A Mountain to Climb and a Keep Full of Guards

The Mountain, step 0: a plan for a climb, and a wider tile sheet

The Sewer is done, so the theme rework moves on to the Mountain, 1 Blade. It’s the last theme still on its original look: every floor is a random cave blob drawn with the September placeholder set, flat gray gravel with a few snow patches and ^ for the cliffs, and nothing about it says mountain.

The idea for the new one is a climb. You start at the southern edge and work your way north, up a mountain built out of terraces: plateaus at different heights, a rock face under each higher one, and stairs and ladders cut into the faces to get between them, with rope bridges across the chasms between two plateaus at the same height. It won’t always go up: a branch can climb to a middle plateau and then drop back down to reach another one. The boss waits at the very top, guarding a cave mouth. The camera is zoomed in far too close to ever see the whole mountain, so the climb has to read up close: a cliff face and its shadow at every step up, each level a little brighter and snowier than the one below, chasms that fall away into mist, and a map edge that drops off the side of the mountain instead of a wall.

Before any art could go in, the map tile sheet had to make room. It was 4 tiles wide and 482 rows tall, right up against the 16384 pixel limit on a texture, with the Mountain, the Dungeon and the Demon Castle still to come. Now it’s 8 tiles wide. The game numbers its tiles left to right, row by row, so every tile kept its number and nothing in the game’s code had to change; I checked all 1932 of them pixel for pixel. The art scripts all open and save the sheet through one small helper that hands them the old 4-wide layout, so they didn’t change either. That’s room for about 2000 more tiles.

The Mountain, step 1: a map that climbs

The Mountain has its own map builder now, and every floor is a climb. The map is cut into six rows of plateaus, four to six in a row, and each row is mostly one level higher than the one south of it. Now and then a plateau sits a level lower than its row, so you climb down into it and back out, or a level higher. A plateau above the ground to its south has a rock face two squares tall along its south edge, and a one-square rim on any other edge over lower ground. Two plateaus at the same height mostly have a chasm between them, about four squares wide, though some just run into each other and some are split by a low ridge of rock. Stairs and ladders climb the faces, short steps cross the rims, and rope bridges span the chasms, enough of them that every plateau can be reached, plus some extras so the map loops. You start at the south edge on the lowest plateau, and the summit, one level above everything else, sits in the middle of the north edge with a cave mouth in its back wall, where the boss will wait.

Enemies only ever stand on the plateaus themselves, never on stairs, ladders or bridges. I checked 200 floors for that, and every one of them had its weapon vault and chest room in place and at least one bridge. The builder also keeps every square’s height and what it is (ground, face, rim, chasm, stairs, ladder, bridge), so the painting can show the height up close, since the camera never sees the whole mountain. For now it all still draws with the old placeholder tiles.

The Mountain, step 2: snow, cliffs and chasms

The terraces have their own tiles now, all drawn by a script. I asked PixelLab for ground textures first, but every try came back as a little scene (a dirt path between trees, a framed patch of snow, a field of boulders) instead of plain ground, so I gave up on it for this.

The ground comes in four stages: alpine grass with the odd snow patch, snow over gray gravel, plain snow, and snow with patches of blue ice. Which one a plateau gets depends on how high it sits and which floor it’s on, so the first floor starts in grass and turns snowy near the top, and the summit floor is snow and ice almost all the way up. Every stage has 16 versions of its square that all share the same edges, so any square can go next to any other and they’re picked at random, with no grid or repeat showing. The first try was one big texture cut into a 4x4 repeat, and the same snow patch turned up every four squares across the whole map.

Under every higher plateau there’s a gray rock face with a wavy lip of snow hanging over its top edge, rubble at its foot, and a shadow on the ground below. The rims where a plateau drops off to the side get a band of rock with a snow edge, the ridges between two plateaus at the same height are a line of snow-capped rocks, and the chasms are dark mist with the far wall falling away into it. The stairs are stone steps cut into the face, the ladders are wood, and the rope bridges are planks with rope rails.

Deeper chasms, and no more stair bridges

My first look in the game was good, but the chasms were just flat dark mist, with nothing to say how far down they went. Now the plateau on the north side of a chasm carries its cliff face on down into it, snow lip and all, before it fades into the mist, and the higher that plateau stands, the further down the face runs: one square at the bottom of the mountain, up to four near the top. I also found a few spots where stairs did a bridge’s job, steps running right across a chasm or along one with mist on both sides. A climb between two levels now never crosses a chasm or runs beside one, so a chasm is only ever crossed on a rope bridge. I checked 200 floors again: every one is still sound, with no stair bridges.

The Mountain, step 3: trees, rocks and a cave at the top

The plateaus have things on them now. PixelLab drew the props: two tall pines heavy with snow, a small pine, a snow-capped boulder, a few loose rocks, a stone cairn, a fallen log, a frosted shrub, a cluster of ice crystals, a horned skull, an orange tent, a mine cart and a stack of crates. The tall pines stand two squares high, so their tops hang over whatever’s behind them. Pines, boulders, cairns, logs and ice block the way, but only where the squares around them stay joined, so nothing ever gets cut off, and never on a square where an enemy stands, inside a vault or chest room, or at the foot of a stair, ladder or bridge. I checked 600 floors for that. The shrubs, rocks and bones just lie on the ground. How much there is depends on the snow: the grassy slopes are full of pines, the higher up it gets the fewer trees there are and the more ice, and in the deep snow only small pines poke out. Near the start there’s a little camp, a tent with a campfire (the Forest camp’s fire, flickering and lit), crates and a mine cart.

The summit has its cave now. PixelLab’s cave came back as a black blob, so I drew it from the Mountain’s own cliff face instead: a stretch of rock three squares wide rising behind the summit, with a dark arched opening right over the stairs, icicles hanging from its rim and snow drifted at its foot. A prayer-flag pole stands beside it. PixelLab’s first pole only had a few flags at the top and the second wound them around the pole, so I took the plain pole and drew two strings of flags sagging down from it.

Each floor its own snow

I changed which ground each floor gets so the three floors feel different. The first floor still climbs from grass into snow, the second is all snow (patches of ice near its top), and the third is deep snow everywhere, a new ground of long wind-heaped drifts with sharp crests and blue shadows on their lee sides. Drawing the drifts one square at a time made a grid of polka dots, so the deep snow is one big texture eight squares across, laid by map position so the drifts run on from square to square. It repeats every eight squares, which is what I’ll be watching for in the game.

Battle screens for the Mountain

Like the Forest, the Swamp and the Sewer, the Mountain will pick its battle screen from the ground I’m standing on. I wrote Leonardo prompts for seven: the grassy lower slopes, the snowfield, the deep-snow summit, the edge of a chasm with a rope bridge behind it, the miners’ camp, the old watchtower, and the boss’s cave mouth with its icicle teeth and the bones of past prey. Each prompt has a layout sketch to attach that keeps the camera right, with the next plateau’s cliff face across the back and the ground filling the lower two-thirds. The Mountain’s enemies include white Yetis, so the snow screens keep the middle of the ground a trampled blue-gray instead of bright white, or a Yeti would disappear into it. The Mountain already has its own music, so there’s no music prompt this time.

A longer way to the top

My first look at the props and the snow went well, but some floors were too easy: all you had to do was walk north. The plateaus were joined by a random spanning tree, so a climb up to the next row was just as likely as a step across to the side, and most plateaus ended up with a stair going up. Now each row of plateaus is joined up sideways first, and only one or two climbs lead up to the next row. The first one sits at the far east or west end, and the ends alternate going up, so getting north means crossing the whole row each time. The loops a floor gets for variety only ever run sideways, never up. On most floors one or two plateaus stand two levels above their row instead of one, with a tall ladder up a cliff twice the usual height, and from the top of it a bridge leads on into the row above, skipping a row’s climb. Chasms are more common, and every plateau that has a neighbor at its height in its row gets a bridge to one of them. The boss’s summit can no longer be climbed into from below: it’s reached by side stairs from the east or the west only. Over 200 floors the walk from the start to the cave went from 1.8 times the straight-line distance (median) to 3.4 times, and every floor is still sound.

The mountain past the edge

The squares around the play area were one flat sheet of mist, half a screen wide whenever I walked up to an edge. Now the mountain carries on out there. North of the summit the terraces keep rising, so a cliff goes straight up behind the boss’s cave and more ledges stack above it. To the south they step down, grassier on the first floor, the way I came up. To the east and west they stand about as high as the rows beside them. A band of mist one to four squares wide, wobbling along its length, separates the play area from all of it on the east, west and south, and some of the far plateaus are left out entirely, so there are pockets of mist with cliff faces dropping into them. The far plateaus get their own pines, boulders, cairns and ice, a little thicker than on the plateaus I can walk on. None of it can be reached; it’s there so the climb looks like part of a mountain instead of a box.

Wearing down the box

My first look at the new edge showed it was still a box: the play area’s east, west and south sides were dead straight lines, and the mist followed them. Now those three edges are worn back by a wobbling depth, up to seven squares on the sides and four on the south, and whatever gets cut off joins the scenery, including any plateau left too small to keep. The mist is measured from the real edge of the plateaus instead of the old rectangle, so it winds along with them. Some plateaus near the east and west edges also get no way onto them at all, a ledge with pines on it that I can see and never reach.

A watchtower and a miners’ camp

The worn edges finally looked right in the game. Next were the Mountain’s two prefabs, which until now were the Dungeon’s fortress and chest room with their walls drawn as ridge rocks. The weapon vault is now the ruin of an old watchtower: a round stone stump two squares wide with a broken, stepped top capped in snow and a single arrow slit, standing in a ring of low broken stone walls with fallen blocks half buried in drifts. The guards and the weapon are inside the ring. The chest room is an abandoned miners’ camp: a tent, crates, a campfire with a log beside it, and a mine cart standing on a short run of rails, with the chest next to the tent and the guards by the fire. All of it is script-drawn. The walls come from the Forest ruin’s wall drawer, recolored to gray granite with snow on the capstones where the Forest has moss. My first rails had upright sleepers and looked like a fence, so they now lie flat on a gravel bed. The plateaus’ open stretches are small, mostly under ten by seven squares, so the watchtower comes in two sizes and the camp fits in eight by six. Before this change, a third of the prefabs missed those open stretches and landed across cliff faces and chasms. Now a prefab that can’t get an open stretch has to stay on one plateau’s plain ground. Over 300 floors, every one got both prefabs, 592 of the 600 inside an open stretch, and every floor was still sound.

Building the backdrops from the one that worked

The first round of Mountain battle backdrops gave me fourteen drafts, and only the Summit ones worked. The other eleven copied the layout sketch I’d attached almost literally: flat gray slabs for the rock face, smooth blocks for the boulders, a plain green or gray sheet for the ground. The Summit drafts came out the way I wanted, with cracked, ice-glazed granite, wind-carved drifts and real dithering. So the second round starts from the second Summit draft instead of the sketch. Each prompt asks for the same picture in the same style, camera and layout, and changes only what that screen needs: grass and a pine for the lower slopes, plain snow and a buried boulder for the snowfield, a misty chasm with a rope bridge, the miners’ tent and mine entrance, the stump of a watchtower, and the cave mouth with its bones and prayer flags for the boss. All three Summit drafts already put the hero and the enemies on open ground, so the Summit screen itself is done.

Seven screens for the climb

The second round of backdrops came back in the Summit’s style: every one kept its cracked granite, its dithering and its camera, and only the ground and the back-left corner changed. I picked seven: the lower slopes in alpine grass with a lone pine, a snowfield with a boulder half buried in a drift, the icy summit, a chasm edge with a rope bridge vanishing into the mist, the miners’ camp with its tent and timbered mine entrance, the stump of the watchtower, and the summit cave for the bosses, with a ram’s skull and prayer flags beside it. A couple of drafts lost on details: two of the lower slopes painted the rock face tan instead of gray, and one snowfield kept the Summit’s ice, which would have made the second and third floors look the same.

As in the Sewer, the ground the fight starts on picks the screen. Inside the watchtower or the miners’ camp a fight gets their screens, at a chasm’s lip or on a bridge it gets the chasm edge, and everywhere else the snow under my feet decides: grass for the lower slopes, snow for the snowfield, ice and deep snow for the summit. I first gave the chasm edge two squares of reach, but that covered nearly two fifths of the ground, so it’s one square now, about a sixth. Every boss on the Mountain fights at the cave.

The Mountain’s enemies, new looks

The backdrops look right in the game, so the Mountain’s enemies are next. I made new looks in PixelLab for all of them and set them beside the old ones, and every new one won. The Goat is cream-white with a dark face and big grey horns, the Yeti pure white fur over blue-grey skin instead of the old dull grey, the Griffon a bright golden eagle-lion, and the Manticore dark red with a black mane, so it no longer shares the Griffon’s tan. The bosses are 48 pixels tall like the other themes’ bosses: a black Massive Goat with huge spiralling horns and a collar of rusted iron links, a Yeti King with a crown of ice shards and a cloak of pelts, and a crimson Manticore Alpha with tattered wings and a dripping green stinger.

The first floor also gets a real second enemy. The Yeti Cub was just the Yeti drawn smaller, so a new Snow Wolf, grey and white with icy blue eyes, takes its place. The Cub doesn’t disappear: the Yeti King’s special move will be to roar and call Yeti Cubs into the fight, the way the Skeleton King raises the dead. The Massive Goat’s special is a Ram Charge, a hard hit that slows me down if it lands, like the Ogre Warlord’s Ground Slam, and the Manticore Alpha’s is a Tail Sting that leaves me poisoned for three turns.

Every one of them is getting the usual set of animations: a walk, a battle idle, an attack and a flinch, and for the bosses a death and the special too.

The Mountain’s enemies move in

All eight new looks got their animations, and a few took more than one try. The Goat’s first attack barely moved; the second reared up on its hind legs, but then its raised front hoof looked like the thing doing the hitting, so the one I kept lunges forward horns first with all four hooves planted. The Snow Wolf’s first attack just walked in place, and now it leaps and bites. The Yeti’s attack grew a tail halfway through its punch, and the flinches of the Griffon and the Manticore lost their wings, the Griffon’s melting into a golden blob, so those were all redone. The bosses’ specials came out right the first time: the Massive Goat charges in a burst of snow, the Yeti King throws his head back and roars for his cubs, and the Manticore Alpha stabs its stinger down in a spray of green venom.

They’re all in the game now. The Snow Wolf hunts the first floor with the Goats, and the Yeti Cub only shows up when the Yeti King calls one, up to two a fight; once he falls, the cubs run off into the snow. The Massive Goat’s Ram Charge hits half again as hard and slows me down, and the Manticore Alpha’s Tail Sting poisons me for three turns if it lands.

While watching the fights I noticed that in every one-enemy battle the enemy dropped a little every time it attacked or got hit, then popped back up. The art was fine; the battle screen drew a lone enemy’s idle on a grid of whole squares, rounding its spot up, while its attack and flinch went exactly where they belonged. The idle now goes exactly there too, so it stays put.

The Mountain’s bot run

The bots climbed the reworked Mountain at 1 Blade, 15 runs for each class, and won 75% of them (56 of 75): Amazon and Rogue 87%, Barbarian 80%, Mage 67%, Hunter 53%. The target for 1 Blade is about 70%, and the old Mountain landed at 72%, so the new one is a touch easier, about as close as a run this size can tell.

The first floor took 7 of the 19 losses, nearly all of them Mages and Hunters, the two classes with the least health, on the floor where the new Snow Wolf hunts. The second floor took 9, four of them Hunters. Only 3 bots died on the summit, so the Massive Goat’s Ram Charge, the Yeti King’s cubs and the Manticore Alpha’s Tail Sting make the last floor a fight without making it a wall. The Hunter’s 53% stands out, but it’s the same Hunter in every theme, so I’m leaving the Mountain’s numbers as they are.

With that the Mountain is done and merged. Of the dungeon themes, only the Dungeon and the Demon Castle are left.

The Dungeon becomes a prison keep

I started on the Dungeon, the 4 Blades theme. Until now it was the same random caves as every other theme with stone tiles on them. Now it’s a prison keep, and each floor is one part of it.

The first floor is the Entrance. I come in through the south gate, between two little gate posts, into a walled yard with a kennel along one side wall and a guard post along the other. Across the top of the yard runs the keep’s facade, a wall two squares thick with wide main doors lined up with the gate. Behind them a wide entrance hall leads up to a hall running the length of the keep, with one or two more halls off it, and rooms fill the blocks between: a guardroom and a visitors’ room off the entrance hall, the warden’s office, storerooms. The stairs are in the room farthest from the gate.

The second floor is the Barracks: one wide hall across and two or three running up and down, some all the way, some only to one side. The blocks between are split into bunk rooms, storerooms, a mess hall (the biggest room) with its kitchen next door, and one block left open as a training yard. The officers’ quarters are the room farthest from where I arrive, and that’s where the Guard Commander waits.

The third floor is the Cells. A corridor runs straight down the middle from the guard station. Across the top is a strip of storerooms and a torture room, and below are three cell blocks, each a corridor with a row of small cells on either side. About a quarter of the cells are sealed shut, and one wing is flooded (the water comes later). The longer wing of the bottom block ends in the deepest cell, and that’s where the Blade is, with the Ambush still waiting there.

Every floor is built the same way underneath: rooms and halls as rectangles with one-square walls between them. Each room gets a door onto a hall, then doors go in between neighbors until everything can be reached, and a few more after that so the floor loops. Each floor also sets aside one room for the weapon vault and one for the chest room. In 40 seeds of each floor, both always landed in their rooms. For now it’s still drawn with the old Dungeon tiles. The scenery around the edges, the new tiles and props, and the enemies come next.

The keep grows up

I played the first floor, and the yard didn’t work. The only way in was the main doors straight north of the gate, so there was never a reason to go left or right. So the yard is gone, and the keep is a tower now: the Entrance on the ground floor, the Barracks above it, and the Cells at the very top, so the Blade waits in the highest cell instead of the deepest.

The first floor now starts inside the keep. I come in through a door in the south-west or south-east corner, into an entrance hall that runs up to the hall across the middle, and the stairs are always in the room in the far opposite corner. Getting there means crossing the whole floor, side to side and bottom to top. The kennels moved indoors as a room of their own, and the gate posts are gone.

Outside the walls will be the forest I just came through, drawn the same on every floor. Around the first floor it’s at full size, and on each floor above it gets smaller, so the same trees shrink as I climb.

The forest below the tower

The forest outside the keep is in the game now. Around the Entrance it’s at full size, around the Barracks half size, and around the Cells a quarter, so the same trees, the same clearing and the same trail up to the door get smaller with every floor. I’d first picked a third for the top floor, but a quarter divides cleanly into whole pixels, and it still reads as climbing. The higher floors also get a bluish haze, and the tower throws a soft shadow onto the ground below.

The view only shows once I’ve seen that stretch of the keep’s outer wall, and it dims like the rest of the map when I walk away. When the door is in the south-east corner the whole forest is flipped, so the trail still leads to it, and the floors above keep the same side.

One forest, one zoom

When I played it, the forest round the tower was wrong. Each side of the border had been shrunk around the middle of its own wall, so it was never really one picture zooming out: on the first floor the trail met the keep at the south-east corner, on the second at the left, on the third in the middle, and the trees touched the walls on some floors but not others. I sketched out what I actually wanted and rebuilt it that way.

Now there’s one picture of the forest, painted at full detail, with nothing cut out of it. The keep is just drawn on top. Under the first floor’s south wall is a wide dirt apron running nearly the whole width of the keep, so the door opens onto dirt wherever it is, and a single trail leaves the middle of the apron and runs off the bottom of the picture. Each floor shows the middle of that same picture, scaled so the keep is always the same size on screen: the Entrance sees the middle at full size, the Barracks twice as much at half size, and the Cells the whole picture at a quarter. The forest never changes, only how far out I can see, so the trail always meets the keep at the same spot and the same clearings shrink as I climb. With no corner to match any more, the flipped copy for a south-east door is gone too.

Stone that ages as I climb

The keep is getting its own tiles. They’re cut from a handful of PixelLab textures, and every room’s floor now comes from what kind of room it is: stone in the halls, dark planks where the guards live (the bunk rooms, the mess hall, the officers’ quarters and the warden’s office), dirty straw in the cells and kennels, and raked sand in the training yard. Walls are drawn at an angle now, with a brick face wherever there’s floor to the south and the dark top of the wall everywhere else, and they cast a shadow at their foot.

The stone changes from floor to floor. My first thought was the newest stone at the bottom, but nobody builds a tower from the top, so the ground floor is the oldest: huge rough flagstones worn smooth by feet. The Barracks have neater, newer slabs, and the Cells at the top have the newest-cut stone of all, pale and sharp but stained by the rain that leaks through the roof.

PixelLab kept painting a soft spotlight into the middle of every floor texture, and switching its shading from “detailed” to “medium” or “flat” got rid of it. The walls still read as knee-high curbs, because each wall only gets its own square. So I’m going to make them taller: the upper bricks and the top of the wall get drawn over the square north of the wall, on the layer above the characters, so anyone standing right behind a wall is partly hidden by it, the way they would be in a real hall.

Walls that stand up

The keep’s walls are tall now. A wall with floor in front of it is all bricks in its own square, and its upper bricks and its top rise most of the way into the square behind it, drawn over the characters, so anyone standing right behind a wall is half hidden by it. That top part belongs to the wall, so it lights up the moment I see the wall, even while the room behind it is still dark. Where a wall running north to south meets one of these tall walls, its top climbs up to meet theirs instead of stopping at floor level, so the corners and T-junctions join into one wall. The shadows at the foot of the walls are darker and longer too.

Every room has a job

The keep’s rooms all have a purpose now, and they’ve been furnished. On the Entrance there’s a chapel, a laundry, a stable, records and an intake room where prisoners get booked in, next to the guardroom, the warden’s office and the kennels. The Barracks got an infirmary, a smithy, a quartermaster’s store, a larder, a war room and a latrine around the mess hall and the bunk rooms. Up in the Cells there’s an interrogation room, a room for the prisoners’ confiscated belongings, the jailer’s quarters, a slop kitchen, guard posts at the ends of the cell blocks, and a burst rain tank next to the flooded wing. The kinds get dealt out so they spread across the floor, and storerooms stay few.

PixelLab drew 50 props for them, one prompt each. Ten came out wrong the first time (a bookshelf, the shackles, a pile of clothes, cheese, the map table, the latrine, a training dummy, the torture rack, a grindstone and a straw bed), so they got rewritten and redrawn, and the grindstone and the latrine took a third try.

Now they’re in the game, room by room: barrels, crates and sacks line the storerooms, bunks two squares long stand along the bunk rooms’ walls with footlockers between them, the mess hall has long tables down the middle, pews face an altar in the chapel with candles either side, the smithy has a forge, an anvil and a grindstone, the training yard has dummies and archery targets, and the cells have a straw bed, maybe a bucket or a set of shackles, and now and then a skeleton. Bigger rooms get more. Furniture blocks the way, but only where the squares around it stay joined, so nothing ever gets cut off. The small things, like clothes, chains, hay and buckets, just lie on the floor. Torches hang on the walls, and they, the candles, the forge, the cauldrons and the braziers glow in the dark. The Cells get rain puddles, thickest in the flooded wing. The stairs on the first two floors are now a stone archway with steps going up, set into the exit room’s north wall. In 20 seeds of each floor, every room got something, and the stairs and the rain tank always found a spot.

No more straight shots

Every floor of the keep could be crossed by just walking down its halls: up the entrance hall to the stairs, along the Barracks’ long hall to the officers’ quarters, straight down the Cells’ spine to the deepest cell. That’s not exploring, so now each floor makes me go round through the rooms. On the Entrance, the top of the entrance hall has caved in, so I have to go out through one of the rooms beside it, and more rubble cuts the hall across between the entrance hall and the next hall. The Barracks’ long hall is blocked twice, about a third and two thirds of the way along. The stairwell and the officers’ quarters only have doors into the rooms next to them, never onto a hall. If the rubble on the Barracks hardly lengthens the walk to the officers’ quarters (a room with a door either side of it can make it a shortcut), the floor gets drawn again. In 200 seeds that was needed now and then and always worked.

The Cells got lowered portcullises across the spine between the cell blocks. To get past one I walk down a wing to the guard post at its end, through a back door into the guard post of the block below, and back up that block’s wing to the spine. The next portcullis sends me down the wing on the other side, so the way down zigzags, and the deepest cell is across the bottom block from where I come in, which adds about a hundred squares of walking. The portcullis is drawn by script, iron bars with the floor showing through. The rubble is two heaps of fallen ceiling stone from PixelLab. The first try came back as two broken pillars, because I asked for a “tall” heap, and asking for a wide mound fixed it. The tall wall south of a hall rose over the bottom heap and hid it, so that heap gets drawn again on top of the wall.

A tune for the keep

The Dungeon has its own music now, a slow, heavy march for the prison keep: low strings and bassoon, a snare like a guard’s footsteps, clanking chains and a sad viola on top. The old cello drone it used to share with the Demon Castle stays with the castle until that gets a track of its own.

Roofs below the top floor

The Cells are the top of the tower, so the big blocks of solid wall around their edge never made sense as wall. From up there I’d be looking down onto the roofs of the keep’s lower parts. Now any solid block that reaches the keep’s outer edge on the top floor is drawn as a red tiled roof, with gable boards at the ends. A tall block is split into several roofs stacked one behind another, each with its own ridge and eave. The blocks inside the keep stay solid stone, because a roof in the middle of the cell blocks didn’t look right. The roof tiles are cut by script from the town’s own red shingles, so there was nothing new to draw, and the blue and slate shingles are on the sheet too in case I change my mind.

The guards get new faces

The keep’s guards are all new. They wear plain blue livery now, with no gold. The Guard Woman is a tall woman with a ponytail and a blue gambeson, and she still carries a spear. The Spear Guard and the Crossbow Guard have new looks too, and the Bow Guard keeps his old one because it already fit. There are two newcomers. The Guard Dog is a gray cane corso for the ground floor. The Houndmaster is the ground floor’s boss, a big bald man with a whip who can call more dogs into the fight. The Guard Commander is drawn bigger now, like the other themes’ bosses, with a long blue cape, and he gets a special of his own, a Crushing Blow.

Some animations took a few tries. The crossbowman kept shooting to the right, away from me, so I flipped his best take to aim the right way. The Guard Woman’s first “hurt” take looked like a clean spear thrust, so that became her attack. The Houndmaster grew a knife in the last frame of his call, so that frame is his first one again. Everything is on the sprite sheets now; the dog and the Houndmaster still have to be added to the ground floor, and both bosses’ specials still need their code.

The dogs are let loose

The ground floor has its Guard Dogs now, prowling the halls next to the Guard Women and the Spear Guards, and the Houndmaster waits by the stairs as the Entrance’s boss. Before this the Entrance had no boss of its own, so the game borrowed a random one from the Forest. Every other turn or so he whistles, and a Guard Dog runs in to join the fight. He calls at most two a fight, and only when none of his dogs is still standing. Once he falls, any dog he called runs off and the fight is over. The Guard Commander’s Crushing Blow is a two-handed swing that hits half again as hard as his normal attack and leaves me slowed for a couple of turns. He doesn’t swing it again until the slow has worn off.

The numbers are borrowed for now. The dog hits like the Mountain’s Snow Wolf, the Houndmaster like the Massive Goat, and both specials copy the Mountain bosses’ moves they’re based on. The bots will tell me whether the keep needs anything changed.

A backdrop for every room

Fights in the keep used to happen in front of the one old Dungeon backdrop wherever I was. Now there are eight, and the room I’m standing in picks one. The ground floor’s halls show an entrance hall of huge old blue-gray blocks with a faded blue banner between two torches. The Barracks are a bunk room with a rack of blue shields, and the Cells are a row of barred cell doors with rain leaking down the walls. The kennels, the chapel and the interrogation room each have their own. The Houndmaster fights me in his kennels and the Guard Commander in front of the fireplace in his quarters. The Ambush at the very end happens in the highest cell, where the roof has caved in and lightning shows through the hole.

I made them in Leonardo, using one of the Sewer’s finished backdrops as the reference so the camera stayed the same, and then checked each one for where everyone stands. My first pick for the highest cell had its floor so low that the enemies would have stood on the back wall, so I took another one. A few of the rooms have their floor start lower than usual, so the enemies stand a little further down in those. The cell block came back with a blue floor even though I asked for a warm one, so I’ll check in the game that the blue-clad guards still stand out on it.

The keep’s bot run

The bots went through the keep at 4 Blades, 30 runs a class, and only 39% got out, ten points under the 49% the old Dungeon managed. Most of them died on the Barracks floor, and the Barbarian had it worst at 27%. Both new bosses had borrowed their numbers from the Mountain, which is the 1 Blade theme, so at 4 Blades they hit much harder than the bosses they were copied from. The Houndmaster was also a brand-new boss on a floor that never had one. I cut him from 45 health and 15 damage to 36 and 12, and the Guard Commander’s Crushing Blow from half again his normal hit to a quarter more. The slow stays.

The second 150 runs came out at 54%. The Barbarian went from 27% to 73%, so the slow on top of that big hit was what had been killing him. The Mage is the one left behind at 33%, mostly on the Barracks floor, but that’s a job for the Mage’s own balance pass, not the keep’s. That finishes the Dungeon. The Demon Castle is the only theme left.