A Sunken Swamp and a Sewer Full of Bones

The Swamp, step 1: onto the Forest’s engine

The Forest is done, so the theme rework moves on to the Swamp, 2 Blades. It looked exactly like the Forest did before its rework: the original 16-tile set from September, brown mud with hard square patches of roots, moss, cracked mud and water dropped on it, and walls that were one tile repeated. The Forest’s ground painting was built to be reused, so the Swamp now runs on it too, with stand-in art borrowed from the Town and the Forest under a murky green tint until its own tiles are drawn.

A swamp needs far more water than a forest, and the Forest’s ponds only fit in open clearings, which a swamp’s twisty layout hardly has. So a new pass floods some of the walls instead: more than half of the wall masses inside the map turn into deep water. Water still blocks the way, so every path stays where it was, but you can see across it, and so can the enemies. Whatever’s too thin to hold water stays as single trees standing at the water’s edge. The Swamp also takes the Forest’s rule for the end of a floor: no stairs, and beating the boss ends it. Its boss will get a lair of reeds and bones; for now he borrows the Forest’s palisade.

The Swamp, step 2: its own ground and trees

The Swamp’s ground is now its own, from PixelLab’s tileset tool: dark wet marsh grass, brown mud, and murky green water with lily pads, in three sets (grass into mud, water into grass, water into mud), so a trail can run right along the water’s edge. Each set redraws its terrains a little differently: the second set’s grass came out browner than the first’s, and the third set’s water a lighter, speckled teal. So a small script swaps every set’s plain grass, mud and water for one shared version and keeps only the banks it drew, which leaves no seam where two sets meet. The first try at that also ate the pale rim along the banks, because the grass had pale specks of the same color; counting only a tile’s common colors fixed it.

The trees are new too: a bald cypress with long strands of moss hanging from it and a flared, knobby foot, and a dead snag, bare and twisted. Two cypresses stand for every snag.

To keep everything murky together, the Swamp keeps a strong olive tint over the whole map, so anything still borrowed from the Forest (the canopy, toadstools, logs) picks up the swamp’s light. Its own art is drawn murky already, so it’s brightened ahead of time by the same amount and comes out exactly as drawn. The Forest’s round broadleaf canopy still stood out bright green, so a theme can now tint the canopy on its own, and the Swamp darkens it toward a mossy olive. That saved redrawing the canopy’s 256 edge pieces, which would have used up room the other themes need on the tile sheet. The art so far cost 10 generations.

The battle tester picks a theme first

Setting up a fight in the battle tester meant picking a theme for every enemy slot, and the Backdrop row ran through every battle screen in the game. Now there’s one Theme row right under the fight type, and everything below it follows it: the Backdrop row only offers that theme’s screens, and each enemy slot only that theme’s enemies. Switching theme puts on its main battle screen and swaps in its first enemy. The command line works the same way: --theme Swamp sets it, an enemy from another theme is refused, and with no theme given the first enemy’s theme is used.

The Swamp, step 3: cattails, lily pads and bigger water

The Swamp got its first props from PixelLab, one generation each: a clump of cattails, a cluster of lily pads, cypress knees (the knobby stumps a cypress pushes up out of the water) and a pile of old bones. The first cattails and bones came out as a dark scribble and a lime green skull, because I’d forced the old Swamp tiles’ colors on them, so they were redrawn without, and the swamp’s tint dulls their colors to match. Cattails grow on the grass along the water’s edge, lily pads and knees float out on open water, and the bones turn up next to trees and logs, like the toadstools.

The water itself was still a scatter of tiny pools, because a pond only grew over open grass and the Swamp’s layout is crowded with thin strips of wall, each of them a standalone tree. Water blocks walking just like a wall, so a Swamp pond can now grow over those strips without cutting off any path, and the trees are planted afterwards so none is left standing in a pond. That gave real ponds with room for the lily pads. Where a pond touched both grass and mud, one of the two banks was missing and left a square notch, so the mud bank now also comes as a see-through layer that goes on top of the grass one. The props cost 6 generations.

The Swamp, step 4: waterways and wooded islands

Even with bigger ponds, most of a Swamp floor was still solid forest, since the big masses of trees around the clearings never took on any water. Now the deep insides of those masses open up into lakes and channels. Two smooth random patterns decide it: one where the water goes, and a finer one that leaves wooded islands standing in it. A belt of forest always stays between the water and anywhere you can walk, so you see the lakes through the trees. Any part too thin to hold water or canopy becomes single trees, and now and then a lone cypress or snag stands on its own little islet out in open water. The scenery border around the map, which you can never walk into, used to be grass clearings; most of them are open water now, with forest islands in them, so the edge of the map reads as more swamp going on into the distance. None of this changes where you can walk: it only ever turns trees into water.

I also wrote the prompts for the Swamp’s six battle screens, the same set the Forest got: the swamp floor, a boardwalk, a sunken shrine, a frogfolk stilt hut, a pond’s edge, and the boss’s lair of reeds and bones. Their layout guides are drawn in the Swamp’s colors, with a boardwalk, a pond or the lair’s fire and totem marked where they should go. The Swamp already has its own music, so it needs no music prompt.

The Swamp, step 5: a boardwalk

The trail through the Swamp is a boardwalk now instead of a wide band of mud: weathered grey-brown planks one square wide, drawn by a script from the Fisher’s pier and recolored for the swamp, with boards lying across the way it runs, a darker beam along each edge, posts at the dead ends and a soft shadow on the ground to the south. It’s a one-square path like the Town’s dirt path to the Fisher, so every bend, junction and end has its own piece. The trail used to turn at random at every step, a staircase that a one-square boardwalk would show as endless zigzags, so in the Swamp it now keeps heading the same way whenever that’s just as short, which gives long straight runs with a few clean corners. The boss’s camp kept its own trampled mud instead of being paved with planks.

Water now draws its bank against a path as if the path were the grass it lies on. That fixed a missing bank on the Town’s pond too, along the side where the dirt path runs past it.

The Swamp’s battle screens

The Swamp’s battle screens came out of Leonardo in one evening, built the way the Forest’s finally worked: a layout guide in the Swamp’s own colors attached to each prompt. The swamp floor has mossy cypresses, a low mist between their trunks and puddles in the mud; the sunken shrine is a wall of green-stained stone carved with spirals, its pillars split by roots; the stilt hut is a thatched frogfolk hut up on poles with a ladder down to the yard; and the boss’s lair is a wall of lashed reeds hung with skulls, turtle shells and nets, a totem of skulls in the middle and a pale green swamp-gas fire in the corner. The boardwalk came back flat the first time, the guide showing through, so I did what fixed the Forest’s pond: I gave Leonardo the finished swamp floor and asked it to add only the boardwalk. It kept the trees and laid a raised plank walk across the clearing, and everyone stands on it. Five of the six are in, each with its own standing spots, and the pond’s edge is getting the same treatment.

The pond’s edge took three more rounds. Each try came back with the pool down in the front-left corner, which is exactly where my hero stands, and in the game it sits even lower than in the picture, because the battle screen crops and enlarges the backdrop. Moving the hero wasn’t an option, since his spot is shared by every battle screen, so I moved the pool instead: the last prompt tucks a small pond between the tree roots at the back left, right under the mist, and the whole bottom half stays dry mud. Now he stands on the bank with the lily pads behind him. On the stilt hut screen the rightmost enemy was cut off by the screen’s edge, so that group’s right half now steps only half as far to the right.

The Swamp’s enemies

I made new looks in PixelLab for all six Swamp enemies and set them beside the old ones. The Alligator and the Lizardfolk kept their old art; the Bullywug and all three bosses took the new. The bosses are now 48 pixels tall like the Forest’s, drawn bigger than everyone else on the map and in battle: a Massive Alligator up on its hind legs, a Hulking Lizardfolk in bone armor with a huge bone club, and a fat Bullywug King with a battered gold crown and a skull scepter.

Every new character got the full set the Forest’s enemies have: a walk in four directions, a looping battle idle, an attack, a flinch when hit and a death. The Alligator got a new low crawl for its walk, and the Alligator, Lizardfolk and Snake each got the flinch too. The Bullywug’s first walk toward and away from me just swayed in place, so it got a second one where its feet actually lift.

Each boss also got a special move, using the same rules as the Forest bosses’ with their numbers. The Massive Alligator’s Death Roll bites you and leaves you bleeding for three of your turns. The Hulking Lizardfolk’s War Cry makes his hits 20% stronger for three turns. The Bullywug King’s Swamp Gas is a cloud of green gas that poisons you for three turns, and since it’s a cloud and not a blow, it can’t miss. The Death Roll’s first animation only snapped its jaws, the second twists the alligator hard with its tail whipping around, and a third that rolled it fully belly-up looked too strange, so the twist stayed.

The Swamp’s boss lair

The Swamp’s boss was still living in the Forest’s log palisade. Now he has a lair like the one on his battle screen. I tried drawing the whole thing by script first, to see it without spending anything: a wall of bundled reeds lashed to driftwood posts and hung with small skulls and turtle shells, a totem of stacked skulls, bone lanterns and a green fire. The shapes worked, but the first colors were far too bright, so the wall took the dark browns of the battle screen. Even then the totem, lanterns and fire looked flat next to the rest of the map, so those three came from PixelLab: a driftwood totem with four skulls down its front under a horned alligator skull, a pole with a crossbar and a hanging skull glowing green, and pale green flames in a ring of mossy stones. The totem took four tries. Using the battle screen’s colors as a palette turned its skulls green and then too dark to read, and the plain try came out clean.

Next to my short fence the PixelLab pieces were giants, but shrinking them to the battle screen’s proportions left a totem ten pixels wide with no skulls you could make out. So the fence grew instead: it now stands about a square and a third tall, its top drawn over the square behind it like a tree’s crown, and the pieces sit at three-quarter size against it. The totem stands in the middle of the back wall with the horned skull rising above it, just like the battle screen. The fence runs right up to the lanterns at the gate, each lantern standing on the fence’s last post with its skull hanging out over the opening. The green fire flickers in the back corner. The camp still turns its gate toward wherever I start the floor, and the Forest’s camp is unchanged. The PixelLab pieces cost six generations.

The Swamp’s chest room and weapon vault

The first look at the lair in the game showed the boardwalk running in through the gate and almost up to the back wall, with a strip of marsh grass on either side of it. In the Forest the trail and the camp’s floor are the same dirt, so a trail running into the camp never showed. In the Swamp the planks paved right over it. Now the boardwalk, its grass verge and the grass patches all stay out of a camp, so the boardwalk ends at the gate and the lair keeps its mud floor.

The chest room is a frogfolk camp now, built like the Forest’s: a thatched stilt hut from PixelLab where the tent stood, with its roof hanging over the square behind it, the lair’s green fire in the middle, rotting logs to sit on, and two woven reed mats I drew by script, rolled up at one end for a pillow. The hut came out right on the first try, for one generation.

The weapon vault is a sunken shrine. It uses the Forest ruin’s four layouts and its script-drawn kit, recolored to green-stained stone like the shrine’s battle screen, with small square spirals carved into some of the wall faces and roots running down the columns and splitting them. The floor’s joints were always see-through, so in the Swamp the mud shows between the slabs instead of grass. The plinth is the Forest’s, turned green. The shrine cost nothing.

The Swamp is done

With the shrine in, the Swamp is finished and merged. It’s the third theme through the rework after the Town and the Forest, and the one that leaned hardest on what they built: the ground engine, the camps and ruins, the bosses’ specials and the battle screens all came over and only needed the Swamp’s own art and a few new switches, like water that grows into the forest and a boardwalk that runs straight. Next the bots get a real run on its tier, 2 Blades, while I start on the next theme.

The Swamp’s bot run

The bots played the reworked Swamp at 2 Blades, 15 runs per class, twice: 76%, then 65%, so 71% over 150 runs. The old Swamp’s last run at the same factor came in at 67%, and about 65% over 300.

Class	Old Swamp	Reworked Swamp
Amazon	67%	63%
Barbarian	53%	67%
Hunter	73%	73%
Mage	70%	83%
Rogue	73%	67%
Overall	67%	71%

None of these moves is bigger than the noise, but the shape changed in the right direction. Floor 1 was where the old Swamp killed people, 31 of its 49 deaths. Now it’s 22 of 44, with 19 on floor 2 and 3 on floor 3. The Barbarian, the class the old floor 1 wore down the most, is back in line with the others. At 71% the tier sits a little above its 65% slot on the curve, close enough that I’m leaving the 1.7 factor alone.

The Sewer, step 1: real tunnels

The Sewer is next, the Crawl tier and the first dungeon of a run. Until now it was a cave like every other theme with sewer tiles on it, so it gets its own map builder to feel like a real sewer: straight brick tunnels running between junctions on a loose grid, with a few extra links so the network loops instead of branching like a tree. A main sewer is a deep channel of water between two walkways, and a side passage is a narrow gutter between two ledges, or dry. The water blocks walking but not sight, like the Swamp’s, so you can see a rat on the far walkway but have to find a bridge to reach it. Bridges cross every 8 to 12 squares, and wherever else the water would cut a walkway off. Where channels meet, a junction room gathers them into a pool; now and then a big cistern stands at a crossing, with pillars and a walkway around its pool. The start, the stairs, the weapon vault and the chest room each get a dry utility room of their own, and a tunnel with nothing at its far end is left as a dead end. The stairs stay, since a sewer makes sense to climb out of. Only floors 0 and 1 are tunnels: floor 2 breaks into old catacombs dug through the rock, where the Skeletons and the Skeleton King live, so it keeps the natural cave builders. For now it all still draws with the old Sewer tiles; its own art comes once the shape feels right.

I also wrote the Sewer’s seven battle screens: a tunnel seen from inside, looking down its length; a dead end; a utility room; two catacomb screens, a rock passage lined with skull niches and a burial cavern; and two boss screens, a great cistern for the Rat Pack and the Large Red Slime and a tomb with a bone throne for the Skeleton King. The catacombs were rooms of carved stone at first, but they feel better as natural rock, rougher and older than the brick above. The Sewer already has its music, and the catacombs get a track of their own.

The Sewer, step 2: packed rooms and its own tiles

The first tunnel map didn’t work. It used about a third of the map, the rest was solid rock, the water stopped in odd places, and every tunnel was a dead-straight strip. I found some reference maps of sewers I liked, and the layout was rebuilt after them. Now the whole floor is cut into rooms and corridors packed close together, with one-square walls between them and very little dead rock. Every room joins its neighbors, with some extra openings so there are loops. A side passage might be a shortcut or a dead end, and you only find out by walking in. Some rooms are round, a few hold a pool, and one canal, two squares wide, runs from a pipe in a wall along the way from the start to the stairs and down a drain in a round chamber, with plank bridges across it. When the canal turned inside a narrow corridor, it sometimes sealed off a whole part of the map, stairs and all, so now a bridge of any shape crosses wherever it has to.

Then the tiles. PixelLab’s tileset tool gave me a tiny waffle grid with rounded blobs for edges four times, which is wrong for stone walls. Its full-frame image tool did much better: one stone slab per square for the floor, a dark brick texture for the walls and murky green water. A script cuts those up and draws the edges itself: a band of stone blocks wherever a wall meets the floor with black rock behind it, a stone curb along the water, and plank bridges. Each square picks its piece from its neighbors, so every join is clean. All of the art so far cost about 14 cents of my extra PixelLab credit. The layout reads much better now, but the floor and the walls are both gray stone with dark outlines, so the rooms don’t stand out yet. That’s the next fix, along with the dark border around the map.

The Sewer, step 3: walls that stand out

The floor and the walls were both gray stone with dark lines, so the rooms didn’t read. Now the floor is calmer and lighter: the same slabs, but with the cracks smoothed, half the contrast, the black grout lifted to a soft gray, and the whole floor a light warm gray. The walls went the other way. They’re blue-gray blocks with a two-pixel black outline wherever they meet the floor, a thin light edge on their top and left sides and a darker one on the bottom and right, and black rock behind. A wall also throws a soft shadow onto the floor to its south and east, as if the light comes from the top left. The walls now use the full 47-piece set, so every corner, inside or outside, gets its outline in the right place. The game darkens every wall a little so walls stand apart from floors, but these walls already do that themselves, so the Sewer’s walls skip it. None of this cost anything: it’s all done by script on the textures I already had.

The Sewer, step 4: the sewer goes on past the edge

Around the part of the map you can walk on there’s a wide border, so the camera never shows the edge of the world. In the Forest that border is thick woods with a few clearings; in the Sewer it was solid black rock, so the play area sat inside one long straight wall like a box. Now the same rooms and corridors are cut through the border too, a one-square wall away from the play area and never opened into it, and then walled up so nothing can walk or spawn there. The outer wall is now just one more wall between rooms, outlined on both sides, and a Dungeon Map shows the tunnels carrying on past the part you can reach, as if the sewer runs under the whole town.

A map tester, and a yellow glitch

The battle tester’s Dungeon mode now has two types. The enemy gallery is the old showcase, every enemy of a theme standing in rows. The new map tester builds an ordinary random floor of the theme, with any floor of the three, and leaves out the enemies, chests and loot, so I can just walk around and look at the map. Its stairs build a fresh map instead of leading to the shop.

The first walk around the new Sewer turned some of the tiles yellow whenever I stopped moving. When the camera is still, the map draws on a layer that treats any nearly black pixel as see-through, and the new black outlines and rock were dark enough to count. Whatever was underneath showed through, and in the tester that was the yellow battle screen behind the menu. All the Sewer’s tiles are now kept just above that cutoff, still close to black.

The Sewer, step 5: water in one piece

Past the edge of the map the tester still showed a green pattern instead of black. That turned out to be the layer the battle screens draw on: clearing it leaves a “blank” character in every cell, and in the battle art that character is a slice of a painted scene. It’s black now, so anywhere nothing is drawn stays dark. The yellow from before was the same slice showing through.

The canal also didn’t read as one body of water. Each square of water showed its own edges, because the texture didn’t wrap, so it’s now blended to tile without a seam. The dark line along the inside of the curb ran right across the corner where two curbs met and left little crosses sticking out, and now it stops at the corner. And the water on each side of a bridge was curbed off against it like two separate ponds; now a bridge counts as water, so the canal runs on underneath it.

The Sewer, step 6: a river through it

The map was still mostly rooms, with one thin canal along the way to the stairs. A sewer has to serve a whole town with a lot of streets, so the water is now the backbone of the map. A main river three or four squares wide comes out of a pipe in one side wall and winds across the whole floor, turning three or four times, to the other side. Three to five side channels, one or two wide, branch off it into the rest of the map like the streets above, each ending at its own pipe. Every channel runs between two walkways inside its own tunnel wall, the rooms it cuts through open onto the walkways through doors, and where a side channel joins the river, planks carry the river’s walkway across its mouth. Bridges cross the river every ten to sixteen squares. The rooms are bigger too, about eight to ten wide instead of six to thirteen, so there are fewer of them. The start is a dry room near where the river comes in, and the stairs are the dry room farthest away.

The map tester gets a camera and a real floor

The tester’s Dungeon mode has a third type now, Normal, which builds a floor the way a run does, with its enemies, items, chest and boss, so I can play a floor of a theme without walking through the town first. It has the tier and weapon settings too, since its fights use them. Whatever happens there, kills and gold included, never reaches my real play history or the achievements. Every Dungeon type also has a Camera setting: the normal one, the normal one with the whole map in sight (walls hide nothing), and a bird’s-eye view that shrinks the whole map onto one screen, so I can judge a layout at a glance.

The Sewer, step 7: props, and rooms with a job

The Sewer was all bare stone, so it got its props. Barrels, crates, sacks, a coil of rope, rubble heaps, loose bricks, a rat’s straw nest, glowing mushrooms, a wall lantern, a ladder, an old pump with a red valve wheel and a brick pillar came from PixelLab, about a cent each. The loose bricks, bones and rags missed on the first try. The bricks worked the second time, the bones are the Swamp’s bone pile, and the rags are dropped after two misses. Everything that has to line up with the walls or the water is drawn by a script: pipe mouths where the water comes out of a wall, a barred drain where the river leaves the map, rusty pipes with valves along the walls, slime streaks, iron cage bars, puddles, floor grates, scum floating on the water, cobwebs in corners and a patch of daylight under the manhole.

Most rooms now have a job. A quarter stay empty, and the rest are a storeroom (crates and barrels stacked along a wall), a pump room (the pump against a wall, pipes all round it), a collapsed room (rubble heaped in a corner, loose bricks around it), a rat’s nest (straw and bones) or a fungus grotto (glowing mushrooms, puddles, slime on the walls). In rooms the river cuts through, the props stay off the walkways. Anything that blocks walking only goes where everything around it stays connected, so it can never cut off a path.

The special rooms got their Sewer versions too. I start under a manhole, with a ladder up to the street and daylight falling down it. The weapon vault is an old pump house, its guards and the weapon inside a cage of iron bars you can see through, the pump at the back. The chest sits in a smugglers’ cache, boxed in by crates, barrels and sacks. The stairs’ room is a cistern like the boss backdrop, with a pillar in from each corner, a pipe pouring into a pool against the back wall, and bones along the walls. Every floor also gets one pool room by itself, with a rope and a crate at the water’s edge, ready for the Fisher’s Golden Carp.

The side channels that are one square wide were drawn as a string of tiny separate pools, because the water’s tile set could only draw something two or more squares wide. The water now uses the same kind of set as the walls, which picks each square’s tile from all eight neighbors, so a one-square channel runs as one stream. A side channel also ended at a walkway before, and now its water runs on into a pipe in the end wall.

The first fixes from my look at the props

Three props didn’t work once I saw them in the game. The pump was a thin pipe with a big red wheel on it, so PixelLab made a new one, a bulky cast-iron engine with a valve wheel and a gauge. Bones were turning up in the middle of corridors, so now they only go in corners, and less often. The chest’s cache was a ring of barrels and crates sitting out in the open, so now it’s a small walled storeroom, with crates and barrels along its walls, the chest and its guards inside and a single door.

Floor 2, the catacombs, used to roll between the two cave builders. Now it’s always the Drunkard’s Walk, which digs the open, wandering caves I wanted there.

I also found a map where the ladder I came down and the stairs out were in rooms next to each other. The stairs only went in a room the water doesn’t run through, and on some maps the river and its branches cut through nearly every room, leaving just two or three dry ones, all near the start. Now a dry room only gets the stairs if it’s at least two-thirds as far as the farthest room. Otherwise the stairs go in the farthest room even if the water runs through it, on its dry floor nearest the middle. Over 200 test maps, the closest stairs used to be 16 steps from the start and are now 58.

The Sewer, step 8: the catacombs

The catacombs on the Sewer’s third floor were still the Drunkard’s Walk, one big open blob painted with the old green placeholder tiles, so they didn’t look like catacombs at all. They get their own builder now. Ten to thirteen burial chambers sit in natural caverns, rough round shapes spread over the map, and narrow passages join them, dug by hand through the rock. A passage is usually one square wide, sometimes two, and runs in short straight stretches with jogs, the way a pick follows the rock. Every chamber is joined to the rest, with a few extra passages so there are loops, and a few short side passages end in small dead-end alcoves. I start in a small cavern by one side of the map, at the foot of a ladder down from the sewer. The stairs are in the biggest cavern, on the far side: the Skeleton King’s throne room, with the throne carved into its north wall, a brazier of cold blue fire on each side and tattered purple banners on the rock, like the boss’s battle screen.

The other chambers get a purpose. An ossuary has skulls heaped along its walls and burial niches all around. A crypt has stone sarcophagi in rows, and a looted tomb has broken coffins, urns and scattered bones. Some chambers have collapsed, with rock heaped in a corner, and a few are left plain. Each alcove holds one coffin, an urn, a heap of skulls or a few candles. The weapon is in a sealed crypt behind iron bars, with a sarcophagus at the back, and the chest is in a robbed noble’s tomb with coffins and urns along its walls. The rock all over has burial niches packed with skulls cut into it, and roots hanging down here and there. The candles and the braziers flicker.

The art is new too. The floor is dark packed earth with a few gray stones, and the walls are rough gray-brown rock, bright where they meet the floor and fading into darkness. Their edge wanders a little and has a black outline, so a cavern reads as rock and not as a built room. PixelLab gave me the skulls, the niche, the candles, an urn, the sarcophagus, two coffins, the throne, the brazier and the banner for about 11 cents. Its rock came back as cobblestones and then as bubbles, so the rock and the floor are drawn by a script, along with the rubble and the roots, which also missed.

The catacombs have no weapon vault or chest room after all. Nothing down there would be any use to me, so those two caverns get an ordinary purpose like the rest, and none of the caverns ends up with square edges.

The catacombs’ art filled out

The throne was drawn from a three-quarter angle and cut badly across its four squares, so PixelLab made a new one seen straight from the front, two squares wide, with skulls on its armrests and a gold crown on its high back. The Blade now lies on a stone pedestal two squares in front of it.

Every candle, sconce and brazier throws a pool of light on the ground around it, warm for the candles and cold blue for the braziers, spread over the squares next to the flame and thinning out toward the edge. Long passages get iron wall sconces with burning torches, never two close together, and their flames flicker like the candles.

The bones have more variety now: a single skull, a scatter of ribs and a thigh bone, and now and then a whole skeleton slumped against the rock. The big caverns get drifts of pale dust, and some have a patch of old worn paving, its outer slabs broken or missing so it fades into the earth. The Sewer’s first two floors finally have their own way down too, a round shaft through the floor slabs with a ladder down its far side. PixelLab’s part was six objects, about 6 cents.

The Sewer’s battle screens and music

I picked six of the Sewer’s new battle backdrops, and a fight now takes its screen from the ground I’m standing on, the way the Forest and the Swamp do. The main tunnel is a long brick tunnel with a slime canal along one side. The last few squares of a tunnel that goes nowhere get the dead end, a brick wall with a pipe pouring into a puddle and a heap of fallen bricks. The dry rooms (storerooms, pump rooms, the start and the stairs’ room) get the utility room, with pipes, valve wheels, a lantern, crates and barrels. In the catacombs, the passages get the ossuary, a rock passage lined with niches of skulls. The bosses on the sewer floors fight in the cistern, a pipe pouring green water into a pool, and the Skeleton King fights in his tomb, with his throne of bones and skulls between cold blue braziers. The backdrop sheet was full, so it grew a row for them.

The crypt, the one for the catacombs’ caverns, came back twice as flat gray shapes instead of pixel art, so it’s being redone. This time it starts from the King’s Tomb picture and turns the throne room into a burial chamber, so the two match. Until it’s in, the caverns use the ossuary.

The Sewer has new music too, and the catacombs have their own track, slow and hollow, with a tolling bell.

The crypt backdrop

The redone crypt came back as pixel art this time, four versions of the King’s tomb turned into a burial chamber. I took the third: a stone sarcophagus on the left with a carved knight lying on its lid and candles at its head, a statue of a knight holding a sword point-down in an arched alcove, and two niches of skulls on the right. The catacombs’ caverns now fight in it instead of the ossuary.

The Sewer’s enemies, new looks

I made new looks in PixelLab for every Sewer enemy, plus two new ones: a giant Cockroach for the first floor and a Ghoul for the catacombs. The Rat kept its old look, which is scarier; the Green and Red Slimes took their new glossy ones. The Kobold’s first redo looked like a little dinosaur, so it got two more tries, and I took a scavenger with a dented tin pot for a helmet and a sack on its back, a good fit for the catacombs’ looted tombs. The new Skeleton came out in a helmet and rags, so I went back to a copy of the old one that now holds its sword on every side, and the Ghoul ended up purple-skinned with wild hair and red eyes. The bosses are 48 pixels tall now: a Rat King in a crown of rusty scrap with a skull on a pipe for a scepter, a Large Red Slime with a sword stuck in it, and a Skeleton King in a fur-trimmed robe.

Every one got a walk, a battle idle, an attack and a flinch when hit, and the bosses a death too; ordinary enemies don’t need one. The Rat’s animations were all redone, and I kept the new walk and flinch with its old attack and idle. The Rat King will lead two or three Rats instead of the Rat Pack’s four, the Large Red Slime still bursts into slimes, and the Skeleton King gets a special move, Raise Dead, which calls up a Skeleton in the middle of the fight.

A few animations needed another go. The Skeleton, the Ghoul, the Large Red Slime and the Skeleton King barely moved their feet walking toward or away from the camera, so each got two new takes; the Skeleton’s flinch bent its sword like rubber, and the Large Red Slime’s sword vanished partway through its attack and flinch. Its death now splits it down the middle into two smaller slimes, with the sword clattering to the ground between them. The Cockroach stays in, on the first floor.

The new Sewer enemies are on the sprite sheets now. The bosses fight on the same big sheet as the Forest and Swamp bosses, drawn half again as big as an ordinary enemy, while their fights stay their own for now: plain attacks, and the Large Red Slime still bursting into smaller slimes, which keep the Red Slime’s new look. One more fix on the way in: two frames of the Large Red Slime’s attack had a white smear across its face, so it holds its wind-up and its lunge a beat longer instead. The Cockroach, the Ghoul and the Rat King have their art but don’t turn up in the game yet; they need their stats and fights first.

The Sewer’s new enemies join the fight

The Cockroach, the Ghoul and the Rat King are in the game now. The Cockroach is the first floor’s tough little one, harder to kill than a Rat but with a weaker bite. The Ghoul is the catacombs’ fast one next to the slow, sturdy Skeleton, a little frailer and quicker on its feet.

The Rat King guards the first floor’s way down with two or three Rats at his side, all on his square, so stepping onto it starts one fight against the lot of them. It counts as one boss fight, and the victory screen names him once.

The Skeleton King has his Raise Dead now. He opens with an attack, then raises a Skeleton at his feet, and raises another whenever the last one is down, twice a fight at most. A raised Skeleton comes back with half its health and hits for about two thirds as hard, it’s worth nothing when I kill it, and once the King falls, whatever he raised crumbles to dust with him.

The enemy gallery got a little tighter, since the Sewer now has eleven enemies and they didn’t all fit on one screen four squares apart.

The split slimes look like their boss

When the Large Red Slime burst, its pieces came out as ordinary Red Slimes, the new glossy kind, and died with the old Red Slime’s death. That’s not what I wanted: the pieces should be smaller copies of the boss. Now they are. The two middle slimes and the four little ones all use the Large Red Slime’s own art, sword and all, just drawn smaller, and they attack, flinch and die with its animations. The ordinary Red Slimes on the second floor keep their own look.

The Sewer’s bot run

The bots ran the reworked Sewer on Dungeon Crawl, 15 runs for each class, and won 85% of them (64 of 75): Amazon 93%, Barbarian, Mage and Rogue 87%, Hunter 73%. The target for Crawl is about 80%, and the old Sewer’s last runs landed mostly between 70% and 77%, so it’s a little easier than before but close to where it should be.

Nearly every death was on the second floor (8 of 11): three to Kobolds, two to Red Slimes and three to the Large Red Slime, almost always walking into the fight with less than a fifth of their health left. Only one bot died on the first floor, a Rogue the Rat King and his three Rats beat from nearly full health, and two Hunters died in the catacombs, one to a Ghoul and one to a Skeleton.

I counted the enemies too, over 40 maps a floor. The first floor has about 53 (Rats, Green Slimes and Cockroaches), the second about 64 (Kobolds and Red Slimes), and the catacombs 16 (about 10 Skeletons and 6 Ghouls). The first two floors are about the same as the old Sewer’s 58 and 65; the catacombs lost the 4 or 5 extra Skeletons the old vaults used to guard, but a Ghoul hits much harder than a Skeleton, so the floor didn’t get easier.