What is Forge of the Elements?

Forge of the Elements is a roguelike ascii game heavily influenced by dungeon crawl, zangband as well as additional influences on gameplay from poxnora, diablo, city of heroes, and everquest.

What distinguishes Forge of the Elements from other roguelikes?

1) Skill based progression with an elemental focus:

In addition to standard archers, warriors, monks, and rogues players may further develop their characters by choosing one of 8 elements: Fire, Ice, Acid, Earth, Temporal, Mind, Life, and Death. These energies course through the player's veins adding additional effects in combat. Players may release explosions of energy on a successful attack damaging surrounding enemies, siphon the souls of their enemies on attack, find themselves more resistant to damage, become faster as well as other additional effects.

Players will be able to forgo physical combat entirely, and learning from the four schools of magic granting the ability to shape their elemental energies into damaging blasts of energy, debilitating effects on foes, physical manifestations of the element, and internal enchancements to physical prowess.

The skill system will be broken into 3 paths, a path of fighting, a path of skill, a path of focus in addition to the elemental focus. Spending points in one of the 3 paths will enhance your general ability to survive in Forge of the Elements. Fighting will increase both a player's hit points and add a modifier to damage. Skill will increase a players defense allowing them to more easily avoid physical attacks, and focus will increase the modifier for a player's mana pool.

2) Tactical spell system:

The spells in forge of the elements will be highly tactical in nature, providing not only damage but damage mitigation. A seasoned mage will completely control the flow of combat, debilitating foes into submission. Unlike physical combatants who can freely wear armor without weight restrictions, equip shields blocking bolt spells, arrows, and physical attacks, train their defense and ability to evade blows, a caster will rely on preventing an enemy from even casting the spell, or landing his blow.

Spells will rely on a spell targeting engine, which will effect all foes with in its area of effect. Spells will use a variety of casting techniques to operate as rays firring a wide beam of energy, bolts firring a bolt of manifested energy, balls which can be lobbed onto a square effecting surrounding enemies, personal based AEs effecting all enemies surrounding the caster, and single target effecting only the the target.

Casters will rely on a wide range of status effects from blindness, corrosion, stun, paralyze, daze, confusion, sleep, lull, stop, slow, immobilize, freeze, ignite, poison, disease, and weaken.

Casters will have to choose which schools to learn as mastering more than a couple is difficult for mortals. There are many very powerful spells in Forge of the Elements from conjuring Hell Fiends, calling forth divine judgement, becoming one with the earth and walking through stone, to even fading the memories of all enemies on the level.

3) Reflexive AI and player monster inheritance:

If you can cast it, they can cast it and will. Enemies have access to the same spells and abilities that you do. They have can have a stealth rating making it difficult to spot them. They will use the spell targeting engine to determine when to cast. They will check your status effects and know when to debuff you. They will track you based on scent and they will become aggressive if they hear you. They will buff and heal their allies. But the best part? The AI is reflexive. A friendly AI or hostile AI will opperate naturally with the same routine. A friendly AI will debuff, buff, heal, or stealth if able.

There may also be ways to turn a caster against his allies...

4) Java based portability and eventual online hosting as an applet!

Initially, Forge of the elements will be released as standalone .jar running on both windows, mac, and linux but eventually the game will be offered online.

Roguelikes are an amazing genre, but are limited in audience by the difficulty in compiling, poor graphics, challenging game play, and unintuitive controls. While the difficulty is a roguelike's best feature and the ascii offers a level of abstraction key in the complexity of gameplay, I hope to offer a game that is easy to get into, fast paced with no grinding, and with intuitive controls while increasing availability through the web!

Please check this blog for updates on F.o.t.E's development!

Justin