult to get the full picture of it for it is quite large.

Roderic: maps are always welcome! We have a pretty large pool of entry vaults by now, but variants of branch endings are desirable for almost all branches. Also some branches lack dedicated vaults (Elf got its first four vaults last week).

I don't know what you mean by "quest" but in principle it is fine. (To me, troves are quest-like.) New maps for existing portal vaults are welcome, as well as new types of portal vaults. If you have an idea you want to discuss before investing a lot of work, use this forum, or the development wiki or the ##crawl-dev freenode channel.

"Quest" in the sense of feeling that you're playing a little mission ahead of the main goal that is the Orb. Getting some artifact, defeat some unique to get a good XP reward, or simply that you have arrived to an special place in the dungeon and have to survive and go through. It's always welcome finding new structures rather than randomized rooms and corridors.

I'm designing some buildings, just I have to concrete the flavour and the difficulty; probably I'll read the wiki suggestions.
If I was a better player I'll reach further regions and I could determine better what is needed, such the branch endings (I still don't want to spoil really much in .des maps!).In the long term I would like to do something with a kenku environment as I 've spotted thay they're possibly upgraded to a 'Q' glyph allowing more classes.

And, to me, I'll like some revision of throwing weapons with some addition and talkative monsters in the long term (the 't' command has really a good potential!). To me the rest of the stuff is fine for now: monsters, species, backgrounds, even gods, so they don't need to be increased significantly at all.

Roderic: yes, these sound fine. Note how trove meets some of these.

Not being a native English speaker (or just using prepositions in a weird way) really is a downside here, for I want to add some speech lines, book descriptions and some other things, but am afraid to screw the gamestyle up. -.-
This question surely is stupid, but do you review the added descriptions and displayed lines?

Of course. All contributed content is reviewed before being included. So if you want to contribute, don't be shy and try it. If the style or anything else isn't good, we'll let you know.

I have a proposal written up for a broad effort to reform the descriptions of all monsters and items in the game. I have experience editing foreigners' English so non-nativeness would be no problem.

If the devs think the time is right I can post my plan and get the ball rolling.

We're a bit busy preparing 0.9 release, but you can start anyway. That way, you'll have plenty of content to submit when we'll have the time to review and include it. Which should be end of august, after the tournament.

Roger that.