Well, it's been a long road, filled with tears, torment and truffles. (Truffles?) We've had our problems and fights, and we've worked into the night countless times to make it the best it could be. Every little milestone just made the goal that much further off, but we knew we had to reach the end eventually, and now we finally have.
If you don't hang around on DROD.net much, our new game, DROD: Journey to Rooted Hold, has now been released. (We tried to fool people by releasing it on April Fool's, but that worked about as well as a match in a blizzard.) You can get it from
http://www.caravelgames.com, which will give you the first three levels of the demo hold, the Foundation style ('style' here meaning graphics and music) and the editor. We'd expect that some new JtRH holds will start turning up soon enough on the DROD.net holds page.
So, what, exactly, is new? I'll probably need to revert to a 'lots of other stuff!' bullet point, but here's what's what:
* A monstrous new official hold, which introduces everything old and new in 25 levels with 350+ rooms filled with DROD's trademark deadly death(tm). We've worked hard to make sure this hold is better in every way over King Dugan's, and so we're considering Journey to Rooted Hold to be the new 'official' hold and go to all the parties instead of King Dugan's. It's got smoother introductions to each of the new monsters, diabolical new puzzle ideas, a more forgiving difficulty curve, and yet it's harder than King Dugan's! Truly something for everyone.
* New graphics engine, from the big (tiles are bigger, everything's colourful and hi-res) to the small (when Beethro turns, his sword makes a little 'swish'. Oh, and now everything actually moves into its square). You can have six different floor styles - the ol' checkerboard, mosaic, road, grass, dirt, and sand, as well as the image floor, which lets you put any image you want on the floor. Try it out: it's really fancy.
* Lots of new elements, from the expected (bombs, which blow up) to the un-expected (wubbas, which will come towards you and *won't* kill you, although you can't kill them either). Or maybe you'd prefer some tunnels (zip from one side of the room to the other!) or orthogonal squares (like force arrows that stop you moving diagonally)? How about sticking your sword into rock golems (very dumb monsters that collapse into an impassable pile of rock once killed) or rattlesnakes (a new long monster that you need to hit on the tail to kill)?
* The Slayer! This wily foe will chase you down and stick his hook into you, which is not pleasant. He's one of the smartest foes in the game, and he also looks like a clown, which is very disturbing. Think of him as kind of like an anti-Beethro.
* Halph! Your closest ally, Halph can open doors for you and follow along behind you. Great for covering your back!
* Characters! Now any monster, Beethro, Halph, the Slayer, or a random passer-by can speak, including voice and subtitles. They can also move around and use orbs, and they have the ability to change their behaviour based on what's happened in the room - they can react differently if a door's open, if the room's been completed, of if Beethro's in a certain place or facing a certain way. In fact, there's 40 different conditions a character can react to.
* There's now a threat clock on the side of the screen - when you're in a room where a creature depends on the spawn counter (a spawning monster, a long monster, Halph, or the Slayer) the threat clock will appear and tick away each turn.
* You can now click on orbs and evil eyes to see what they affect/see.
* Rooms now have a 'mood' - empty rooms are ambient, rooms with low monsters are contemplative, and rooms with lots of monsters are aggressive. There's different music for each mood, and you can change the music using characters if you need to.
* The mini-map has gone through a colour change - the back's maroon now, but that's a bit trivial. What *isn't* is that now you can double click on the map and bring up a level view. Non-required rooms also show up as magenta on the map.
* Secret rooms have been added - they can be hidden by secret crumbly walls, which are very difficult indeed to see, and solving all of the secret rooms in a hold will make you a 'master' of that hold. You can now restrict parts of the hold to masters only and can give editing rights to masters instead of conquerors. Secrets rooms also won't show up on the forum.
* Spiders no longer blink, and they're no longer blue. No more staring at the screen! Now, they'll be easily visible when they move or rotate, and completely invisible when they're not, which makes them actually puzzley. We're finally happy with how spiders work, so expect to see a lot more of them in DROD in the future.
* We've fixed the brain/arrow bug, and broken lots of rooms that relied on this bug in the process.
* Lots of other stuff! (It was inevitable.)
The game is US$19.95, or US$28.95 (including shipping) for the CD version, which has some nifty cover artwork. The game's available for both Windows and Linux. Your cashmoney will buy a new 25-level hold, Journey to Rooted Hold, filled with brain-busting puzzles and a clever and entertaining storyline (with voice!), two new styles, Iceworks and Deep Spaces, and one year's subscription to CaravelNet.
CaravelNet allows you to connect to the Caravel servers from DROD, so you can download holds in game. We may have other things you can download as well - watch this space! There's also a built-in highscore table, so when you connect to CaravelNet you'll be able to see how good your solution was compared to the rest of the world. DROD will also save the best-scoring demos, and you'll be able to download them when you finish the room they're for. We'll have a place on DROD.net where you can see the overall highscores and we can find out once and for all who's the best DRODer of them all! I've tried it out, and it's a great feeling to finally get that room you've been working on and then have '2nd place!' come up on the screen as well - makes it all worthwhile. The forum will also track your progress through CaravelNet holds, and will remember which room you're in (and won't show you rooms you haven't finished).
Of course, you could forget all that purchasing stuff and just play around in the (free!) level editor, or download some (also free!) holds. This is a good idea - we've got a diabolical scheme in place for those people who make the very best holds...
(cue lightning)
So, to recap: we're not joking, we're finally done, and you can get Journey to Rooted Hold at all good
http://www.caravelgames.com near you. Enjoy!
And now we're going to Disneyland. Erik's driving, I'm kicking the back of Mike's seat.
Matt (making little excited 'squee' noises)
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×Lost.
Impressive, very impressive so far. eDIT: connected to CaravelNet, that is.
(Well, it is "cheap" in US terms, but here with a 2.60 (or more) dollar-to-real ratio, it isn't that cheap)
I am angry. Grr. 
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