In these early stages of development of Dance of Death, I definitely have my work cut out for me. I’m also grateful to have received such great feedback from the roguelike community, much of which has helped me determine development priorities.

The focus for the next release will be to provide a winnable condition and wire a lot of the placeholder functionality, in order to graduate the project from “tech demo” to an alpha stage!

The following is a list of goals for the next release of Dance of Death:

1. Add more monsters.
2. Add ability for monsters to drop items (basic loot system).
3. Add endgame condition.
4. On death, provide a way to return to the main menu.
5. Add quest tracker.
6. Allow diagonal movement without NumLock on.
7. Implement E[x]amine for the inventory.
8. Stepping over a tile with items should output the items similar to using [L]ook mode.
9. Add weapon skills and wire them to weapon subtypes.
10. Implement armor functionality and wire armor requirements to Armor Use skill.
11. Introduce secret doors and wire Search skill.
12. Wire Sight skill to FOV.
13. Add round rooms, and rooms with columns in the dungeon generator.
14. Add “Quick Character Creation” option.
15. In Character Creation, validate that all stat and skill points are distributed, and that a name is typed in.
16. Add a scrollbar to output area and PgDown/PgUp functionality.
17. Bug fix: Messages addressed to the player are now being output in third person. They should be written in second person.