Character selection doesn't show Stats until you created the Character. Also are there Plans for more customization in that Area later on ? Visual and/or Statwise?
MonsterQuest Dialog has none, just plays a snipped of the Introduction Blacksmith Dialogue. Also Your Translation doesn't seem to work, most of it is still in English.
Diagonal Movement still feels a lot faster, and it still feels like it has a bit of a lag before starting any Movement. Is your Pathfinding slow maybe?
In the Caves it also felt a bit broken. I can't abandon and restart movement while I'm already moving, and I can click into nothingness, which has a long calculation Time before the Character moves somewhere. And sometimes Movement just stops working for a long while. After playing around with it, it seems the Movement Inputs are not read from around the Character, but from a Point 5-6 Squares below the Character. Reloading didn't fix this, and this makes the winding Caves pretty much unplayable. It works fine when I click on Actors like the Doorway or the Smith however.
The loading Screens make this feel a lot more polished already, altho they do need a bit of work I think. Mainly the loading... text in the middle feels off.
The UI at the Bottom feels like its outside of the actual Gamewindow, with the big Grey and black Boxes at the Sides and Top, not like it actually belongs to the Game. All the Subwindows also feel empty and unfinished, but they probably are at the Moment.
Tiles still seem like they're to wide for how high they are, and for how wide the Characters are. Tileset Graphics could also do a rework.
Arrows don't rotate fully towards the target but only in increments, and then fly in a jagged tile-based Line towards their targetpoint which feels super odd. I get that it makes Sense if you're having tilebased movement, but at least visually it should look like a straight line I think.
Overall this feels a lot more comfy then the last Time tho. With these oldschool highly detailed or prerendered Sprites and clustered Maps, some animated Tiles like blinking Eyes in the Caves entrance, or a glowing furnace for the Smith, and some nice background Music and UI, this could really feel like a relaxing Browsergame to put lots of Time into.
Important things first: Can you tell me more on how you got to the point where the inputs where calculated from multiple squares below your position? This happened to me once when i was testing in Firefox and found that the zoom function was broken. It would only zoom for calculations but not for rendering, hence the coordinates were off. I disabled zooming for FF because of this and am now curious on how you managed to break it.
The lag between inputs and their actions shouldn't be too long. What might make it seem longer is the fact that i barely have any action interrupts in apart from getting staggered. Issuing multiple attacks creates a little queue that also feels bad at times.
Dialogue wise i just have to admit i was too lazy to translate and polish it. If anything else was correctly in german, then it's not a big deal at this point. For the blacksmith i wasn't really creative on quest dialogue for this thing, so i left it blank. As a fallback it was just playing a few miliseconds of his introduction. Apologies for this uncomplete mess.
Now to the plans: Yes i would like to experiment with more customization. There is still a hard limit on what i can do (deviating strongly from the base sprite silhouettes is a big nono), but masking specific parts and replace them with a player chosen color, that's a thing i will try soon.
The portraits i also want to incorporate more, so when you customize your dude and you never see those things again because of your equipment, you can at least see that nice portrait in multiple situations. For that i will also add more portrait backgrounds for each environment you are in. This is another reason to rework dialogues completely and have some more NPCs later on with their own portraits.
Depending on the performance of customizable colors on the player sprite, this might open up the possibility of better enemy recolors: Instead of completely hue rotating a goblin, only their skin color or their rags could be changed (and maybe make way for multiple clans of goblins? who knows). Possibly going further with this, would be some sort of color cycling for easy tile animation like flowing grass or ripples in the water.
Other than that, the grid movement will probably go away. In a lot of cases this grid brings more pain than it helps.
I think it happened when I entered the Caves, but it also happend when I reloaded the Page afterwards, so might not be that. Sorry, but I don't fully recall. If it helps, I'm on Chrome for this.
Lag might come from not being able to interrupt stuff, i.e. if I attack while between Tiles, I have to finish moving first. Also might be impacted by me not realizing the Controls where off.
I really like all the additions, the sound effects/music in the goblin caves is really nice. Not much really to say other than maybe make level 2 of the dungeon not as OP as it is.
Thanks for playing once again! Glad you liked what you saw and heard. In my mind im still setting up all the systems of the game, but i guess i should put more work into balancing so people can experience those additions in a humane manner. On the other hand, level 2 is my current endgame, so maybe it should be hard... jk, will make it nicer in the next version.
i played through 2 and a half runs. i died in one run, game froze on another, and i didnt do much on the last.
starting off simple: the goblin shaman is cool. i'm glad there's diversity between enemies now. the main issue with them is the stagger duration. when hit, you freeze for over a second of realtime, which gets tedious quickly, especially in a room with 2+ of them. i think a ministun is good enough especially since they halt your action.
i also saw 2 named enemies; a gobbo and a shaman. they behaved as expected.
map generation had a few hiccups. starting a dungeon always had a bit of a wall showing on the minimap, which was far away from the starting zone.
one level had a path leading nowhere
the levels are also gigantic. the exit to level 2 was a solid 3 minute of clicking. it would be nice if a) i could hold LMB to move and b) clicking a wall would take me to the nearest possible tile instead of not doing anything. these two things made moving through a cleared dungeon boring, since i died on level 2 and needed to treck back.
level 2 was cool, i liked the recolors. i saw a named goblin there, and i killed him. he dropped a big unidentified club, and as soon as i equipped it the game froze. i could still open my inventory, but nobody could move nor could i interact with anything. a reset fixed this.
another smaller thing is that using the scrollwheel in the item shop would also zoom the camera simultaneously.
i'd also consider increasing the droprate of items during this initial demo period, and bringing it back down when you're further along. i can imagine many playtesters losing/dying/leaving before they see a single item drop, since they're rare and shamans are tough.
a minor thing i noticed was the character seems blurry (?) when moving diagonally. don't know what's up with that, but it was noticeable.
sometimes projectiles would hit me even if i was clearly on another tile at the point of contact. Diablo 1 had the same tile issue (remember trying to flee the butcher?), but it was lame back then and I think it's lame today. now that there's goblin shamans, i'd consider looking into this. no clue how you'd resolve this, though.
anyway, great improvement. very glad to see that things are shaping up to be an enjoyable game, and i hope you continue working on this. keep it up
Late reply, for i was very ill over the weekend: Dungeon hiccups happened to me too. I think the minimap showing walls far away is actually just a slight bug for the level transition. Like your character is at the coordinate 20,30 then enters a dungeon which has the entrance at, lets say 10,20, then the transition might be too slow/quick and the map gets updated before the player position will be. The floor with no wall is probably a special case of "the room exactly fits on the egde so we dont have to put up walls". I will fix both of these things until next time.
Most of the other pleasantries you encountered are part of a future dungeon gen overhaul too: Levels feel too big, enemy spawns are really random and theres no challenge apart from higher numbers (see lvl2 or the higher hp of rares).
I agree with the whole projectile stun being too harsh. However i found the way of D1 handling this to be the actual terrifying thing in combat and have fond memories of it. For the way movement and positioning works right now it's hardly possible in another way. Fortunately i committed to experimenting without a grid! This may also influence the blurry movement you noticed.
So i guess you haven't found the Kalemonvo legendary? For now it can only drop in level 2. I actually thought the drop rates were still very high, but i will specifically make guaranteed treasure rooms in the next version, so these things can be better checked out.
Comments
tons of progress since the last demo day I played it, nice work
Thanks for revisiting!
Character selection doesn't show Stats until you created the Character. Also are there Plans for more customization in that Area later on ? Visual and/or Statwise?
MonsterQuest Dialog has none, just plays a snipped of the Introduction Blacksmith Dialogue. Also Your Translation doesn't seem to work, most of it is still in English.
Diagonal Movement still feels a lot faster, and it still feels like it has a bit of a lag before starting any Movement. Is your Pathfinding slow maybe?
In the Caves it also felt a bit broken. I can't abandon and restart movement while I'm already moving, and I can click into nothingness, which has a long calculation Time before the Character moves somewhere. And sometimes Movement just stops working for a long while. After playing around with it, it seems the Movement Inputs are not read from around the Character, but from a Point 5-6 Squares below the Character. Reloading didn't fix this, and this makes the winding Caves pretty much unplayable. It works fine when I click on Actors like the Doorway or the Smith however.
The loading Screens make this feel a lot more polished already, altho they do need a bit of work I think. Mainly the loading... text in the middle feels off.
The UI at the Bottom feels like its outside of the actual Gamewindow, with the big Grey and black Boxes at the Sides and Top, not like it actually belongs to the Game. All the Subwindows also feel empty and unfinished, but they probably are at the Moment.
Tiles still seem like they're to wide for how high they are, and for how wide the Characters are. Tileset Graphics could also do a rework.
Arrows don't rotate fully towards the target but only in increments, and then fly in a jagged tile-based Line towards their targetpoint which feels super odd. I get that it makes Sense if you're having tilebased movement, but at least visually it should look like a straight line I think.
Overall this feels a lot more comfy then the last Time tho. With these oldschool highly detailed or prerendered Sprites and clustered Maps, some animated Tiles like blinking Eyes in the Caves entrance, or a glowing furnace for the Smith, and some nice background Music and UI, this could really feel like a relaxing Browsergame to put lots of Time into.
Thanks for another essay!
Important things first: Can you tell me more on how you got to the point where the inputs where calculated from multiple squares below your position? This happened to me once when i was testing in Firefox and found that the zoom function was broken. It would only zoom for calculations but not for rendering, hence the coordinates were off. I disabled zooming for FF because of this and am now curious on how you managed to break it.
The lag between inputs and their actions shouldn't be too long. What might make it seem longer is the fact that i barely have any action interrupts in apart from getting staggered. Issuing multiple attacks creates a little queue that also feels bad at times.
Dialogue wise i just have to admit i was too lazy to translate and polish it. If anything else was correctly in german, then it's not a big deal at this point. For the blacksmith i wasn't really creative on quest dialogue for this thing, so i left it blank. As a fallback it was just playing a few miliseconds of his introduction. Apologies for this uncomplete mess.
Now to the plans: Yes i would like to experiment with more customization. There is still a hard limit on what i can do (deviating strongly from the base sprite silhouettes is a big nono), but masking specific parts and replace them with a player chosen color, that's a thing i will try soon.
The portraits i also want to incorporate more, so when you customize your dude and you never see those things again because of your equipment, you can at least see that nice portrait in multiple situations. For that i will also add more portrait backgrounds for each environment you are in. This is another reason to rework dialogues completely and have some more NPCs later on with their own portraits.
Depending on the performance of customizable colors on the player sprite, this might open up the possibility of better enemy recolors: Instead of completely hue rotating a goblin, only their skin color or their rags could be changed (and maybe make way for multiple clans of goblins? who knows). Possibly going further with this, would be some sort of color cycling for easy tile animation like flowing grass or ripples in the water.
Other than that, the grid movement will probably go away. In a lot of cases this grid brings more pain than it helps.
I think it happened when I entered the Caves, but it also happend when I reloaded the Page afterwards, so might not be that. Sorry, but I don't fully recall. If it helps, I'm on Chrome for this.
Lag might come from not being able to interrupt stuff, i.e. if I attack while between Tiles, I have to finish moving first. Also might be impacted by me not realizing the Controls where off.
I really like all the additions, the sound effects/music in the goblin caves is really nice. Not much really to say other than maybe make level 2 of the dungeon not as OP as it is.
Thanks for playing once again! Glad you liked what you saw and heard. In my mind im still setting up all the systems of the game, but i guess i should put more work into balancing so people can experience those additions in a humane manner. On the other hand, level 2 is my current endgame, so maybe it should be hard... jk, will make it nicer in the next version.
ahoy. glad to see this submitted again.
i played through 2 and a half runs. i died in one run, game froze on another, and i didnt do much on the last.
starting off simple: the goblin shaman is cool. i'm glad there's diversity between enemies now. the main issue with them is the stagger duration. when hit, you freeze for over a second of realtime, which gets tedious quickly, especially in a room with 2+ of them. i think a ministun is good enough especially since they halt your action.
i also saw 2 named enemies; a gobbo and a shaman. they behaved as expected.
map generation had a few hiccups. starting a dungeon always had a bit of a wall showing on the minimap, which was far away from the starting zone.
one level had a path leading nowhere
the levels are also gigantic. the exit to level 2 was a solid 3 minute of clicking. it would be nice if a) i could hold LMB to move and b) clicking a wall would take me to the nearest possible tile instead of not doing anything. these two things made moving through a cleared dungeon boring, since i died on level 2 and needed to treck back.
level 2 was cool, i liked the recolors. i saw a named goblin there, and i killed him. he dropped a big unidentified club, and as soon as i equipped it the game froze. i could still open my inventory, but nobody could move nor could i interact with anything. a reset fixed this.
another smaller thing is that using the scrollwheel in the item shop would also zoom the camera simultaneously.
i'd also consider increasing the droprate of items during this initial demo period, and bringing it back down when you're further along. i can imagine many playtesters losing/dying/leaving before they see a single item drop, since they're rare and shamans are tough.
a minor thing i noticed was the character seems blurry (?) when moving diagonally. don't know what's up with that, but it was noticeable.
sometimes projectiles would hit me even if i was clearly on another tile at the point of contact. Diablo 1 had the same tile issue (remember trying to flee the butcher?), but it was lame back then and I think it's lame today. now that there's goblin shamans, i'd consider looking into this. no clue how you'd resolve this, though.
anyway, great improvement. very glad to see that things are shaping up to be an enjoyable game, and i hope you continue working on this. keep it up
Aloha and thanks for playing again!
Late reply, for i was very ill over the weekend:
Dungeon hiccups happened to me too. I think the minimap showing walls far away is actually just a slight bug for the level transition. Like your character is at the coordinate 20,30 then enters a dungeon which has the entrance at, lets say 10,20, then the transition might be too slow/quick and the map gets updated before the player position will be. The floor with no wall is probably a special case of "the room exactly fits on the egde so we dont have to put up walls". I will fix both of these things until next time.
Most of the other pleasantries you encountered are part of a future dungeon gen overhaul too: Levels feel too big, enemy spawns are really random and theres no challenge apart from higher numbers (see lvl2 or the higher hp of rares).
I agree with the whole projectile stun being too harsh. However i found the way of D1 handling this to be the actual terrifying thing in combat and have fond memories of it. For the way movement and positioning works right now it's hardly possible in another way. Fortunately i committed to experimenting without a grid! This may also influence the blurry movement you noticed.
So i guess you haven't found the Kalemonvo legendary? For now it can only drop in level 2. I actually thought the drop rates were still very high, but i will specifically make guaranteed treasure rooms in the next version, so these things can be better checked out.
no legendaries of any kind, despite my best efforts