Hello kcfos, I played your game on Wednesday. I think you have a very good tutorial, because I quickly grasped the game as a new player. I played as the hobo simply because that was the character I saw most progress posts with. In my run I got the thing that teleports you randomly from time to time. I did not run into any bugs with that. I mainly played with a mouse without using the number keys, so there were few times when I would accidentally move my character instead of using at item in the hotbar. I very rarely rotated the camera, but it is nice. For the simplicity of the movement I mainly played in top down view.
I expected the game to be more open, but instead I pretty much just kept moving in one direction. It's not bad, just different to what I imagined, or maybe that was just the sort of map I got.
It's a solid game as it is. I think it being a roguelike is going to require a lot of variety in perks, and loot, but I am sure you know that and it's something you are working on.
I have my own dogma on true open world games, I think in many cases if you're playing the game optimally (which permadeath greatly encourages) there is one location to go to that is the best option out of all the rest, usually the least dangerous. In DCSS, even though that game has branching paths, I always go in a mostly similar path (Dungeon->Lair->Swamp->Depths,etc). Perhaps in another game I'll try to make an open world where the location you choose to go in is a truly interesting choice.
I think there does need to be more perks, I'd like to introduce more archetype focused perks, like mutation-build, food-build, candy-build, etc.
I think it is fine to have not optimal paths, because finding the most optimal ones is part of the fun. Some people also like to play not the most optimal way, because they like challenge, creativity, or just randomness.
I got the farthest with the hiker. I really like the music and it reminds me of some rougelikes I used to play. Really good job, Add some more to it and put it on Steam.
Played a run as the hiker since I'm used to games like Crawl where I can heal by resting. Food clock seems pretty well balanced around that, I still had to look for food but never ran completely out. Camera rotation is neat, I expected a topdown/isometric toggle from the screenshots. Well done on that. Mutations (at least the ones I saw) were creative and I'll probably try Experiment next.
Two complaints: I wasn't sure exactly where to get new bullets. Didn't see any on the ground but I think I picked up a few from enemies. The other is that, being used to traditional roguelikes, I kept wanting to use the numpad for movement. Sometimes using the mouse was a little swingy for me. Read the itch.io page as soon as I posted this and realized I had NumLock off. Controlling with the NumPad is quite good.
Really fun game. I was a bit surprised at first because I was expecting an open world style game, but I really enjoyed it anyway.
I expected the camera rotation to work the opposite way (left = clockwise). I think it'd make sense to have an option for inverting in the settings, although personally I kept it fixed at 45 degrees for basically all of the time. I would have liked it if it remembered that position when I started a new game though. Also autoequipping starting weapons at start sounds like it'd make sense.
Sometimes there's some green-blue non walkable tiles that I assume are water, but it's kind of hard to tell, they probably need an animation or something.
I wanted to complain that there was no visual distinction between night and day, but it looks like the "lighting" option fixes that. I think it adds a fair bit to the atmosphere.
For the rest no complaints, it was very fun with a lot of content and stuff to do.
Thanks for the feedback, I've thought about calling it semi-open world before, there's no level barriers / stairs and your technically free to go wherever you want, as long as it's in a straight line...
Inverted camera settings would be pretty easy to implement, i'll look into it. I think the camera position saving thing might be a bug, I intend for it to save that. Yea autoequipping starting weapons should be a thing.
Ok water is ugly.
I think I should switch the default lighting to on, there's some minor visual bugs with both options I think, but also everything should get darker at night even in unlit mode yea.
Thanks again for playing, I'm curious how far you got.
I'm not sure but I think the farthest I got was 1 or 2 zones past the graveyard one.
By the way, I played another game today and I think I ran into a bug: when the mothman spawns the moths I'm frozen in place and I can't move, attack or use items, and esc for the options doesn't work. I can still select things and move the camera though. I tried alt+f4 and reloading the save but the exact same thing happens when I run into him again.
thanks a lot for the report, I've managed to track it down. Spawning new enemies from the Mothman's ability wasn't inputing the moth's saves properly. Worse than that it was creating a null ref and softlocking the game.
There does seem to be an inconvenient workaround: alt+f4 and reload as you said, then try to kill the mothman before they can spawn anything?
I don't know if I'm going to get around to patching the fix in right away, because mothman should be very rare and there is some type of workaround? But we'll see.
Tried a couple of runs, made it as far as the Graveyard biome as the hiker/backpacker class
Game is quite fun, didn't have any bugs or issues that I've noticed. During that run, my hiker got a berserker mutation, and it was a lot of fun watching him walk to up random rats and beat them to death.
I haven't played many of these games but I can't think of any that handle the camera like yours did. I thought it was interesting and innovating. Throughout my runs I stuck with the 'standard' 2d view.
Only suggestion would be making it easier to place things in your backpack, where dragging an item over it would swap items instead of placing the item in the backpack. Instead I needed to have the item ready to place, then open the backpack and place the item in one of those slots - I think that's one step too many.
Final score: I will buy this game on steam once you release it / 10
Glad you got the berserker mutation, that's something new since last dday.
I think a lot of people will end up playing with the camera straight top-down. I've thought about even making it the default but I think isometric looks cooler for screenshots.
That's a good suggestion, I was worried at first because containers are balanced around opening them = 1 turn, but I think its fine if swap-inserting into the container is free, but opening it up to remove stuff is what takes up the turn.
Comments
Hello kcfos, I played your game on Wednesday. I think you have a very good tutorial, because I quickly grasped the game as a new player. I played as the hobo simply because that was the character I saw most progress posts with. In my run I got the thing that teleports you randomly from time to time. I did not run into any bugs with that. I mainly played with a mouse without using the number keys, so there were few times when I would accidentally move my character instead of using at item in the hotbar. I very rarely rotated the camera, but it is nice. For the simplicity of the movement I mainly played in top down view.
I expected the game to be more open, but instead I pretty much just kept moving in one direction. It's not bad, just different to what I imagined, or maybe that was just the sort of map I got.
It's a solid game as it is. I think it being a roguelike is going to require a lot of variety in perks, and loot, but I am sure you know that and it's something you are working on.
Thanks for playing!
I have my own dogma on true open world games, I think in many cases if you're playing the game optimally (which permadeath greatly encourages) there is one location to go to that is the best option out of all the rest, usually the least dangerous. In DCSS, even though that game has branching paths, I always go in a mostly similar path (Dungeon->Lair->Swamp->Depths,etc). Perhaps in another game I'll try to make an open world where the location you choose to go in is a truly interesting choice.
I think there does need to be more perks, I'd like to introduce more archetype focused perks, like mutation-build, food-build, candy-build, etc.
I think it is fine to have not optimal paths, because finding the most optimal ones is part of the fun. Some people also like to play not the most optimal way, because they like challenge, creativity, or just randomness.
Different builds sound interesting
I got the farthest with the hiker. I really like the music and it reminds me of some rougelikes I used to play. Really good job, Add some more to it and put it on Steam.
Thank you. There's a steam page in the description I think, I have more stuff planned for the next 2-3 months
Looking forward to it.
Played a run as the hiker since I'm used to games like Crawl where I can heal by resting. Food clock seems pretty well balanced around that, I still had to look for food but never ran completely out. Camera rotation is neat, I expected a topdown/isometric toggle from the screenshots. Well done on that. Mutations (at least the ones I saw) were creative and I'll probably try Experiment next.
Two complaints: I wasn't sure exactly where to get new bullets. Didn't see any on the ground but I think I picked up a few from enemies.
The other is that, being used to traditional roguelikes, I kept wanting to use the numpad for movement. Sometimes using the mouse was a little swingy for me.Read the itch.io page as soon as I posted this and realized I had NumLock off. Controlling with the NumPad is quite good.Game is fun, good job. I would play it again.
Thanks for the feedback,
I really like DCSS and it's a big inspiration for this game. Glad the food clock is alright, it used to be a lot faster.
Yea bullets are a limited resource, probably a bit too rare. Most robot type enemies drop them, but besides that there are barely any lying around.
Really fun game. I was a bit surprised at first because I was expecting an open world style game, but I really enjoyed it anyway.
I expected the camera rotation to work the opposite way (left = clockwise). I think it'd make sense to have an option for inverting in the settings, although personally I kept it fixed at 45 degrees for basically all of the time. I would have liked it if it remembered that position when I started a new game though. Also autoequipping starting weapons at start sounds like it'd make sense.
Sometimes there's some green-blue non walkable tiles that I assume are water, but it's kind of hard to tell, they probably need an animation or something.
I wanted to complain that there was no visual distinction between night and day, but it looks like the "lighting" option fixes that. I think it adds a fair bit to the atmosphere.
For the rest no complaints, it was very fun with a lot of content and stuff to do.
Thanks for the feedback, I've thought about calling it semi-open world before, there's no level barriers / stairs and your technically free to go wherever you want, as long as it's in a straight line...
Inverted camera settings would be pretty easy to implement, i'll look into it. I think the camera position saving thing might be a bug, I intend for it to save that. Yea autoequipping starting weapons should be a thing.
Ok water is ugly.
I think I should switch the default lighting to on, there's some minor visual bugs with both options I think, but also everything should get darker at night even in unlit mode yea.
Thanks again for playing, I'm curious how far you got.
I'm not sure but I think the farthest I got was 1 or 2 zones past the graveyard one.
By the way, I played another game today and I think I ran into a bug: when the mothman spawns the moths I'm frozen in place and I can't move, attack or use items, and esc for the options doesn't work. I can still select things and move the camera though. I tried alt+f4 and reloading the save but the exact same thing happens when I run into him again.
thanks a lot for the report, I've managed to track it down. Spawning new enemies from the Mothman's ability wasn't inputing the moth's saves properly. Worse than that it was creating a null ref and softlocking the game.
There does seem to be an inconvenient workaround: alt+f4 and reload as you said, then try to kill the mothman before they can spawn anything?
I don't know if I'm going to get around to patching the fix in right away, because mothman should be very rare and there is some type of workaround? But we'll see.
Also that's a lot of mutations wow
Tried a couple of runs, made it as far as the Graveyard biome as the hiker/backpacker class
Game is quite fun, didn't have any bugs or issues that I've noticed. During that run, my hiker got a berserker mutation, and it was a lot of fun watching him walk to up random rats and beat them to death.
I haven't played many of these games but I can't think of any that handle the camera like yours did. I thought it was interesting and innovating. Throughout my runs I stuck with the 'standard' 2d view.
Only suggestion would be making it easier to place things in your backpack, where dragging an item over it would swap items instead of placing the item in the backpack. Instead I needed to have the item ready to place, then open the backpack and place the item in one of those slots - I think that's one step too many.
Final score: I will buy this game on steam once you release it / 10
thanks for the feedback
Glad you got the berserker mutation, that's something new since last dday.
I think a lot of people will end up playing with the camera straight top-down. I've thought about even making it the default but I think isometric looks cooler for screenshots.
That's a good suggestion, I was worried at first because containers are balanced around opening them = 1 turn, but I think its fine if swap-inserting into the container is free, but opening it up to remove stuff is what takes up the turn.