Great progress since last time I played! This is shaping up really well. Few thoughts as I play through:
Diagonal movement speed needs to be normalized. You move a lot faster diagonal than orthogonal. Might want to look into Vector2. Once you start using them and get comfortable with them, they are infinitely useful and you will be using them all the time.
Holding the mouse down should work to continually move you, and holding it down on an enemy should move you towards that enemy and then continuously attack.
Dungeon gen feels a lot better than last time I tried.
Got a freeze up. I was trying to open a chest, and clicking on it a bunch to get it to open. Now I can hover over things, but I can't move, and the enemies and everything is frozen.
Reloading, and then trying to load back into the character just hangs on the Loading... screen
Reloading again seems to work
Red goblin eyes in the dark are a great touch
The difficulty feels good, easy enough on the first level, with a nice bump up on the second
Freeze again when I went to pick up a shield
Overall, it's feeling good. I think the biggest improvements could be in the character movement, making that feel a little more smooth. Holding m1 down to keep moving around would go a long way. Normalizing the diagonal speed would too. Good work dude!
Hey thanks for playing again and sorry for the (very) late reply.
I'm actually using vectors for projectiles, however it's all overcomplicated by the fact that i use 2x1 tiles, which are also used as an easy way to check for collisions. The characters movement is just from tile center to the next, so diagonals seem faster, but actually are the same distance technically (time to move from A to B is the same in the calculations). Something about it has to change though, i agree.
Holding the mouse is something i already implemented briefly, but it was really buggy. It led to some weird behaviour in some cases. Similarly the hold mouse down to keep attacking was also bugged (a single click would trigger the attack twice :( ).
Glad about the positive feelings inbetween bugs and lack of QoL though!
I feel like last time I played you could move to a different direction midpoint, now the character walks until it reaches to your first command/click whatever then moves again which makes things bit cumbersome. Idk if I'm remembering it wrong or you changed something.
That must've been a way older version: the change direction midpath was a buggy implementation of whats going on now and could lead to a state that froze any further movement. I see your point though (as have others with their feedback about the movement). The clunkyness needs to go, simple as.
Your game was one of the few I also played in the previous DD. You are doing a great work with it. Excellent visuals and that goblin voice takes me back in time. This is the type of game I'd play for a little bit over the course of many days (or months), because I enjoy farming and going after loot, but since I'm playing it on browser I haven't finished the game (I wanted to find that goblin outfit you have made). Npc at the start makes me think of the blonde one in the Everquest covers/posters, and of course, the Doom reference with it takes me way back, while also giving the character some life. A volcano in the scenario is yet another positive choice you've made. Don't stop investing in the voice acting 'cause that helps a lot in a rpg these days. There is a thing I never enjoyed in this type of game though (mostly player PoE), which is the "Unidentified" tag. I know it's a common feature, but it frustrates me every time I want to check new loot and can't just equip it right away... oh well. Keep polishing this gem.
Glad you liked it despite its rough and never ending buggy state.
Its a good point you are making with the unidentified items. The more i develop this, the more i question if some of the classic features of ARPGs make sense. For instance the scrolls for town portals in D1-2 and PoE were a bit annoying and as much as i dislike D3, the always available portal button was pretty neat. Item durability and identification are among these things too. In theory there might be interesting mechanics for durability, like increased stats if its almost broken? Or ethereal weapons like in D2?
What can be done with identifying? I do not know. But i will have to think of something to justify keeping it, thanks to you ;)
I love it that you let us use portals without problems, I hated having to keep the scrolls in PoE. Hmm, interesting. About broken equipment, as someone who has played a lot of mmorpg many moons ago, I like the theory of having your weapon deteriorate with use. But the consequences are usually: not doing high damage or having your equipment disappear. In terms of gameplay, the player usually goes to a blacksmith and presses 2 buttons every time they go back to town. I would like to see these mechanics you talk about, adding depth to the durability system in terms of actual gameplay. Maybe a rusty sword would have 10% chance of giving an enemy tetanus? ha ha. I like seeing your updates so keep killing those bugs and ascend to a new class.
Does it not work in firefox? I click run game and just get a blank screen like it's not loading.
In the character customizer, it's weird I only see my change when I go to the next option.
I right clicked my book of healing and it disappeared, did I destroy it? :( I was just clicking randomly, if it's destroyed I wish I got a prompt before it happened.
The way dialogue text scrolls up fast looks weird to me. I think it shouldn't move so fast.
I don't really understand attacking. Right click seems to attack but not really? It's actually left click on enemy? Would be nice to have an auto attack so I don't have to keep clicking.
I think I got into a bugged state. The gobbos were beating up on me so I tried to use my healing spell. But it didn't seem to work and I died? But I didn't really die, everything just went dark but I have a sliver of health? Here's a screenshot: https://i.4cdn.org/vg/1683478201719971.png
You used React to build this right? That's awesome. The style seems cool, bit bummed it ended early for me.
Firefox is at the least very "special". Its less performant and zooming doesn't work there. However the game itself should start.
The books are right click to consume (as in learn). It seems i forgot to add the little info on the tooltip that says that (potions have this for example). I could put in a prompt to confirm, just because books are pretty valuable in the beginning.
Just like the books, i tried to imitate good old Diablo 1 with the dialogues. Apart from the nostalgia, i think the scrolling text is a bit suboptimal and i would like to remake the whole system. The scroll speed is supposed to be faster when there is less text, but i see why thats not necessarily a good thing.
The click events are a bit iffy: Holding a mouse button down doesn't repeat an action right now. I tried to implement this but for some reason a single click was triggered twice then. Once i overcame that little technical hurdle, an auto attack can become reality.
Im a bit late here, so your screenshot is dead. I will try to reproduce your scenario though.
Made it originally with React just to learn it, which might be the reason why older components may be less than optimal and some things need longer to fix/optimize. Now it's bundled with tauri so i can at least tell people with problems in Firefox to have a workaround by downloading the game :D
Nice that there's more of a Customization Menu now. Could use some Stat assignment or something tho maybe. Also feels odd that I have to click ok to see the Colorchoice take Effect.
Seems the bug with the Movement when clicking too high up/down was fixed, nice. Tiles are still too wide I think, and diagonal movement is a lot faster then horizontal/vertical.
New Menu Backgrounds are simple but nice. having Wood, Iron 'and' green Jade or whatever it is clashes a bit tho. And could use some more ornamentation(?) on the Corners maybe. Also its pretty small on my Screen and I can't resize or reposition the Windows.
Copy from Kalemonvo and have the Life/Mana Values be visible on the Orbs when I click on them. Its neat.
Cave lvl 1 stop generating a Pathway on the right side without cutting it off with a Wall.
Defeated Flat Snuzzcracker and Flot Snotmuncher or however they are called. When you get hit by a Shaman while in between Tiles you sometimes teleport back to the Tile before the one you're trying to move to.
And while you can change your movement target while walking now, it still overall feels pretty unresponsive, like everything is taking a while to process before being executed. Maybe thats just low performance due to running in Browser.
The Game is incredibly silent. Map helps a lot in finding your Way through the Dungeon.
When having a 2 handed Club equipped, and equipping a Sword in the Offhand, the Club just disappears. Also defeated Dritz Dirtclobber or whatever. Inventory is now full, I'll clear out the first Floor, then head to Town. Your Inventory could definetly be bigger.
Game froze on me when trying to pickup Gold while being hit by a Shaman, while already moving, while right before a Levelup. It's not locked, I can still see the hover-information, highlight Items etc, I just can't input any Commands, and the Game doesn't tick anymore. Exiting to Menu and returning fixed it. Found the Sound sliders during that, nice. Can't sell any of the Loot I found tho, not nice.
Froze again when picking up a Club. Something is very wrong there.
When zooming in your Pixels seem to blur a bit. Defeated Brizz Boneslurper, nice. And Floeak Toothtaker. And fianlly made level 2, and almost immediately Level 3 in the Caves. And took down Flitz Rabbelsnapper or something.
Loading to level 4 caused the Game to hang itself in the loading Screen. Guess that Ends it.
Customization: Immediate change is on the list. Stat assignment is an interesting idea, but i need to think about where i wanna go with classes (or if i wanna ditch them) first.
Small UI elements are a result of me being lazy and making them the absolute minimum first for this version. Resize and reposition manually by the user came to my mind as well, i will test this soon.
The disappearing club seems to be a recurring bug. I thought i fixed it, but you proved me wrong.
Pretty fun game. I loved the graphics and overall atmosphere, and specially the spritework. Good job!
Only minor complaints are that the camera feels not very smooth, and that the game elements look a bit too small on a 1440p monitor. I tried the web version btw.
This is the first version where i made those UI elements fit the smallest supported screen size. A more responsive scaling for bigger screens is up next.
I like the updates you made and overall it is extremely good and like diablo. Nothing really to say outside maybe it takes a bit to many hits for Impalers for how much EXP they give and how some witch doctors are looking at the wall and won't attack.
i Plundered through Plunderground (no longer a Hero!) until i was stopped by some nasty bugs
i believe i can pinpoint the cause of these issues, but i'll leave that to you and instead i'll describe my journey
started off with a new character, Warrior as always. level 1 was a breeze because as it turns out, the shopkeepers take IOUs. i can buy everything and my gold will simply turn negative
very kind of them
i bought out what i thought was the best gear and a bunch of potions. onto level 2.
turns out i suck, and i died at level 2 to a named Spiker goblin. oops. except there's no game over screen - my character (and his lightsource) disappear and that's it. i manually restarted and loaded my character. this is where the troubles began.
back to level 1, no issues. i clear it and find an exit. now at level 2, the ground looks different? i thought this was probably randomized, except the enemies are now called Impalers and they look different? not only that, but they're much tougher. i thought this was probably a case of incorrect levels being loaded. i manage to clear this harder level and move on to level 3. except now in level 3, the enemies are simple goblins again? it's a cakewalk. I find the waypoint, clear the map, then find the exit. except clicking the go-deeper object freezes my movement and doesn't take me down! in fact, i can't do anything until i switch tabs. switching browser tabs, for whatever reason, unfreezes me and allows me to move again. except i still can't Go Deeper. this is as far as i can go, and according to the waypoint and townsfolk, there is still more to explore.
well, since i have a waypoint, i'll restart and use that to go back to level 3. i do, it works! the enemies are correct too, they're impalers! nice
well, unfortunately that wasn't enough, since even after finding a new Go-Deeper entrance, i still freeze and cannot actually go down to the next level. it's quite unfortunate, but i had a lot of fun playing regardless of any issues. sadly i didn't find any unique items, and for some reason all Big Clubs give +14 Mana (which i don't use), but i was able to club my way down as far as i could go.
there are some other minor issues, like ESC not pausing, ESC not clearing the currently opened menu (inventory, spells, etc) but those are all unimportant and can be implemented later. i hope to be able to play through this again soon, because i'm still curious about the unique items and this nasty boss the townsfolk talk about
The gold thing is new, thanks for catching that! The level 4 thing being broken is also a good reminder for me, i think i just forgot to put some sprites in the right folder and now it crashes when looking for them. Truly my fault and will be fixed today! Crash on death is another bug i actually knew, but forgot about it (will also be fixed today).
Now the regular/stronger goblin distributions are a bit random, but maybe i really should disable the basic ones for level 3+. This wouldn't be that bad and obvious if i had more enemies in total and not just the two.
Level 2 (or any for that matter) changing colors is new to me, i will investigate this.
The uniques are quite rare, maybe i will up their droprate a bit to make it easier. The boss is still waiting for some animations, but i may just drop him in with some placeholder stuff since i will need to adjust things today anyway.
Apart from the bugs and inconveniences, how was the performance for you, especially in level 2 and 3? Im not sure how taxing the color replacement for the goblins is at runtime, the laptop im developing with at the moment is a bit weak and running multiple programs makes this fluctuate a lot for me.
i played it in chrome on my old midrange PC. i had no issues whatsoever, and the input delay i assume is due to browsers and has existed forever for me. there is no noticeable change in performance from before
Comments
Great progress since last time I played! This is shaping up really well. Few thoughts as I play through:
Overall, it's feeling good. I think the biggest improvements could be in the character movement, making that feel a little more smooth. Holding m1 down to keep moving around would go a long way. Normalizing the diagonal speed would too. Good work dude!
Hey thanks for playing again and sorry for the (very) late reply.
I'm actually using vectors for projectiles, however it's all overcomplicated by the fact that i use 2x1 tiles, which are also used as an easy way to check for collisions. The characters movement is just from tile center to the next, so diagonals seem faster, but actually are the same distance technically (time to move from A to B is the same in the calculations). Something about it has to change though, i agree.
Holding the mouse is something i already implemented briefly, but it was really buggy. It led to some weird behaviour in some cases. Similarly the hold mouse down to keep attacking was also bugged (a single click would trigger the attack twice :( ).
Glad about the positive feelings inbetween bugs and lack of QoL though!
I feel like last time I played you could move to a different direction midpoint, now the character walks until it reaches to your first command/click whatever then moves again which makes things bit cumbersome. Idk if I'm remembering it wrong or you changed something.
Thanks for trying again!
That must've been a way older version: the change direction midpath was a buggy implementation of whats going on now and could lead to a state that froze any further movement. I see your point though (as have others with their feedback about the movement). The clunkyness needs to go, simple as.
Your game was one of the few I also played in the previous DD. You are doing a great work with it.
Excellent visuals and that goblin voice takes me back in time.
This is the type of game I'd play for a little bit over the course of many days (or months), because I enjoy farming and going after loot, but since I'm playing it on browser I haven't finished the game (I wanted to find that goblin outfit you have made).
Npc at the start makes me think of the blonde one in the Everquest covers/posters, and of course, the Doom reference with it takes me way back, while also giving the character some life.
A volcano in the scenario is yet another positive choice you've made. Don't stop investing in the voice acting 'cause that helps a lot in a rpg these days.
There is a thing I never enjoyed in this type of game though (mostly player PoE), which is the "Unidentified" tag. I know it's a common feature, but it frustrates me every time I want to check new loot and can't just equip it right away... oh well.
Keep polishing this gem.
Thanks for the feedback and for playing!
Glad you liked it despite its rough and never ending buggy state.
Its a good point you are making with the unidentified items. The more i develop this, the more i question if some of the classic features of ARPGs make sense. For instance the scrolls for town portals in D1-2 and PoE were a bit annoying and as much as i dislike D3, the always available portal button was pretty neat. Item durability and identification are among these things too. In theory there might be interesting mechanics for durability, like increased stats if its almost broken? Or ethereal weapons like in D2?
What can be done with identifying? I do not know. But i will have to think of something to justify keeping it, thanks to you ;)
I love it that you let us use portals without problems, I hated having to keep the scrolls in PoE.
Hmm, interesting. About broken equipment, as someone who has played a lot of mmorpg many moons ago, I like the theory of having your weapon deteriorate with use. But the consequences are usually: not doing high damage or having your equipment disappear. In terms of gameplay, the player usually goes to a blacksmith and presses 2 buttons every time they go back to town. I would like to see these mechanics you talk about, adding depth to the durability system in terms of actual gameplay. Maybe a rusty sword would have 10% chance of giving an enemy tetanus? ha ha.
I like seeing your updates so keep killing those bugs and ascend to a new class.
Does it not work in firefox? I click run game and just get a blank screen like it's not loading.
In the character customizer, it's weird I only see my change when I go to the next option.
I right clicked my book of healing and it disappeared, did I destroy it? :( I was just clicking randomly, if it's destroyed I wish I got a prompt before it happened.
The way dialogue text scrolls up fast looks weird to me. I think it shouldn't move so fast.
I don't really understand attacking. Right click seems to attack but not really? It's actually left click on enemy? Would be nice to have an auto attack so I don't have to keep clicking.
I think I got into a bugged state. The gobbos were beating up on me so I tried to use my healing spell. But it didn't seem to work and I died? But I didn't really die, everything just went dark but I have a sliver of health? Here's a screenshot: https://i.4cdn.org/vg/1683478201719971.png
You used React to build this right? That's awesome. The style seems cool, bit bummed it ended early for me.
Thanks for playing!
Firefox is at the least very "special". Its less performant and zooming doesn't work there. However the game itself should start.
The books are right click to consume (as in learn). It seems i forgot to add the little info on the tooltip that says that (potions have this for example). I could put in a prompt to confirm, just because books are pretty valuable in the beginning.
Just like the books, i tried to imitate good old Diablo 1 with the dialogues. Apart from the nostalgia, i think the scrolling text is a bit suboptimal and i would like to remake the whole system. The scroll speed is supposed to be faster when there is less text, but i see why thats not necessarily a good thing.
The click events are a bit iffy: Holding a mouse button down doesn't repeat an action right now. I tried to implement this but for some reason a single click was triggered twice then. Once i overcame that little technical hurdle, an auto attack can become reality.
Im a bit late here, so your screenshot is dead. I will try to reproduce your scenario though.
Made it originally with React just to learn it, which might be the reason why older components may be less than optimal and some things need longer to fix/optimize. Now it's bundled with tauri so i can at least tell people with problems in Firefox to have a workaround by downloading the game :D
Nice that there's more of a Customization Menu now. Could use some Stat assignment or something tho maybe. Also feels odd that I have to click ok to see the Colorchoice take Effect.
Seems the bug with the Movement when clicking too high up/down was fixed, nice. Tiles are still too wide I think, and diagonal movement is a lot faster then horizontal/vertical.
New Menu Backgrounds are simple but nice. having Wood, Iron 'and' green Jade or whatever it is clashes a bit tho. And could use some more ornamentation(?) on the Corners maybe. Also its pretty small on my Screen and I can't resize or reposition the Windows.
Copy from Kalemonvo and have the Life/Mana Values be visible on the Orbs when I click on them. Its neat.
Cave lvl 1 stop generating a Pathway on the right side without cutting it off with a Wall.
Defeated Flat Snuzzcracker and Flot Snotmuncher or however they are called. When you get hit by a Shaman while in between Tiles you sometimes teleport back to the Tile before the one you're trying to move to.
And while you can change your movement target while walking now, it still overall feels pretty unresponsive, like everything is taking a while to process before being executed. Maybe thats just low performance due to running in Browser.
The Game is incredibly silent. Map helps a lot in finding your Way through the Dungeon.
When having a 2 handed Club equipped, and equipping a Sword in the Offhand, the Club just disappears. Also defeated Dritz Dirtclobber or whatever. Inventory is now full, I'll clear out the first Floor, then head to Town. Your Inventory could definetly be bigger.
Game froze on me when trying to pickup Gold while being hit by a Shaman, while already moving, while right before a Levelup. It's not locked, I can still see the hover-information, highlight Items etc, I just can't input any Commands, and the Game doesn't tick anymore. Exiting to Menu and returning fixed it. Found the Sound sliders during that, nice. Can't sell any of the Loot I found tho, not nice.
Froze again when picking up a Club. Something is very wrong there.
When zooming in your Pixels seem to blur a bit. Defeated Brizz Boneslurper, nice. And Floeak Toothtaker. And fianlly made level 2, and almost immediately Level 3 in the Caves. And took down Flitz Rabbelsnapper or something.
Loading to level 4 caused the Game to hang itself in the loading Screen. Guess that Ends it.
Fun, but fix your crashing and your Performance.
Thanks for the traditional DD essay!
Customization: Immediate change is on the list. Stat assignment is an interesting idea, but i need to think about where i wanna go with classes (or if i wanna ditch them) first.
Small UI elements are a result of me being lazy and making them the absolute minimum first for this version. Resize and reposition manually by the user came to my mind as well, i will test this soon.
The disappearing club seems to be a recurring bug. I thought i fixed it, but you proved me wrong.
Pretty fun game. I loved the graphics and overall atmosphere, and specially the spritework. Good job!
Only minor complaints are that the camera feels not very smooth, and that the game elements look a bit too small on a 1440p monitor. I tried the web version btw.
Thanks a lot!
This is the first version where i made those UI elements fit the smallest supported screen size. A more responsive scaling for bigger screens is up next.
Generally pretty fun, ran into a few bugs or confusing parts.
Performance and everything was fine, played the web version via ffox. Definitely haven't finished playing yet, just what I've came across so far.
Thanks for the feedback!
Seems like the selling button got bugged while i was fixing the buy button :(
Will check out the other two issues.
I like the updates you made and overall it is extremely good and like diablo. Nothing really to say outside maybe it takes a bit to many hits for Impalers for how much EXP they give and how some witch doctors are looking at the wall and won't attack.
Thanks for playing again! Not sure what happened there with the witch doctors, but i will check.
ahoy and well met orbdev
i Plundered through Plunderground (no longer a Hero!) until i was stopped by some nasty bugs
i believe i can pinpoint the cause of these issues, but i'll leave that to you and instead i'll describe my journey
started off with a new character, Warrior as always. level 1 was a breeze because as it turns out, the shopkeepers take IOUs. i can buy everything and my gold will simply turn negative
very kind of them
i bought out what i thought was the best gear and a bunch of potions. onto level 2.
turns out i suck, and i died at level 2 to a named Spiker goblin. oops. except there's no game over screen - my character (and his lightsource) disappear and that's it. i manually restarted and loaded my character. this is where the troubles began.
back to level 1, no issues. i clear it and find an exit. now at level 2, the ground looks different? i thought this was probably randomized, except the enemies are now called Impalers and they look different? not only that, but they're much tougher. i thought this was probably a case of incorrect levels being loaded. i manage to clear this harder level and move on to level 3. except now in level 3, the enemies are simple goblins again? it's a cakewalk. I find the waypoint, clear the map, then find the exit. except clicking the go-deeper object freezes my movement and doesn't take me down! in fact, i can't do anything until i switch tabs. switching browser tabs, for whatever reason, unfreezes me and allows me to move again. except i still can't Go Deeper. this is as far as i can go, and according to the waypoint and townsfolk, there is still more to explore.
well, since i have a waypoint, i'll restart and use that to go back to level 3. i do, it works! the enemies are correct too, they're impalers! nice
well, unfortunately that wasn't enough, since even after finding a new Go-Deeper entrance, i still freeze and cannot actually go down to the next level. it's quite unfortunate, but i had a lot of fun playing regardless of any issues. sadly i didn't find any unique items, and for some reason all Big Clubs give +14 Mana (which i don't use), but i was able to club my way down as far as i could go.
there are some other minor issues, like ESC not pausing, ESC not clearing the currently opened menu (inventory, spells, etc) but those are all unimportant and can be implemented later. i hope to be able to play through this again soon, because i'm still curious about the unique items and this nasty boss the townsfolk talk about
Praise the orb and praise your feedback!
The gold thing is new, thanks for catching that! The level 4 thing being broken is also a good reminder for me, i think i just forgot to put some sprites in the right folder and now it crashes when looking for them. Truly my fault and will be fixed today! Crash on death is another bug i actually knew, but forgot about it (will also be fixed today).
Now the regular/stronger goblin distributions are a bit random, but maybe i really should disable the basic ones for level 3+. This wouldn't be that bad and obvious if i had more enemies in total and not just the two.
Level 2 (or any for that matter) changing colors is new to me, i will investigate this.
The uniques are quite rare, maybe i will up their droprate a bit to make it easier. The boss is still waiting for some animations, but i may just drop him in with some placeholder stuff since i will need to adjust things today anyway.
Apart from the bugs and inconveniences, how was the performance for you, especially in level 2 and 3? Im not sure how taxing the color replacement for the goblins is at runtime, the laptop im developing with at the moment is a bit weak and running multiple programs makes this fluctuate a lot for me.
i played it in chrome on my old midrange PC. i had no issues whatsoever, and the input delay i assume is due to browsers and has existed forever for me. there is no noticeable change in performance from before