This is the first official Alpha build! That means we're done with pre-alpha, and forging towards Early Access.  I'll be submitting this build for a Feedback Friday on Reddit's/r/roguelikedev community.

My definition of alpha:

• You can complete the game.
• All the major game systems are present.
• The majority of minor systems are present, even if they don't look amazing yet.
• Look/feel is good, but not done yet.
• Further improvements will be cosmetic, bug fix, or any content I somehow missed.
• I'll continue to add content: more items, more mobs, more NPCs, more dialogue, etc.

My plan is to forge through alpha, fix whatever comes up - and have beta be an early access type release. We'll see how that works out!

What's New in Alpha 1?

Loot Revamp

The most visible part of this patch is that loot has been revamped. I previously had serpentine loot tables, and it made adding/updating items a pain in the rear. So now, loot has a LootLevel associated with it - and different mobs drop different levels of loot. This gives a good progression curve - you get better stuff as you get further into the game. It also makes adding items as easy as dropping in some Lua, some graphics and setting the loot level - bingo, the item can drop.

Food is handled separately. Mobs have a DropFoodChance, and a type of food they produce. So killing pigs gets you pork, rats gets you poisoned meat, and so on.

Gold is also handled separately; the loot entry lets you put a GoldDice field in (say "1d20") - and that's the roll for gold drops.

It's resulted in a *much* better progression curve - so I'm happy there!

Crafting and Recycling

The whole backpack interface has been redone (it was the last vestige of pain-medicine-programming). It's quite a bit faster and easier to use, now. The main view lets you chose between a compact icon sea and a list, tooltips work everywhere. The back-end is a lot more sensible now, also.

(Almost) Every item has a `Recipe` attached. For example:

      Recipe = {
           Leather = 2,
           RedCrystal = 4
       }

On the new Recycling tab, you can see the recipe (with numbers divided by two). If you chose to recycle an item, you gain one half of its recipe requirements in "junk". This lets you quickly get rid of all the mounds of items you don't want.

On the Crafting tab, you can see a list of recipes for which you have the necessary reagents. Click `Craft`, and bingo - you have the item. This lets you turn the junk you find into items that you actually want. Most items are craft-able.

Other

• Tooltip skill descriptions actually work in the skill tree now. That was quite a major thing to miss!
• Hourglass icon for when the game is busy. It rotates. I'm hoping this will help with the "it isn't really turn based!" confusion I've seen from a few people; apparently, smooth movement and not jumping between characters displaying movement (making for a *really* slow game) confuses people on this front.
• Display a turn counter on the HUD. Again, this helps drive-home that this is a turn-based game. It also gives a good feel for how you are doing.
• Added onscreen mouse/touch navigation. It's optional - you can play with the keyboard. I just wanted to have the option for mousers or potentially mobile one day.
• Re-enabled some lights.
• Fixed some neutrals attacking for no obvious reason.
• The "quick consumables" panel now shows the hotkeys for quick usage.
• Fixed hotkey displays to show ⇧X instead of SHIFT+X, ^X instead of CTRL+X, and 1 instead of One.
• Added `?` for help. I'd left this until the inputs were finalized.
• When you invoke an item command that gives you a menu (`Throw`, `Drop`, `Equip`, `Unequip`), the resultant menu didn't give you a good way out if you changed your mind. So it gained a close button, and responds to `Escape` to get out.
• The loot system has been reworked to make it less painful to add items.
• Fixed a nasty bug that deleted an item when you equipped a new item into its slot, instead of swapping them correctly.
• Rewrote the backpack interface, it's much nicer now.
• Implemented the entire recycling system (to get crafting components from items you don't want)
• Implemented the first version of the crafting system (to make items from components)
• Fixed announcements not showing up in some dialog boxes.
• The graphics settings menu has been completely revamped.