A new version after 14 years!

Well. It has been fourteen years since the last release of CastlevaniaRL.

Last week someone posted on reddit about the lack of fullscreen support. I looked into the old source code of the game and thought, well, if I'm going to push a new version out, let's make it count.

CastlevaniaRL was my first big scale game, with development starting in 2005 at the very first 7DRL challenge. As such, I was self-teaching myself gamedev while developing it, both in the technical aspects as well as game and user interface design. It's been a long time since 2010 so I thought I could improve it a little bit for it to be more enjoyable by people.

The game has the peculiarity of having a very special tileset made for it back on 2006 by none other than Oryx; he just wanted to contribute to a roguelike project since he didn't feel like learning programming to make his own. CvRL was never very popular and after some years he decided to start offering the tileset as a royalty free pack. It was eventually picked by the developers of Vampire Survivors as a foundation for their game visuals.

But enough talk, have the changelog at you!

Let's start with the visuals; at some point, after 2010, I started toying with the idea of an interface with bigger icons, but never managed to complete the refactor due to not being powerful enough. Well, now I am, and it looks much better IMO. The canvas size has been increased to 1024x768 (was 800x600) with sprites scaled 2x on viewport.

The HUD has also been improved, with the biggest change being the addition of the minimap to it, and the message box changed to a vertical format, one message per line, much more readable.

There is also an optional full screen mode which might work fine for you depending on your graphics card and the number of displays. It's good enough that I thought it warranted being there as an option.

The adventure map now displays every time the player enters a level to give him a sense of where he is.

The very annoying environmental overlays for fog, rain and thunderstorm, have been removed, and the feedback for combat has been improved both in the messages displayed and animations when entities are hit.

Let's go now with gameplay. And well, the single, biggest, more important change is the removal of "bounce back" when the player is hit. This is a real game changer, making the game much less confusing given the lack of animations, and much more interesting tactically.

Other than that, a lot of small tweaks were made to make the game a bit less frustrating in the beginning: Healing items are now stronger, skeletons have been removed from the welcome party and their ranged attacks have been nerfed a little bit, monster spawning frequency has been reduced, and the player now starts at dawn giving him higher chances to reach Petra on daylight.

Another important modernization aspect was allowing WASD movement (+QEZC for diagonals), which involved moving around some commands but will allow playing in laptops and short keyboards.

Finally, I bundled the 64bit windows version of libjcurses to make it a little bit easier for windows players to use the ASCII version. (Yes, the ASCII version works completely fine after all these years and I still love how it looks.)

So, what are you waiting for? go now and play the game!