I know it's a bit late, but finally got around to play this game again as I did been checking it out in previous DDs. Played 20.1 version and my playthroughs were mostly focused on a spellcaster build.
Game looks great as ever, and the enemy variety is great. I only noticed a couple of issues:
- Loading a manual save after dying seems to be constantly put me in a black void, always had to go to the main menu and load from there.
- Sometimes my attacks went through enemies, and I don't mean the missing because of attack rating kind, but the projectile goes through the enemy like there's no collision kind. Mainly happened with the skeleton mages who cast ice spike, but can't say if it's intended or a bug.
- Sometimes projectiles reflected by the enemy's shield slow down and just hover in place for a while before disappearing.
- Enemy attacks seem weird and random. Sometimes enemies swing as soon as they get close, sometimes they just stand there for a bit. Pokan herself bugged out of me and just stood still after going up to my face, letting me wail on her until she died.
- I went to Pokan's place, then back to Breeding Grounds 2 for some cleanup, and after that every time I went back to Pokan's area the game kept saying I was entering Breeding Grounds 2.
Apart from issues, my feelings about the balance and general gameplay:
- Potions that deplete your mana are bad, awful, terrible and worse than useless since I actually have to keep in mind which potions to avoid instead of being able to pick up everything. If they do have to be in the game it'd be better if their name reflect that they are tainted or something similar so that it's clear from a glance that they're a downgrade from regular potions instead of being called something like "wondrous" (though I have to admit, I genuinely forgot what they are actually called since I avoided them like a plague from moment one).
- Enemies that are faster than you are generally a pain to fight. I didn't find a good way to kite them - spells that slow down enemies (like the ice spell or the area one) don't last long enough, as by the time I made some distance and turned back around to attack them they were already over and the enemies ran up to my face a moment later. This combined with the fact that enemies in general are very happy to cancel their attack animation to chase you (which yourself can't do) made them kind of a resource sink, which can suck if the game decides that you're not going to find any potions for the rest of the area.
- Speaking of resources and potions, mana in general is very inconsistent. Sometimes I had no problem keeping myself topped off, other times I had to go through almost all of the level with no mana because I couldn't find any potions. Items that steal/replenish it can help IF you can find any, though ones that give a flat recovery begin to fall off in usefulness eventually. This is genuinely a shame because the spells are realy nice and fun to use with a lot of variety, but it feels like the game doesn't want me to use them and I'm left at the RNG's mercy whether I can or not.
- And speaking of spells, currently Intelligence feels like a noob trap and pretty much not worth putting any points into. I only put two so that I can learn the first level of fireball (so that I can cast it even if I switch off of my starting wand), but even that ended up as a waste as Int received from gear workts just as fine. Leveling up spells does not seem to worth it either - you get twice as damage for twice as much mana cost. Considering that you have to spend precious points to be even able to do that, you could put those points into Mind instead: not only it increases your base attack damage (for times when you're out of mana and can't even use any spells, see previous point) since it increases your maximum MP you'll be able to do more damage before you're depleted as you'll be able to cast spells more times. Hell, I'd argue that lower level spells are actually better than higher level spells: since casting is relatively fast, your damage output is basically the same whether you cast one lvl2 or two lvl1 spells, but you can split two spells for two targets and won't waste MP on any overkill damage. In case your attack misses (because you screwed up or the enemy moved away) you also waste less MP, and as most of the mana recovery is a flat amount you'll be able to cast lower level spells more frequently too because of their lower MP requirement. As for it's effect on the quickslot wheel, I had no problem just opening the spellbook mid-fight with M and changing my active spell there.
- The way there is no HP bar and enemies indicate visually of how hurt they are is a cool idea and I like it, and generally works for the most part, but not for bosses I feel like. It's not gradual enough for them considering how tanky they are and a lot of times I had no idea how well I'm doing against them, and was praying they'd die before I do. Bosses in general are not really standing out from the other enemies - most of the time I only realized I'm fighting one because they didn't die as fast as their crowd or because suddenly I'm receiving three times as much health from their attacks that I would do from a regular enemy.
- Leveling up slows down a lot as you get more levels, which I wouldn't normally mention but I kept having the feeling that the areas level up faster than I do even with clearing out the whole place to get all the XP I possibly can.
All of the complaining aside, even with it's frustrations the game is still quite fun. And last but not least, here's my endgame stats (I did encounter Vedomot in an earlier run but alas that one had to be abandoned due to bad stat distribution):
thanks for playing and for the detailed write up! it's never too late for feedback
>Loading a manual save after dying seems to be constantly put me in a black void, always had to go to the main menu and load from there.
if this happened during your last playthrough, could you please send me Unity's playerlog .txt file(s)? it'll be in C:/Users/You/AppData (hidden directory)/LocalLow/osur/Tower of Kalemonvo (you can just put it on a text hosting site). i thought ver .21 would've fixed this by now, but there's always another bug lying in wait it would seem.
>Sometimes my attacks went through enemies Faceless and Lich enemies have evasion, which is a % chance for ranged attacks to phase through them. For the faceless, their transparency sortof helps imply that, but for liches there's no visual indication of this so a lot of players were left thinking it was a bug. I'll look into adding some feedback to this.
>Sometimes projectiles reflected by the enemy's shield slow down and just hover in place for a while before disappearing.
weird. i'll check it out
>Enemy attacks seem weird and random. Sometimes enemies swing as soon as they get close, sometimes they just stand there for a bit.
yeah - there's an attempt to make their attacks inconsistent (random base attack time). they also reduce that waiting period if they detect they're being kited. for Pokan to stop entirely is a new thing to hear.
>Potions that deplete your mana are bad, awful, terrible and worse than useless
potions that aren't the main 3 (+hp, +mp and +both) are randomized, with random name/icon/effect chosen as soon as you start a new game. sometimes a potion with a "good" icon and a "good" name (like a purple potion named Angelic) would actually have an effect that's awful for mages (-full mana). i sort of want to have some potions that are weak for one playstyle but strong for another, there's more balance required in this part.
> Enemies that are faster than you are generally a pain to fight. I didn't find a good way to kite them - spells that slow down enemies (like the ice spell or the area one) don't last long enough, as by the time I made some distance and turned back around to attack them they were already over and the enemies ran up to my face a moment later. This combined with the fact that enemies in general are very happy to cancel their attack animation to chase you (which yourself can't do) made them kind of a resource sink, which can suck if the game decides that you're not going to find any potions for the rest of the area.
they're a pain if you're a ranged character! that's the intention. the fact that you haven't gotten any resources makes this more annoying, though. there isn't anything to replenish with after one fountain in the Burrows, which makes BG1, BG2 and Lost Corridors a gauntlet, which i think sucks. I'll add some tools in the Paladin camp and see how that works.
same thing with the mana intake. i need a bit more tools for the player to use in case RNG isn't working out
>And speaking of spells, currently Intelligence feels like a noob trap and pretty much not worth putting any points into.
.21 changed stats. before that (during DD), Int would *also* give the + 1-1 wand damage. I just changed that so mind does that instead, since mind only gave mana beforehand. you're right that spell scaling is a bit weird, i'll need to slightly buff +lvls on spells.
>LVLs
I noticed that as well. i'll slightly lower level requirements for higher levels.
Congrats on making it through the end! not too many people can say they did that. thanks again for the detailed feedback, this will prove very useful in the days to come where i'll need to do a lot of balance changes.
For the loading bug, I added the save as well, since I was able to consistently reproduce it: simply go back to Pokan's place and get yourself killed, then load the save again (the file is deleted after one download, so let me know if you got or need me to reupload it):
For Int being changed now makes a lot of sense since I vaguely remember leveling it in older builds and was wondering why it seemed such a bad choice now. For the potions yeah, I guess if I weren't so strapped for resources getting healed for the cost of your mana could be an interesting tradeoff, but as it is now they were the most annoying part of the demo for me if I'm honest. Good luck with further development and looking forward for the updates!
thanks for the save and bug report, i was able to resolve the issue! i'll be sure to also take a better look at balancing potion effects and drop rates
* Gameplay is fun, I could burn my eyelids to this
* Visuals are great, light and shadows in particular, really well done. I dig the UI too.
* It kinda make my GPU run at full when other bigger games don't, perhaps there is some optimization to be done on how it loads stuff?
Possible improvements:
* Most enemies don't give any sign of being struck (except for becoming bathed in blood), ranged special animations seem to go through even if they hit sometimes so it would be cool to give some visual input on this.
* Drop rates seem somewhat low (and this is a problem given the game has no vendors)
>It kinda make my GPU run at full when other bigger games don't, perhaps there is some optimization to be done on how it loads stuff?
yeah - my game sometimes embodies the "western gamedev meme" of having a giant filesize and running like dogwater. if you've played the latest build it'll be better, but there's still more work to be done
> Most enemies don't give any sign of being struck (except for becoming bathed in blood), ranged special animations seem to go through even if they hit sometimes so it would be cool to give some visual input on this.
noted, working on this
>Drop rates seem somewhat low (and this is a problem given the game has no vendors) that's sortof the point - i just need to tailor it so that it doesn't lead to boring "i havent gotten a drop in 2 hours" gameplay. the idea is that drops are low, items are plentiful and you may not get what you want the most, but since there's no town you have to go with what you can scrounge.
>Named or bosses could use an hp bar I don't want this in order to make these bosses feel more threatening. how many hp does this guy have? how many fireballs will he take? no idea, but he's coming straight at you!
> MORE BREAKABLE STUFF PLEASE
it will be done
thanks again for the feedback, it's much appreciated.
>I don't want this in order to make these bosses feel more threatening. how many hp does this guy have? how many fireballs will he take? no idea, but he's coming straight at you! Well then its working as intended! I got some samurai guy chasing me forever haha. I'll give it another try later to see if I can overcome those bosses with another build. Keep up the good work!
Little late I know, but I gave it a go, took some notes.
Lower Dungeons
I like the new starting weapon selection
Ranged still feels way stronger than melee, but I'll try going for melee.
I can't help but notice that my sword looks different on my back than it does in my hand.
Found a two handed axe already, guess I'll try two-handing.
Thought: Two-handed weapons should get a bigger bonus to damage from your strength than one-handed weapons.
Axe isn't great. The slow attack speed means it's just worse than the sword, which might hit enemies and keep them from hitting you back.
But killing the cult apprentices in one hit and the big mauler dudes in two is pretty satisfying.
I miss being able to hit while standing still with the axe by holding shift.
It LOOKS like it should work fine, but I'm pretty sure it's impossible to hit anything by clicking into the air, and he usually refuses to attack if I click an enemy.
Forgotten Passageway
Managed to take out the chaos warrior quite handily with a club, a shield, and 4 healing potions.
Lower Dungeons 2
It's nice to be able to switch quickly to my melee weapon for when there's a single invisible fucker.
But the burning floating skull fireball hell remains a job for the bow, and if there's more than one melee enemy, I'm gonna take a lot of damage fighting them in melee, so kiting it is.
It's kinda annoying how the skulls can hide behind walls and pop you. I really wish enemies would get an outline when behind a wall or something. You already have an outline for when you hover the mouse over them that ignores walls. Please, man, I just wanna see the things my dude should have in plain view.
From a melee perspective, the width of the doors becomes a huge issue. Like, back in Diablo 1, you had one-character wide doors, so you could use them as choke points to avoid getting surrounded. It was an absolutely vital tactic. Here in the tower though, there's always plenty of room for enemies to flank you and you don't have any AoE attacks or crowd control to deal with them. I'm not saying every door should be a choke point, but they're sorely missed.
Bloodlust affects all damage output? Considering the theme, shouldn't it only affect melee? I'm not complaining, mind.
I found Vedomot. Since she's a horrible demon, I of course try to kill her through the bars, but she ignores the arrows.
If you want her to not be killable, you should put a force field around her in a summoning circle or something, or have her talk from behind a wall where the player can't see her.
The way the ranged enemies just hang back and don't chase you is another problem for melee.
Like if you could lure them closer, that'd be one thing, but when a bunch of them spawn and can pepper you with attacks from every direction as you come at them, it seems impossible.
Anyway, by losing a few HP permanently with the cauldron spell and using my bow , I managed to reach the stairs up.
But I'm gonna go see how Vedomot betrays me first.
Aaand I'm dead. Kiting enemies that are faster than you doesn't work so well. It's nice that she's got a speed advantage on you though, means ranged can't get so complacent.
Might try another run later with a wand since I didn't get to see much of the new stuff and I'm told they're the new hotness.
You already know this, but melee, and especially two-handed melee, really seems to need a buff. The damage output is about the same once you account for melee having to walk up to the enemy first, and even if it were much better, it'd be hard to outweigh the ~20x damage you take from fights from being in melee and needing to level an additional stat. They need knockback, or a low-level stunning weapon art, or much better hit rate, or guaranteed interrupts, or hitting multiple enemies, or something to make them viable. I also think making two-handed weapons so slow compared to one-handed is overkill - you're already giving up on a defensive bonus from a shield or a stat bonus from an effigy, so it's fine if they're just plain better than every other option when it comes to actually killing things.
I think making ranged weapons slower and harder hitting would be a good idea. Not only does it seem silly that you can nock an arrow, draw your bow, aim and loose in the same amount of time that it takes you to whack someone with your sword, it'd be a good balancing factor against kiting all the time. Mayybe lower base bow damage, but let it scale with strength, to differentiate them from crossbows in a way that isn't attack speed?
Maybe you can make it so ranged enemies don't attack you through other enemies? Right now the impenetrable volleys of fireballs are a little frequent.
it's never too late for feedback! thanks for taking the time to write this out. i'll reply to the points that stand out the most, since a lot of talk has already been covered (probably by you as well) in the threads
>It's kinda annoying how the skulls can hide behind walls and pop you. I really wish enemies would get an outline when behind a wall or something. You already have an outline for when you hover the mouse over them that ignores walls. Please, man, I just wanna see the things my dude should have in plain view.
will try this out, seems like a good idea. having multiple outlines might be scary, but what if i used the fill instead of the outline? hmm....
>there's always plenty of room for enemies to flank you and you don't have any AoE attacks or crowd control to deal with them. I'm not saying every door should be a choke point, but they're sorely missed
this is a Mauler consequence. i think enemies will see some reorganizing, and with only humanoids in some floors, the doors will shrink to fit that. this is still spitballing, but i'll give it a go.
>If you want her [Vedomot] to not be killable, you should put a force field around her in a summoning circle or something,
damn, good idea. i already have a forcefield made for the later levels anyway. i'll give it a try.
>Like if you could lure them closer, that'd be one thing, but when a bunch of them spawn and can pepper you with attacks from every direction as you come at them, it seems impossible.
this exists. Spitters in the bug-levels do that. i should add that to archers, (or skulls) so that one enemy type hangs back , and the other chases. good idea.
>Maybe you can make it so ranged enemies don't attack you through other enemies? Right now the impenetrable volleys of fireballs are a little frequent.
i like this, will try it out. it used to be the case that goth girls would friendly-fire everyone, perhaps it's time to bring that back
there is a lot of work to do for me after this patch, but rest assured melee will be getting some much needed love.
have you tried the 2H combat arts? final blow is quite strong, tomo can kill her alter-ego in 3 hits with it!
thanks again for taking the time to play and write out such thoughtful feedback, i really appreciate it!
I did, but I didn't seem like it was particularly effective. Like, it costs mana, still might not hit, and didn't seem to do that much more damage. Maybe for a third playthrough at some point.
Notes from my wand playthrough:
Wand and shield is a cool combo that you don't see a lot, but it's a breeze compared to melee or the bow I used last time. Like wow, I went straight up through to the halls of pain without a hitch just constantly leveling up my int to up my wand damage.
Halls of Pain
Fleshpriests look nice, but they're super annoying to fight with the way they slow you while milling about at high speed.
I can't believe you took out the temptresses but left in the ghoul recolors smdh
Possible bug report: I keep hearing a loud "clank" noise when enemies attack me from the front, and I think it might be because the shield weapon art counts as being constantly active, without costing any mana.
It kept happening even after I unequipped the shield.
After reloading, I seem to be taking a lot more damage than I was before, I'm not hearing the clank, and I can actually do the block shield art as intended. So probably a bug.
I wasn't even bothering to kite enemies previously and still had an inventory full of potions.
Found a book of Mana Shield, which means my int build finally has a use for mana aside from bloodlust. Using mana on offensive magic seems silly when wands kill everything just fine anyway.
And now I found a ring of mana steal, which means I'm now just about invincible.
The burrows
Found a tome of haste. It doesn't seem very powerful. Being faster is nice, but since you're already faster than all the enemies, it doesn't give you any new options in combat. I mostly just use it to make backtracking more convenient, but maybe it'd be more useful on a level with faster enemies, like the faceless from level 3
I didn't expect much trouble, but I did encounter a Spitter boss. The boss itself wasn't a problem, but his squad of 10-20 spitters that all start shooting at me from beyond visual range when I turn the corner made it really tricky to kill anything without losing a ton of health. Fortunately my inventory was full of potions.
Skeleton Pit
I hate liches I hate liches I hate liches I hate liches.
Enticing potions aren't very enticing if they start dropping alongside greater health potions that do the same amount of healing with no downside.
I had a fight in the room with the golden goblin statue and its hitbox kept me from picking up some of the items that were dropped.
I found a wand and a staff down here, and the staff seems much weaker. It's got more base damage, but the slower attack speed means you get to apply your int bonus less, and you don't get an off-hand weapon.
Summon great snake is a fun spell. Having the summon be a monster that doesn't appear as an enemy adds a lot to it.
I'd like 'em to be a little more aggressive though.
Breeding grounds
Huh? Wait, the loading screen when leaving the skeleton pit said the breeding grounds, but I'm back in the burrows.
Breeding Grounds 1 for real
Very cramped, which is leads to interesting synergies with my new snake buddies. Enemies don't seem to aggro them unless they actually get attacked, so they're more useful for keeping the melee bugs away from me by blocking narrow passages without anyone attakcing.
Had a wall piece not load in, meaning I got to stare into the void.
This place really IS full of bugs! I tried unequipping my shield and most of my gear exploded off of me as my mind stat blasted down to -2
It happens consistently when I reload and try again.
Anyway, continuing on.
Now that I'm paying attention, there's a LOT of missing walls.
Breeding Grounds 2
IDK if the breeding grounds are so interesting that players will wanna do two whole levels of them.
Met a special enemy of the flying buggers called "count queen of flies", which is kinda awkward sounding.
Paladin Basecamp
I was not expecting the paladins to be like actual christian-cross-wearing templars. Seems a little weird when you're fighting weird made up cults for the most part.
Anyway, on to side quest.
Lost Corridors
Think I might've tabbed out at a bad time and broke the loading screen.
It worked fine after reloading the autosave though.
New models look nice in action.
Truth seekers are annoying for a wand-user, but fortunately my snake buddies have no such problems, because I haven't got the stats to use any melee weapons I could find up here. I usually just wait behind a wall while they get snaked to death.
Oh so the temptress got a new model instead of being removed entirely.
I got careless, died and reloaded my autosave, and my snakes were still there. That's weird.
Is attack rating working alright? I tried equipping a ring that says it gives me +9 ttack rating but I can't see any change in my stats screen.
Every enemy here has a gimmick intended to beat ranged players, but the only one I'm really scared of is the temptress: I've died like 8 times on this one level and every time, it's because I get rushed by temptresses.
They're hard to notice before they're already in your face because they're small and dark, I can't disengage even with haste 2, and they can take off half my health before dying. Sometimes I get lucky and one of my snakes distracts them and they crumple like paper.
I think they'd be fine as glass cannon mooks if they had less defense. Trying to click on one as she's rushing towards you at sonic speeds is hard enough, but having them proceed to ignore a lot of your attacks that looks dead on gets frustating.
The slug dudes sometimes bug out, teleport and rotate around a point. I can't tell what's causing it.
I got killed by it once, my only death that wasn't from a temptress - a slugman decided to rotate around behind me, told me it was "nothing personnel", and blasted me with lightning. (I ain't even mad, that was amazing).
Pokkan died surprisingly easily, since I saw her coming and had time to think about setting up all my buffs beforehand.
I think your end screen's "time played" counter is busted.
thank you for taking the time to do another complete run. it really warms my heart knowing people are interested enough in the game to play it multiple times! truly the best of feels.
>I can't believe you took out the temptresses but left in the ghoul recolors smdh
i can, she was my least favorite model. had all kinds of issues!!
>Possible bug report: I keep hearing a loud "clank" noise when enemies attack me from the front, and I think it might be because the shield weapon art counts as being constantly active, without costing any mana.
yeah - it's something that i'm trying to get to the bottom of. no clue what causes it, but it can also completely freeze (!!!) your movement. it's awful.
>I hate liches I hate liches I hate liches I hate liches.
reflect projectile is your friend
>Enticing potions aren't very enticing if they start dropping alongside greater health potions that do the same amount of healing with no downside.
they're randomly rolled at the start of each run. there's 4 (i think?) random rolled potions per game. i assume this one was the heal for 60 but drain mana one
>This place really IS full of bugs! I tried unequipping my shield and most of my gear exploded off of me as my mind stat blasted down to -2
i hate inventories so much it's unreal. bugfix coming through as we speak.... i hope
>Every enemy here has a gimmick intended to beat ranged players, but the only one I'm really scared of is the temptress: I've died like 8 times on this one level and every time, it's because I get rushed by temptresses.
yeah - i'm experimenting with some anti-ranged sentiments right now.
the slug-hug-bug is very annoying, but i'll solve it later since i think only like 1% of all players make it that far, and it's usually other devs.
i have a LOT of bugs on my plate it would seem. hoping to cover all of these to make the next DD a lot less frustrating to deal with.
thanks again for the playthroughs and detailed feedback. i will address all these issues (and the ones mentioned previously) ASAP!
>i assume this one was the heal for 60 but drain mana one
Yeah, that's the one.
Anyway, I saw you'd done a hotfix so I thought I might as well try out a quick 2-handed run.
Lower Dungeons
Found a virile axe of shock, so two-handed playthrough is definitely go.
I slept a bit on the weapon art - +20 attack rating is pretty great.
Forgotten Passageway
Ran into a special enemy ghoul that I could barely hit even with the weapon art, so I'm down to 3 health potions. Great.
Found a ring of life steal so this run might just go well though, especially if I pair it with this fast-attack club I found.
And the red knight dopped an axe with more life steal. I wonder if that means I'll regen 2 health per hit?
Lower Dungeons 2
It's still really tough going, but with 2 hp recovered per hit, it's doable.
The gates in the prison bars here are a good size for choke points, for reference.
Found a spear that I'm contractually obligated to try out. It's very short for a two-handed spear, looks kinda goofy.
It's got really good base damage for the attack rate though. I probably should level agility enough for the multi-strike to get more use out of life steal, but dammit, I like axes.
Vedomot was too shy to come out, so I guess I'm moving on up.
Brief Respite
It's nice to ahve the sun cultists be a threat for once.
A problem I'm having with melee combat that I didn't have with ranged is the difficulty in clicking the same dude in a mob of enemies consistently to focus your damage. With ranged you can just shift-click in the general direction, but with melee you actually have to hit the right guy. What's worse, clicking in the general direction like you would with a bow makes your dude do an attack animation, but it's a trap: as far as I can tell you can't actually hit anything by doing so.
Finally died to a boss goat lady.
Conclusion; Once I understood that the W weapon art was more useful as a hit bonus than a damage bonus, I had a much easier time of things.
I'd still say it's a lot weaker than playing with a wand or bow though - even with two really lucky item drops giving me life steal, I didnt' get past the sun cultist area because I simply can't avoid damage like I can with ranged weapons.
>Vedomot was too shy to come out, so I guess I'm moving on up.
was there a bug of some sort? she didn't want to leave or you didn't interact with her? if bug, did you save/load/try again/return to the stairs? any more details about this?
as for the balance, this was merely a bandaid patch since i was fixing something else so i tweaked some numbers. at least you were able to reach the halls, which is probably more than what was possible beforehand.
>What's worse, clicking in the general direction like you would with a bow makes your dude do an attack animation, but it's a trap: as far as I can tell you can't actually hit anything by doing so.
the way this goes is that if the game doesn't think youre interacting with an enemy, you'll just play an attack animation without any intent on hitting things - there isn't a collider check or anything, since i didn't think you'd need one. it means you can't do a pre-swing where an enemy would walk into an attack animation or something. will need to look into this further.
thanks again for playing... again! melee upgrades soon..
she's actually quite a rare spawn. something like 1 in 10 chance to get her. most players will go through the game only seeing her name on the end-screen - they're missing out!
I think this a competently put together Diablo clone. It's fair moody, the combat is OK, it still needs some work. Enemies are a bit spongy. The first floor has some tough enemies considering it's the first level. I would like some more loot as well. I found it kinda hard to see too, walls kept getting in the way of me seeing some enemies and the lack of contrast in the some places didn't help either. A minor thing, but I found it hard to read the introduction menu text, it's very small.
Trying the regular Version first, if it crashes, I'll switch to low-end. My PC must be too bad then. Began at slightly after 8.00.
I like the new Weapon select Screen instead of Floorstuff. Very neat. Wand and Sword for now, I'll go bow later, I wanna try that fire Crossbow. Also no Despair (yet).
Why is Weaponswapping bound to ö? Thats 3 Keys left of Enter and horrid to reach when one Hand is on the Mouse. It seems to me that initially when unlocking new spellwheel slots my Spellwheel cleared itself, no Idea if that just happened occassionally or all the Time tho, or if it was something else. The Spell I got was through my Wand, so maybe that has to do with it. Also it still says every level increases Slots, but you don't gain a slot per point of Int.
Savegame Button stopped working once I entered Floor 2. Couldn't open the Savescreen anymore.
I really like the new Inventory Graphics backdrops and Stuff.
A special Enemy in the Bossfloor, really?
Its still great that Potions come out of Bookstands. On the same Node, most Books I get are shocking Discharge, is there some issue with random algorithm or is this intended?
After alt-tabbing savescreen worked again and was open for some Reason, tried to enter a name, defaulted to autosave, didn't let me save because that one was already in use, tried a different slot and name, opened Stuckscreen, so apparently I was not in menu-controls I guess? Now it doesn't work again. Great Savesystem, huge improvement from last Time.
Nice Cultist Lore. But why does she have a Hitbox blocking my Projectiles when dead?
Went through a Door, got Stuck. Couldn't move into the Room further, couldn't move back out through the Door, only left and right a tiny bit.
At least Autosave/Load seems to work somewhat I guess. Time to redo a bunch of Stuff. Ran into the same Room, same Issue. Guess everything beyond that Point is off-limits to me.
Killed Vedomot, should've seen it coming, I'm stupid. Found a few more Areas I couldn't walk through on the Way, is your Navmesh not generating Properly? Weapon seems Amazing, shame I can't use it, since I can't move past that Door to continue climbing the Tower. Guess this Run ends here. Hopefully the next one will be better.
This Time focusing on Hitchance early on, since I'm hoping the Weapon will be the same, and if it isn't I still have a Stat useful for any build. Run ended right on Floor 1 this Time, same Navigation(?) Issue.
Going to retry the low-end Version, maybe that one actually works. Found Grimspike and bloodlust immediately, got excited, died. Realized my old saves carry over, got curious, and turns out, Nav issues are not a Thing apparently in the low-end version, so that worked out and I can continue my first Run. Great? Could confirm that Weapon stays the same tho, so I'm definetly trying a Run with that Monstrosity. Couldn't resist, tried it real quick, 100% going to run with this after this wand one.
Assuming the Frostpriests are also resistent to magic, this run failed because of the Focus on Wands. Thats fine.
That it crashed my GPU again after starting the next run isn't, but again, thats my trash PC.
This Time Floor 1 is littered with Golems, and I found a no return Stairs, are both of these intended? Also couldn't interact with the Stairs. And no Well. So my 1 Potion isn't going to get me Far. Tons of Golems in melee focused on early Levels really is tough.
Could place a Manapotion on the 2 right Tiles of a Book, and afterwards when picking up a Healthpotion from my Inventory that one disappeared. Happened only once tho.
Killed Shadowstep from the Sewers before the Boss, now I'm locked into walking slowly. Without Potions and slowwalk, died to Boss. Time for another Run.
This Time I can get into the save menu, select and rename a File, but not confirm the saving. Either overwriting or regular saving.
Binding Quickswap to ^ doesn't work, had to use y. And Nav Issues are back. Luckily not in an important Area for now.
And now as I'm finally on a Run for the Demons Weapon she doesn't spawn in lvl3? Rude.
Some Book just randomly turned invisible in my Inventory until I moved it.
Trying to swap my Gloves when I apparently needed their Stats for something (maybe?) Caused me to flow into -6 Dexterity despite leveling only that, which disallowed the use of anything, including Potions. Or at least it showed Potions as red in Inventory. Could still use them through the Hotbar.
With -6 Dex, -10 Defense and -35 Armor the Game surprisingly did not become noticeable different. I still hit and still take roughly the same Amount of Damage as before. Makes me think any Stat but Damage, Mana and Health doesn't actually matter. Died either Way, run was screwed anyhow, due to not being able to equip anything anymore.
Item dropped through the Wall on the other Side.
Finally got that Demons sword again, without wasting too many Points into int.
On loading, not all Walls that were previously visible disappear, and the Loot-Goblin becomes broken.
Found a Handaxe early on that apparently gives 19-28 Damage, but only increased my damage from 1-1 to 2-11 when equipped. Something seems wrong there. IcePriests are ridiculous.
I'm going to take a break, I'll do some more Runs later today or tomorrow or something, will update this Comment and then continue on afterwards when I do.
Wands seem incredibly overpowered. You are ranged and can kite, so no defense Stat leveling necessary, and you can just pump everything into Int to constantly increase your Damage. This also allows you to constantly learn all Spells, so you can abuse them against Enemies that are resistent to ranged Attacks, like those Priests or the Faceless Ones. Compared to Bows who just don't seem to be able to increase in Damage, and especially to melee, which forces you to get hit, requires you to invest constantly into strength to keep Damage up, and into accuracy to actually hit. And of course into defense and health aswell, so you don't just die, since you will be taking damage in melee, as opposed to wanding.
curious. i'll investigate. is ^ the alternate to "6" on your keyboard? that's how it is on US boards.
>And now as I'm finally on a Run for the Demons Weapon she doesn't spawn in lvl3? Rude.
very low chance, only 2-3 people have met her so far. i like random events like this, especially when there are multiple.
>With -6 Dex, -10 Defense and -35 Armor the Game surprisingly did not become noticeable different. I still hit and still take roughly the same Amount of Damage as before. Makes me think any Stat but Damage, Mana and Health doesn't actually matter. Died either Way, run was screwed anyhow, due to not being able to equip anything anymore.
i believe this is caused by autoequipping items from the ground when using a backslot, but i'll need to look further into this
this is a very balanced and playtest ready build, i see :^)
>Wands seem incredibly overpowered.
they're very good, until the lateer parts when enemies are much quicker and have projectile resistant skills and abilities. i'm trying to have different difficulty curves depending on equipment, but it's easier said than done
feel free to stop here, it surely must be very frustrating playing such a broken build. i'll hopefully get it patched up and ready for my next submission
good morning, thanks for playing! there's a lot here so i'll tackle them all now
>Weaposwapping
it's bound to "`" on QWERTY boards, which is right next to "1" and "Q". probably different on Ze German Keyboards, but you're right that it can easily become inconvenient for non-US keyboard owners.
>The Spell I got was through my Wand, so maybe that has to do with it. Also it still says every level increases Slots, but you don't gain a slot per point of Int.
yes, i posted about this a few times. since the weapon gives you the spell access, when you stow the weapon on your back you lose access. the issue here is if you swap back to the wand, the spell isn't re-selected. i'll add that in the future.
>Savegame Button stopped working once I entered Floor 2. Couldn't open the Savescreen anymore.
Saving is awful and I wouldn't wish it upon any man
>A special Enemy in the Bossfloor, really?
I think Bloodguard has been there since DD 46 or so? it's been a while
> is there some issue with random algorithm or is this intended?
pure random, just unlucky rolls. better than getting all Slow books
> Great Savesystem, huge improvement from last Time.
sorry
>Nice Cultist Lore. But why does she have a Hitbox blocking my Projectiles when dead?
oops, i didn't know she did that. will fix.
>Went through a Door, got Stuck. Couldn't move into the Room further, couldn't move back out through the Door, only left and right a tiny bit.
yeah, i had a quick navmesh fix in the new build (as i've read you discovered). will need to work on that more soon
>Killed Vedomot,
you're the second person to have her in your run! how nice. read her name backwards!
>Assuming the Frostpriests are also resistent to magic, this run failed because of the Focus on Wands. Thats fine.
they have evasion, like the Unseen guys. trick is to have a ranged weapon and quickswap to a melee one when they're the only ones left alive
>This Time Floor 1 is littered with Golems, and I found a no return Stairs, are both of these intended? Also couldn't interact with the Stairs. And no Well. So my 1 Potion isn't going to get me Far. Tons of Golems in melee focused on early Levels really is tough.
not sure what you mean?
Floor 1 being the starting floor, so golems are Maulers? No return stairs? what is this referencing? And the next-level stairs were uninteractable? not sure what's going on here.
>Could place a Manapotion on the 2 right Tiles of a Book, and afterwards when picking up a Healthpotion from my Inventory that one disappeared. Happened only once tho.
oh, an inventory bug? it's been a long time since i saw one. i assume this might have something to do with the other issues - most likely something broke when recreating your character or clearing your inventory, which messed everything else up because spaghetti code and unity exceptions don't gel well
>Killed Shadowstep from the Sewers before the Boss, now I'm locked into walking slowly. Without Potions and slowwalk, died to Boss. Time for another Run.
stuck walking slowly? Shadowstep is a random (procgenned) boss, i assume with a +Cold attack modifier. did the cold slow never fade away? strange..
>This Time I can get into the save menu, select and rename a File, but not confirm the saving. Either overwriting or regular saving.
I hate saving so much it's unreal
thanks for playing and for the detailed review. as i mentioned before, this build needed (a lot) more time in the oven. i hope the next, more stable iteration fixes these problems.
I ment a random generated tough enemy, not Bloodguard. On the Floor with the first Boss tho, which means 2 Potionchugging fights in a row without a chance to refill.
>Floor 1 being the starting floor, so golems are Maulers? No return stairs? what is this referencing? And the next-level stairs were uninteractable? not sure what's going on here.
Maulers, yes. I was assuming they only spawned after the first Boss, which got me confused. With the Stairs I mean the No-return-possible ones, which probably are the ones you're coming down from into the Dungeon in the first Place. Which would make Sense if they always spawned into the room you start out in, not in some other room midway. Thats waht got me confused.
Next Run, this Time with a lighting lifesteal Wand, going very smoothly so far.
Skeleton Pits are really nice, downed Samsara, got some nice Equipment. For some Reason my Chest disappeared in between. Maybe I was accidentally playing around with equipment, lost my Stats, got it unequipped and dropped tho, don't know, too lazy to go back and look.
The Breeding Grounds generated with a Room that didn't have a Wall. I couldn't walk outside or anything, but it looked weird.
Found a completely invisible and untargetable Enemy in Breeding Grounds 2. After loading, every Enemy is now tiny and apparently deals a lot more Damage then before. Paladins are normal size tho, maybe it fixed with getting in a new Level.
The after-paladin Level is massive. Here's the Game End Screen. Wands proved superior in the End. As for Equipment and Stats, Paladin shield, lifesteal Wand, nothing special elsewhere, just generic +1 int or something. 22 Const level 5 or 6 times or so to get to 22 for the Breastplate, other then that, only int, up to 50.
and congrats on beating the game! you and TGIG dev are the only two players who beat the game this DD, despite all the errors
I'd love it if you could send me the Playerlog files (C:/User/You/Appdata/LocalLow/osur/ToK.20/) so i can investigate all these reported issues. thanks again for playing, i hope you had at least some fun despite the issues
When I switch from wand to sword and back does it reset my spell wheel and selected spell? Also when I die it reset. Also when I switch between loadouts I and II it resets.
Why can't I use the same shield in two loadouts with different weapons?
I'm confused by how to cast spells. Edit: oh ok it's right click.
I was watching a streamer play and he was kiting enemies. Am I supposed to do that? I don't know how to run away and attack at the same time.
I would like to be able to stack or reorder the potions on my quickbar.
I picked up a spellbook I didn't have the stats to learn. I right clicked it anyways just to see what would happen, and my character dropped it. But I had 'right click equips' set so I don't think he should have dropped it.
Overall I suck at this! I only made it to the boss once and just died a bunch. Am I not understanding something? The game does look very good and feels polished.
thanks for playing and taking the time to write out your thoughts!
yea, it's clear i need a tutorial. i just need to figure out how to make it *immersive*.
>When I switch from wand to sword and back does it reset my spell wheel and selected spell? Also when I die it reset. Also when I switch between loadouts I and II it resets.
yeah, as i mentioned in PAT's comment, it's something i need to figure out. the idea is that the spell is granted by the wand, so when the wand isn't equipped (it's on your back, thus doesnt give you benefits) then you lose the spell. re-equipping it should return the spell, though, that makes sense. i'll need to figure out how to make that work in the future.
>Why can't I use the same shield in two loadouts with different weapons?
that would be an interesting mechanic - to only switch ONE hand. perhaps in the future.
>I was watching a streamer play and he was kiting enemies. Am I supposed to do that? I don't know how to run away and attack at the same time.
if you want to! you can hold shift to attack without moving, the idea being you move, hold shift + click, move, etc. there are multiple ways to play, though. you can facetank enemies (but it's more dangerous). the idea is that melee is hard at the start, but easy later, while ranged starts off easy but gets hard
>I would like to be able to stack or reorder the potions on my quickbar.
a purposeful design decision to not be able to stack, but a reorder might be interesting. good idea.
>I picked up a spellbook I didn't have the stats to learn. I right clicked it anyways just to see what would happen, and my character dropped it. But I had 'right click equips' set so I don't think he should have dropped it.
an interesting idea i didn't think about. i'll give that a try and see how it goes. usually i like having right-click-to-drop since it allows for very quick inventory clearing if needed, but i understand your thoughts here.
>Overall I suck at this! I only made it to the boss once and just died a bunch. Am I not understanding something? The game does look very good and feels polished.
It's a hard game! it's meant for people who played old ass arpgs and thought they were too easy. either way, i'm very glad to hear you gave it multiple tries and i hope you enjoyed your time playing. i'll try and get all of these ideas implemented or at least prototyped by next DD.
thanks again for playing and for the thoughtful feedback!
that would be an interesting mechanic - to only switch ONE hand. perhaps in the future.
Well it's not that I specifically want to switch one hand. Let's say I'm at the middle or late game and I'm fully geared and I have some magic gear and some melee gear. But there still might be a few pieces of gear that are great with either build. But the way you have it right now, I can't have those in both builds.
Despite the video being choppy, I didn't notice any choppiness while playing. The last update really made a huge difference!
I had difficulties with the controls. I wanted to find the key to quickswitch between both weapons, but I didn't find it. I changed one of the binds that looked like it would work, but nothing seemed to happen. Switching between the loadouts removed my spell from the right click. Not having the martial arts on the screen and having to memorize them is difficult.
I found a nice axe, but it made me took too much damage so I had to switch back to my default setup.
I played mostly by kiting, like last time. Maybe the martial arts help for melee builds, but that should be introduced in some way because I cannot mindlessly spam left click like in other diablo-likes. It looks more involved. Ranged attack on the other hand are intuitive and super safe. How does a melee build work?
Maybe I missed something, but is there an use for trash loot? Is there a place to sell it or convert it into something useful? Part of the fun in diablo-like games is being able to hoard items to sell for pennies.
If you left click a monster while holding shift and using a melee weapon, the character wont attack. Maybe because I was clicking on an enemy out of range?
That last monster healed himself. I wasn't able to tell until I realized he stopped doing the ability if I missed an attack. And also drained my mana, which sucks badly. The fountain did give me an ability to heal mana but I discovered it by pure chance and even then the knight used his mana burn as soon as I had mana. I wasn't able to click fast enough in the mana heal, then switch to damage spell, then spam the spell and repeat all while healing myself. This feels like a puzzle enemy, there is nothing wrong with them as long as the player knows they are facing a puzzle. Otherwise it feels like a hopeless situation.
I will try another run later this week because this one was too short. The game has a playable framerate (like 300% increase!) which makes playing it much easier.
30 minutes long! thanks a bunch for doing this. i'll be sure to watch it all shortly
really quick:
"`" (the traditional valve console key) is the weapon swap key. i should've probably been more clear with that. a tooltip when mousing over this in the menu (or having the info show up in the textbox) will do the trick, i hope
>Switching between the loadouts removed my spell from the right click.
since it's a item-granted spell, and you're no longer equipping the item that gives you this spell, it gets unequipped. you're right that it should get reequipped when swapped back, though! 'll look into it
>Maybe I missed something, but is there an use for trash loot? Is there a place to sell it or convert it into something useful? Part of the fun in diablo-like games is being able to hoard items to sell for pennies.
Only the Golden Goblin object, that eats your crap loot and spits out goot loot - but that's later in the game. I need to make an interactable object similar to that for the early game
>If you left click a monster while holding shift and using a melee weapon, the character wont attack. Maybe because I was clicking on an enemy out of range?
Correct, holding shift prevents all movement
>This feels like a puzzle enemy, there is nothing wrong with them as long as the player knows they are facing a puzzle. Otherwise it feels like a hopeless situation.
Correct, he is! Man-fight him and try your best, he cries like a baby if you hold your ground and chug a potion or two..
thanks again for playing and recording! this video will be invaluable for me! i hope you had fun as well
i finished watching your video, you've given me great insight in how you think with this and it's very appreciated. you also showed me a bug with auto-picking up items when you're on your backslot.
i also believe i will need a lot more hints for the Bloodguard, since it's not particularly clear how you're meant to face him, and he doesn't ask you to Stop Running nearly enough.
There are some quality of life features from Diablo it certainly wouldn't hurt to copy. The obvious stuff like "clickable weapon text boxes when you hold alt" and "enemy health bars", but also some things like 'when the inventory or stat screens are open, shift the camera so the player is focused in the middle of the remaining side of the screen'. That helps gameplay be less obstructed even with a menu open. An often rather tricky thing to do without some exploits / glitches is to make sure equipping/unequipping items with +stats like +hp preserves your % HP instead of absolute value, so putting on a +2 max hp item makes me go from 60/60 -> 62/62, instead of 60/62. Of course, lots of ways to screw up the coding on that. Could use something on the control setter to warn/stop you if you map multiple functions to the same hotkey.
Also another very important one I noticed- left click lock-on! When you click on an enemy in a diablo game, it will act as if you continue to hold that click aimed on that enemy, even if the enemy moves. For ranged attacks you'll stand and keep shooting at it no matter where it moves, for melee attacks you'll follow it if it gets out of range. That becomes very noticeable and necessary when you have enemies that are moving around erratically instead of attacking, like the goat cultists
Overall looks great! didn't notice too many bugs. When I died and restarted my minimap wouldn't show
thanks for the feedback and i'm happy you had fun! a lot of the QoL things you mentioned are on purpose - i don't like healthbars, i don't want the player to cheese their health with +hp items, i want players to have items in their inventory instead of checking them from the ground, and so on
i understand these are probably annoying to most people, but these are design decisions i like and will try to make work somehow
>Left click lock on
that's a great idea and it's currently on my To-Do pile. i'll start it off as a toggleable option and see where it goes from there!
thanks again for playing and taking the time to write out feedback!
I can only get to level 5 before inevitably getting filtered. Trying to go back from there transports me to the wrong staircase (it will place you next to staircase on level 4 going down to even lower level).
Loading times can be quite long. Correction, it's probably softlocked on "Returning to Lower Dungeons 2" while trying to go back from higher level.
Loading can be quite weird. After dying I picked Try Again and it started all over in another level, so I loaded from autosave and it teleported me to a different coordinate of that level.
I think I'm starting to understand the game more. Instead of comparing it to Diablo 2 it probably resembles Diablo 1 quite closely (which I never played), and suddenly everything clicks. Because of that mindset a lot about the game feels underwhelming, like loot, skills and movement speed.
In such a dark game it would be nice to see a hub area to lay back and resupply.
thanks for the feedback! sorry about some of the level weirdness.
unsure of what you meant by the Try Again issues. By another level, do you mean another floor (ex. Lower Dungeons 2 or Upper Halls, etc) or another level as in the map regenerated itself and you start the game once more except with another layout? if it's the former, that's quite concerning
there is a hub level, but it's quite deep in! there are still some pacing issues i'm trying to figure out, since constant fighting can get quite tiresome.
the game is very heavily inspired by Diablo 1 and the games of that era before D2 took over the world. so the pacing and speed is all based around slow movement.
also, which build did you play? perhaps the issues were resolved when i fixed some save/load issues this morning.
thanks again for the feedback and i hope the level issues didn't detract too much from the experience! it's clear that this build probably needed more time in the oven, the next one will be more stable i swear
As for Try Again, the minimap was wiped and my spells were not there (I'm not sure about other stuff, I didn't check), so I assume it was like a new game.
The build was from yesterday morning.
Diablo 2 is one of the very few games where I don't mind starting in a hub area - usually I prefer a good gameplay kick off instead of overwhelming amount of NPCs. I need to think about it some more.
This time I played it melee only, no spells at all or ranged weapons (bouncing back projectiles still counts as melee...right?). This is the only run I've played on this version so when I talk about a lot of balancing things it'll be compared to when I played bows and spells last version. Played surprisingly well with a trackpad. So besides the bugs I showed before:
I encountered the increased attack speed bug a third time, this time I hadn't reloaded or died in probably over an hour. So maybe its not related to reloading, but I still think its multistrike related.
Thought block was pretty bad at first and should maybe be changed to something more passive. But as I played more I think its fine actually, extremely useful vs bosses and single enemies but vs multiple its better to just keep swinging. Wish you could always interrupt any action (like mid swing) with a block though. Some enemies could have longer windup animations I think, like the big gray guys with clubs. Felt like their damage comes later than when the swing connects too?
Not sure if I was just hallucinating it but sometimes it felt like you got damaged out of nowhere, like walking close to the cultists (witches? the early women enemies... I did play on a small laptop screen though, maybe I missed something. "Think" I got damaged by fireballs even though I reflected them.
Maybe change the color of the water in the fountains to a lighter blue. I'm probably damaged from Diablo but right now it looks like a mana pool to me.
When you have an item that gives you stats to allow you to wear another item and you take it off it gets thrown on the ground even though you have space for it in the inventory. Would be nice if it was put into the inventory instead, or turn "red" and inactive and you'd have to unequip it yourself.
Enemies can hit you slightly around corners, even if you can't see them.
Is there a sound for opening a trapped chest? If there is, it might be too similar to the regular one.
Can't pick up potions from the ground to the cursor when the inventory is full.
Magic items feel a bit weak overall and not that different from regular items. Mostly in the early, mid game. Maybe decreased stat range for items? An example, the masterwork armor with increased defense has less def than another without it.
The resistance modifiers seem really low, like getting an item with %3 lightning res. (are there lightning enemies early game?) isn't very fun. Don't think the game would go on for so long that stacking resistances would be a problem?
I want more modifiers! :) Mana leech is very strong but it might be too common? Maybe having it drop on melee weapons be a higher chance than others would be a nice balance thing.
New enemies are great.
Death animations on enemies are great, although the snake ladies could be gorier. I wish enemies had much more pronounced flinch animations though, I want arms flailing, heads snapping, blood flying on every hit!
Charge attack sound for the snakes is weird, placeholder? Charge seemed very weak though.
Items on the ground disappear when loading from the main menu. Corpses too, but maybe that doesn't matter much.
I didn't get a single amulet the whole game, :(
Strength as a stat seems a bit too weak, only gives you increased damage every 5 points compared to 2 for other stats is a huge difference. Doesn't seem like a lot of items require much strength either. Intelligence seems like by far a better stat, gives you some benefit every stat and also every 5, makes you able to read more books, many (for me it seemed like most, had the same bracers forever because I couldn't find any without int req, but maybe I was just unlucky) armor pieces and even melee weapons and shields require intelligence.
Two handed weapons don't seem worth it at all, I wanted to use them but they all looked so much worse than going one handed and shield I didn't. Not really higher damage than one handed and much slower, you get less stats too, less weapon arts.
Playing melee only was much, much harder than going ranged. Maybe you don't really intend people to play like that, but still. Last DD I played I don't think I died once with bow and spells, this time I did many times. Probably why I encountered all the save and load bugs heh. All in all the early game feels way too hard melee, most of the times I was at 0-1 health potions and had to play extremely carefully luring out single enemies and try to kite them (often you can get a free hit in and run away when they run up on you without attacking). Some times I pretty much had to try the same fights several times til I got a health drop from an enemy. I think the big problem is that you can't really avoid having your health drain when fighting melee, even with using block which won't really work when fighting multiple enemies and often you'd be better just punching them. In Diablo 1 you'd abuse doorways a lot to only fight a single enemy at a time but you can't really do that here (I'm not saying you should be able to just that it made melee easier there). I think around the burrows or so the difficulty playing melee starts to get a lot better, the golden goblins seem vital to that playstyle though so you can get good weapons. I used them both for new weapons and used them all the time. I don't think I died after getting to skeleton town, around the burial grounds I was swimming in potions and had my entire inventory filled with them. The drop rate for them felt too high around and after that. When I reached the very last area I was so strong I breezed through it. Fighting and bouncing back projectiles at the same time was really fun though, melee felt strong around mid to late game.
Making melee better early game is hard without breaking the balance for other playstyles I think. One idea would be to have some more starting items to choose from, so if you want to go full melee from the start maybe you could pick between a shield as well. Maybe a piece of armor too? Increasing the drop rate of health potions early game could be a good idea overall, doubt it would hurt to have the early game be easier for all. Could make it harder as the game progresses.
Some levelups felt really long, like 8->9. I carried around some items for ages until I could level up and use them.
Not sure if you care about this part but not using the same seed for per character for rng makes it really susceptible to save scumming. I didn't do it this run (well except for when I died and had to reload) but if you really wanted to you could for example save before breaking every crate and reloading until you get a potion or when opening a a magic chest to get something you want, etc. But again I don't know if it actually matters.
I'm sure I had more to say but I forgot/didn't write it down. I had a great time playing though. I think the amount of playtime will be pretty good in the final version with the last areas. More monster variety would be great too of course but I get why its not that simple. Adding a hardcore option alongside the despair difficulty would be a fun "free" thing to add for us masochists too. Can't wait to see more great things from you. Ending stats:
thanks for the massive feedback and all the bug reports!
i'm going to first fix everything, but afterwards i'll end up using many of your ideas. i especially like giving a shield as a potential starter equipment.
i also fixed the attack speed bug this morning with the last hotfix thanks to your reports.
also, congrats on being the only person thus far to have beaten the game! world record any % :^)
to answer some questions:
trapped chest sound is the normal sound but heavily pitched down
>When you have an item that gives you stats to allow you to wear another item and you take it off it gets thrown on the ground even though you have space for it in the inventory. Would be nice if it was put into the inventory instead, or turn "red" and inactive and you'd have to unequip it yourself.
i'll have the inventory placement implemented, that's better than it dropping on ground.
>Two handed weapons don't seem worth it at all, I wanted to use them but they all looked so much worse than going one handed and shield I didn't. Not really higher damage than one handed and much slower, you get less stats too, less weapon arts.
I think i need to buff the Attack Rating for them. missing multiple times with a low AR weapon and low attack speed is brutal
>Not sure if I was just hallucinating it but sometimes it felt like you got damaged out of nowhere, like walking close to the cultists (witches? the early women enemies... I did play on a small laptop screen though, maybe I missed something. "Think" I got damaged by fireballs even though I reflected them.
I've heard someone else had this in the halls of pain, will investigate
thanks again for the detailed feedback and all the bug reports, i truly appreciate all your help
I wont really be talking about everything here since I don't like repeating what other people said. Graphics and sound improved a lot and even the game balance seems more fair than in the previous version.
I played "ToK.20_windows", so there is a good chance you already changed or fixed most of the issue, but I'm going to post them anyway.
First suggestion. It would be nice if you setup some kind of online changelog. Even just for demo days, so people can see what bugs are already reported or fixed.
First is the broken wall bug. As you have said, this probably breaks your save since I couldn't load it after seeing that bug. Autosave for that same level worked fine however. This is a different spot than in the video, but it is the same wall orientation.
Another save problem, I loaded level 4 save and this happened:
Couldn't move or do anyhing. ALT+F4, loaded the save again and it worked.
Next list are either small anoyances or minor bugs.
Items can drop behind walls (By the way, the bugged wall is in the red circle since I forgot to put up the automap in the previous screenshot).
Doors are very anoying. It's nice that they open when you walk into them, but you can still close them, which got me hurt quite a lot of times when I wanted to walk and I closed them instead. I would suggest you either remove the ability to close them completely, since enemies can open them no problem, or you make enemies incapable of opening them and they would have to break them down first, so there would be actual purpose to closing them. As they are now, they just cause pain.
It would be nice if I could open the spell book by clicking on the spell slot next to the mana orb.
Clicking doesn't count as a "press any key" on the loading screen.
Can't drink potions from the inventory by right clicking them, even if I enable the "right click to equip" in the options menu. This got me killed in the prison encounter because I wanted to use potions straight from the inventory, but was dropping them instead.
Enemies pop in \ out of existence instantly when they enter \ leave your field of vision. Would be nice if you added some kind quick fade in \ out effect.
Adding impact \ miss sound effects for ranged weapons and probaly footsteps or more idle sounds for enemies.
That's pretty much all I noticed. I didn't play through the entire game this time, since I have to fix my roof, but It's safe thing to say that the game improved a lot since the last time I played. Keep it up.
Playing this right now. I'm hoping to actually finish all of your content this time, now that I finally have some time to relax.
The art is great, music is comfy and very fitting, animations are great. Enemies are very satisfying to kill. Difficulty feels just right - really hard (for me) but not unfair. Every encounter feels tense. It's nice.
I discovered magic entirely by accident. I picked the sword and staff as my starting weapons, but didn't realize the staff gave me access to a spell until I looked through the menus. Fireball is cool and satisfying to use. Haven't used any others yet.
The sound skellies make when you kill them is perfect. Hearing the crunch is like music to my ears.
I moved onto floor 3 and alt tabbed to write this. When I tabbed back in, I think the game was still loading, because Towerguy wasn't anywhere on my screen and I couldn't move or open the map or anything. The usual loading screen wasn't visible. After a while the "Press any key to continue" screen popped up and everything started working again.
The only nitpick I have (had?) was that the map didn't have an opacity slider, but you or somebody else informed me in the thread that +/- works for that. I'm still playing through it, so if I have any useful feedback I'll edit this post. It's genuinely really fun though, and it's hard to find any serious faults. I'd buy it.
Edit 1: Trying to reproduce and record the loading screen bug. Saves also weren't working, but I died and restarted and now saves and the loading screen(s) are both working again. I'm gonna keep trying to break it to see if I can get a recording though. Also, I used a potion during a loading screen while pressing every button on my keyboard to see what I could break.
thank you for playing and for the write up. i'm glad our levels don't suck this DD :^)
>I moved onto floor 3 and alt tabbed to write this. When I tabbed back in, I think the game was still loading, because Towerguy wasn't anywhere on my screen and I couldn't move or open the map or anything. The usual loading screen wasn't visible. After a while the "Press any key to continue" screen popped up and everything started working again.
never heard of this before, i'll jot this down and try to replicate this. since you say Towerguy (stealing this) wasn't on your screen, I assume you mean the default (not the loading) screen was on. was it the screen of the last level, or the screen of the level you just loaded in to? perhaps a loading screen just didn't load properly in general - if it happens again then that might be the case.
i'm very glad to hear you are having fun and i hope you enjoy your time. there is a stopper at the end of the Halls of Pain, but the "end" of the demo occurs when you defeat the quest enemy you'll hear about after many more levels. feel free to stop at the stopper-prompt (where you get asked for the password)
I'm trying to break it again so I can record what happened, but so far I've been unable to do so after dying. Saves weren't working for me with the broken loading screen run either. Everything works now on a new file. So far I've had no luck with breaking it after that run ended, but if I manage to break it again I'll record it and send the footage your way. Also, just wanted to say that the music in the halls of pain is extra kino.
Pretty cool! Reminds me a lot of the first Diablo game.
The game makes a great first impression, with it's animated loading screens and nice 3D models. Loved the atmosphere and the music.
Just one complaint: when you are asked with "pressing any key" if you press S or I the game will show the stats menu or the item menu right from the get go.
It's also quite hard, I died a lot, but I'm not too much into this kind of games so that might be on me.
thanks for the feedback! glad you've enjoyed it and had a bug-free experience. hoping the performance was OK as well, since i heard many devs had issues in that regard.
it's gotta be said that this is probably not my kind of game, cos I found the combat to be a bit of a chore and comparing loot I didn't find terribly thrilling.
presentation is pretty good though, audio's very nice and it's got a cohesive if slightly low-quality and slimy art style, no complaints there.
the bloodstained knight or whatever, does it have a healing ability? I fought it with a bow for many many seconds, perhaps even minutes, and it didn't die. I died instead, of boredom and of suspecting that it was still at full health.
I ended up getting through the whole game on my second attempt though, up until the little AGDG password check thing. Took an hour and then some. spent the whole time somewhat convinced that I was playing the game wrong, since my method of defeating enemies was usually to kite them until they died, which is kind of long.
It was a while until I figured out how to use magic, and I still haven't figured out how to access this 'Spell Wheel' I've heard to much about.
The stairs at the start of the game go up, and yet it is implied you came down through them? Did protagonist start their adventure by going from the second floor of the ToK down to the first!?!?!? inexcusable plot hole, it should be a staircase going downward, or a great doorway or something.
I like lifesteal, and the fact that getting full health when levelling up is effectively lifesteal. also got some lifesteal items which may have elongated my survivability to levels far beyond what I'd earned
thanks for the detailed feedback and the playtest! i appreciate you sticking through a game where you might not necessarily love the genre
to answer your queries:
yes the Bloodguard heals - he is a big fan of healing if you try and kite him, but he's a pushover if you stand your ground and hit him (preferably with a melee weapon) the spellwheel is Q, i really should have something to tell the players what keybinds are by default while ingame the lore is that you took the dungeon path, which is less populated, by going down some stairs. now you have to go up them again! i'm glad to hear that you didn't encounter any bugs or other major issues, and i will look into making this less boring and kite dependent in the future
Comments
I know it's a bit late, but finally got around to play this game again as I did been checking it out in previous DDs. Played 20.1 version and my playthroughs were mostly focused on a spellcaster build.
Game looks great as ever, and the enemy variety is great. I only noticed a couple of issues:
- Loading a manual save after dying seems to be constantly put me in a black void, always had to go to the main menu and load from there.
- Sometimes my attacks went through enemies, and I don't mean the missing because of attack rating kind, but the projectile goes through the enemy like there's no collision kind. Mainly happened with the skeleton mages who cast ice spike, but can't say if it's intended or a bug.
- Sometimes projectiles reflected by the enemy's shield slow down and just hover in place for a while before disappearing.
- Enemy attacks seem weird and random. Sometimes enemies swing as soon as they get close, sometimes they just stand there for a bit. Pokan herself bugged out of me and just stood still after going up to my face, letting me wail on her until she died.
- I went to Pokan's place, then back to Breeding Grounds 2 for some cleanup, and after that every time I went back to Pokan's area the game kept saying I was entering Breeding Grounds 2.
Apart from issues, my feelings about the balance and general gameplay:
- Potions that deplete your mana are bad, awful, terrible and worse than useless since I actually have to keep in mind which potions to avoid instead of being able to pick up everything. If they do have to be in the game it'd be better if their name reflect that they are tainted or something similar so that it's clear from a glance that they're a downgrade from regular potions instead of being called something like "wondrous" (though I have to admit, I genuinely forgot what they are actually called since I avoided them like a plague from moment one).
- Enemies that are faster than you are generally a pain to fight. I didn't find a good way to kite them - spells that slow down enemies (like the ice spell or the area one) don't last long enough, as by the time I made some distance and turned back around to attack them they were already over and the enemies ran up to my face a moment later. This combined with the fact that enemies in general are very happy to cancel their attack animation to chase you (which yourself can't do) made them kind of a resource sink, which can suck if the game decides that you're not going to find any potions for the rest of the area.
- Speaking of resources and potions, mana in general is very inconsistent. Sometimes I had no problem keeping myself topped off, other times I had to go through almost all of the level with no mana because I couldn't find any potions. Items that steal/replenish it can help IF you can find any, though ones that give a flat recovery begin to fall off in usefulness eventually. This is genuinely a shame because the spells are realy nice and fun to use with a lot of variety, but it feels like the game doesn't want me to use them and I'm left at the RNG's mercy whether I can or not.
- And speaking of spells, currently Intelligence feels like a noob trap and pretty much not worth putting any points into. I only put two so that I can learn the first level of fireball (so that I can cast it even if I switch off of my starting wand), but even that ended up as a waste as Int received from gear workts just as fine. Leveling up spells does not seem to worth it either - you get twice as damage for twice as much mana cost. Considering that you have to spend precious points to be even able to do that, you could put those points into Mind instead: not only it increases your base attack damage (for times when you're out of mana and can't even use any spells, see previous point) since it increases your maximum MP you'll be able to do more damage before you're depleted as you'll be able to cast spells more times. Hell, I'd argue that lower level spells are actually better than higher level spells: since casting is relatively fast, your damage output is basically the same whether you cast one lvl2 or two lvl1 spells, but you can split two spells for two targets and won't waste MP on any overkill damage. In case your attack misses (because you screwed up or the enemy moved away) you also waste less MP, and as most of the mana recovery is a flat amount you'll be able to cast lower level spells more frequently too because of their lower MP requirement. As for it's effect on the quickslot wheel, I had no problem just opening the spellbook mid-fight with M and changing my active spell there.
- The way there is no HP bar and enemies indicate visually of how hurt they are is a cool idea and I like it, and generally works for the most part, but not for bosses I feel like. It's not gradual enough for them considering how tanky they are and a lot of times I had no idea how well I'm doing against them, and was praying they'd die before I do. Bosses in general are not really standing out from the other enemies - most of the time I only realized I'm fighting one because they didn't die as fast as their crowd or because suddenly I'm receiving three times as much health from their attacks that I would do from a regular enemy.
- Leveling up slows down a lot as you get more levels, which I wouldn't normally mention but I kept having the feeling that the areas level up faster than I do even with clearing out the whole place to get all the XP I possibly can.
All of the complaining aside, even with it's frustrations the game is still quite fun. And last but not least, here's my endgame stats (I did encounter Vedomot in an earlier run but alas that one had to be abandoned due to bad stat distribution):
thanks for playing and for the detailed write up! it's never too late for feedback
>Loading a manual save after dying seems to be constantly put me in a black void, always had to go to the main menu and load from there.
if this happened during your last playthrough, could you please send me Unity's playerlog .txt file(s)? it'll be in C:/Users/You/AppData (hidden directory)/LocalLow/osur/Tower of Kalemonvo (you can just put it on a text hosting site). i thought ver .21 would've fixed this by now, but there's always another bug lying in wait it would seem.
>Sometimes my attacks went through enemies
Faceless and Lich enemies have evasion, which is a % chance for ranged attacks to phase through them. For the faceless, their transparency sortof helps imply that, but for liches there's no visual indication of this so a lot of players were left thinking it was a bug. I'll look into adding some feedback to this.
>Sometimes projectiles reflected by the enemy's shield slow down and just hover in place for a while before disappearing.
weird. i'll check it out
>Enemy attacks seem weird and random. Sometimes enemies swing as soon as they get close, sometimes they just stand there for a bit.
yeah - there's an attempt to make their attacks inconsistent (random base attack time). they also reduce that waiting period if they detect they're being kited. for Pokan to stop entirely is a new thing to hear.
>Potions that deplete your mana are bad, awful, terrible and worse than useless
potions that aren't the main 3 (+hp, +mp and +both) are randomized, with random name/icon/effect chosen as soon as you start a new game. sometimes a potion with a "good" icon and a "good" name (like a purple potion named Angelic) would actually have an effect that's awful for mages (-full mana). i sort of want to have some potions that are weak for one playstyle but strong for another, there's more balance required in this part.
> Enemies that are faster than you are generally a pain to fight. I didn't find a good way to kite them - spells that slow down enemies (like the ice spell or the area one) don't last long enough, as by the time I made some distance and turned back around to attack them they were already over and the enemies ran up to my face a moment later. This combined with the fact that enemies in general are very happy to cancel their attack animation to chase you (which yourself can't do) made them kind of a resource sink, which can suck if the game decides that you're not going to find any potions for the rest of the area.
they're a pain if you're a ranged character! that's the intention. the fact that you haven't gotten any resources makes this more annoying, though. there isn't anything to replenish with after one fountain in the Burrows, which makes BG1, BG2 and Lost Corridors a gauntlet, which i think sucks. I'll add some tools in the Paladin camp and see how that works.
same thing with the mana intake. i need a bit more tools for the player to use in case RNG isn't working out
>And speaking of spells, currently Intelligence feels like a noob trap and pretty much not worth putting any points into.
.21 changed stats. before that (during DD), Int would *also* give the + 1-1 wand damage. I just changed that so mind does that instead, since mind only gave mana beforehand. you're right that spell scaling is a bit weird, i'll need to slightly buff +lvls on spells.
>LVLs
I noticed that as well. i'll slightly lower level requirements for higher levels.
Congrats on making it through the end! not too many people can say they did that. thanks again for the detailed feedback, this will prove very useful in the days to come where i'll need to do a lot of balance changes.
For the loading bug, I added the save as well, since I was able to consistently reproduce it: simply go back to Pokan's place and get yourself killed, then load the save again (the file is deleted after one download, so let me know if you got or need me to reupload it):
https://file.io/iLcB3XY84tpG
For Int being changed now makes a lot of sense since I vaguely remember leveling it in older builds and was wondering why it seemed such a bad choice now. For the potions yeah, I guess if I weren't so strapped for resources getting healed for the cost of your mana could be an interesting tradeoff, but as it is now they were the most annoying part of the demo for me if I'm honest. Good luck with further development and looking forward for the updates!
thanks for the save and bug report, i was able to resolve the issue! i'll be sure to also take a better look at balancing potion effects and drop rates
I finally got to playing this.
Observations:
* Gameplay is fun, I could burn my eyelids to this
* Visuals are great, light and shadows in particular, really well done. I dig the UI too.
* It kinda make my GPU run at full when other bigger games don't, perhaps there is some optimization to be done on how it loads stuff?
Possible improvements:
* Most enemies don't give any sign of being struck (except for becoming bathed in blood), ranged special animations seem to go through even if they hit sometimes so it would be cool to give some visual input on this.
* Drop rates seem somewhat low (and this is a problem given the game has no vendors)
* Named or bosses could use an hp bar
* MORE BREAKABLE STUFF PLEASE
thanks for taking the time to play and review!
>It kinda make my GPU run at full when other bigger games don't, perhaps there is some optimization to be done on how it loads stuff?
yeah - my game sometimes embodies the "western gamedev meme" of having a giant filesize and running like dogwater. if you've played the latest build it'll be better, but there's still more work to be done
> Most enemies don't give any sign of being struck (except for becoming bathed in blood), ranged special animations seem to go through even if they hit sometimes so it would be cool to give some visual input on this.
noted, working on this
>Drop rates seem somewhat low (and this is a problem given the game has no vendors)
that's sortof the point - i just need to tailor it so that it doesn't lead to boring "i havent gotten a drop in 2 hours" gameplay. the idea is that drops are low, items are plentiful and you may not get what you want the most, but since there's no town you have to go with what you can scrounge.
>Named or bosses could use an hp bar
I don't want this in order to make these bosses feel more threatening. how many hp does this guy have? how many fireballs will he take? no idea, but he's coming straight at you!
> MORE BREAKABLE STUFF PLEASE
it will be done
thanks again for the feedback, it's much appreciated.
>I don't want this in order to make these bosses feel more threatening. how many hp does this guy have? how many fireballs will he take? no idea, but he's coming straight at you!
Well then its working as intended! I got some samurai guy chasing me forever haha. I'll give it another try later to see if I can overcome those bosses with another build. Keep up the good work!
will be streaming ( and attempting to beat ) on weds may 17.
/obligatory comment to get me off the wall of shame
i'll be there
I recorded playing games with commentary, and your game is one of them.
Here's the link to the whole DD50 folder:
https://mega.nz/folder/GclCXISL#gwE9S1kRTbe6amYLH2RiYA
Melee too OPmelee is simply too powerful this patch, needs a nerf :^)
Little late I know, but I gave it a go, took some notes.
Lower Dungeons
I like the new starting weapon selection
Ranged still feels way stronger than melee, but I'll try going for melee.
I can't help but notice that my sword looks different on my back than it does in my hand.
Found a two handed axe already, guess I'll try two-handing.
Thought: Two-handed weapons should get a bigger bonus to damage from your strength than one-handed weapons.
Axe isn't great. The slow attack speed means it's just worse than the sword, which might hit enemies and keep them from hitting you back.
But killing the cult apprentices in one hit and the big mauler dudes in two is pretty satisfying.
I miss being able to hit while standing still with the axe by holding shift.
It LOOKS like it should work fine, but I'm pretty sure it's impossible to hit anything by clicking into the air, and he usually refuses to attack if I click an enemy.
Forgotten Passageway
Managed to take out the chaos warrior quite handily with a club, a shield, and 4 healing potions.
Lower Dungeons 2
It's nice to be able to switch quickly to my melee weapon for when there's a single invisible fucker.
But the burning floating skull fireball hell remains a job for the bow, and if there's more than one melee enemy, I'm gonna take a lot of damage fighting them in melee, so kiting it is.
It's kinda annoying how the skulls can hide behind walls and pop you. I really wish enemies would get an outline when behind a wall or something. You already have an outline for when you hover the mouse over them that ignores walls. Please, man, I just wanna see the things my dude should have in plain view.
From a melee perspective, the width of the doors becomes a huge issue. Like, back in Diablo 1, you had one-character wide doors, so you could use them as choke points to avoid getting surrounded. It was an absolutely vital tactic. Here in the tower though, there's always plenty of room for enemies to flank you and you don't have any AoE attacks or crowd control to deal with them. I'm not saying every door should be a choke point, but they're sorely missed.
Bloodlust affects all damage output? Considering the theme, shouldn't it only affect melee? I'm not complaining, mind.
I found Vedomot. Since she's a horrible demon, I of course try to kill her through the bars, but she ignores the arrows.
If you want her to not be killable, you should put a force field around her in a summoning circle or something, or have her talk from behind a wall where the player can't see her.
The way the ranged enemies just hang back and don't chase you is another problem for melee.
Like if you could lure them closer, that'd be one thing, but when a bunch of them spawn and can pepper you with attacks from every direction as you come at them, it seems impossible.
Anyway, by losing a few HP permanently with the cauldron spell and using my bow , I managed to reach the stairs up.
But I'm gonna go see how Vedomot betrays me first.
Aaand I'm dead. Kiting enemies that are faster than you doesn't work so well. It's nice that she's got a speed advantage on you though, means ranged can't get so complacent.
Might try another run later with a wand since I didn't get to see much of the new stuff and I'm told they're the new hotness.
You already know this, but melee, and especially two-handed melee, really seems to need a buff. The damage output is about the same once you account for melee having to walk up to the enemy first, and even if it were much better, it'd be hard to outweigh the ~20x damage you take from fights from being in melee and needing to level an additional stat. They need knockback, or a low-level stunning weapon art, or much better hit rate, or guaranteed interrupts, or hitting multiple enemies, or something to make them viable. I also think making two-handed weapons so slow compared to one-handed is overkill - you're already giving up on a defensive bonus from a shield or a stat bonus from an effigy, so it's fine if they're just plain better than every other option when it comes to actually killing things.
I think making ranged weapons slower and harder hitting would be a good idea. Not only does it seem silly that you can nock an arrow, draw your bow, aim and loose in the same amount of time that it takes you to whack someone with your sword, it'd be a good balancing factor against kiting all the time. Mayybe lower base bow damage, but let it scale with strength, to differentiate them from crossbows in a way that isn't attack speed?
Maybe you can make it so ranged enemies don't attack you through other enemies? Right now the impenetrable volleys of fireballs are a little frequent.
it's never too late for feedback! thanks for taking the time to write this out. i'll reply to the points that stand out the most, since a lot of talk has already been covered (probably by you as well) in the threads
>It's kinda annoying how the skulls can hide behind walls and pop you. I really wish enemies would get an outline when behind a wall or something. You already have an outline for when you hover the mouse over them that ignores walls. Please, man, I just wanna see the things my dude should have in plain view.
will try this out, seems like a good idea. having multiple outlines might be scary, but what if i used the fill instead of the outline? hmm....
>there's always plenty of room for enemies to flank you and you don't have any AoE attacks or crowd control to deal with them. I'm not saying every door should be a choke point, but they're sorely missed
this is a Mauler consequence. i think enemies will see some reorganizing, and with only humanoids in some floors, the doors will shrink to fit that. this is still spitballing, but i'll give it a go.
>If you want her [Vedomot] to not be killable, you should put a force field around her in a summoning circle or something,
damn, good idea. i already have a forcefield made for the later levels anyway. i'll give it a try.
>Like if you could lure them closer, that'd be one thing, but when a bunch of them spawn and can pepper you with attacks from every direction as you come at them, it seems impossible.
this exists. Spitters in the bug-levels do that. i should add that to archers, (or skulls) so that one enemy type hangs back , and the other chases. good idea.
>Maybe you can make it so ranged enemies don't attack you through other enemies? Right now the impenetrable volleys of fireballs are a little frequent.
i like this, will try it out. it used to be the case that goth girls would friendly-fire everyone, perhaps it's time to bring that back
there is a lot of work to do for me after this patch, but rest assured melee will be getting some much needed love.
have you tried the 2H combat arts? final blow is quite strong, tomo can kill her alter-ego in 3 hits with it!
thanks again for taking the time to play and write out such thoughtful feedback, i really appreciate it!
>Have you tried 2h combat arts
I did, but I didn't seem like it was particularly effective. Like, it costs mana, still might not hit, and didn't seem to do that much more damage. Maybe for a third playthrough at some point.
Notes from my wand playthrough:
Wand and shield is a cool combo that you don't see a lot, but it's a breeze compared to melee or the bow I used last time. Like wow, I went straight up through to the halls of pain without a hitch just constantly leveling up my int to up my wand damage.
Halls of Pain
Fleshpriests look nice, but they're super annoying to fight with the way they slow you while milling about at high speed.
I can't believe you took out the temptresses but left in the ghoul recolors smdh
Possible bug report: I keep hearing a loud "clank" noise when enemies attack me from the front, and I think it might be because the shield weapon art counts as being constantly active, without costing any mana.
It kept happening even after I unequipped the shield.
After reloading, I seem to be taking a lot more damage than I was before, I'm not hearing the clank, and I can actually do the block shield art as intended. So probably a bug.
I wasn't even bothering to kite enemies previously and still had an inventory full of potions.
Found a book of Mana Shield, which means my int build finally has a use for mana aside from bloodlust. Using mana on offensive magic seems silly when wands kill everything just fine anyway.
And now I found a ring of mana steal, which means I'm now just about invincible.
The burrows
Found a tome of haste. It doesn't seem very powerful. Being faster is nice, but since you're already faster than all the enemies, it doesn't give you any new options in combat. I mostly just use it to make backtracking more convenient, but maybe it'd be more useful on a level with faster enemies, like the faceless from level 3
I didn't expect much trouble, but I did encounter a Spitter boss. The boss itself wasn't a problem, but his squad of 10-20 spitters that all start shooting at me from beyond visual range when I turn the corner made it really tricky to kill anything without losing a ton of health. Fortunately my inventory was full of potions.
Skeleton Pit
I hate liches I hate liches I hate liches I hate liches.
Enticing potions aren't very enticing if they start dropping alongside greater health potions that do the same amount of healing with no downside.
I had a fight in the room with the golden goblin statue and its hitbox kept me from picking up some of the items that were dropped.
I found a wand and a staff down here, and the staff seems much weaker. It's got more base damage, but the slower attack speed means you get to apply your int bonus less, and you don't get an off-hand weapon.
Summon great snake is a fun spell. Having the summon be a monster that doesn't appear as an enemy adds a lot to it.
I'd like 'em to be a little more aggressive though.
Breeding grounds
Huh? Wait, the loading screen when leaving the skeleton pit said the breeding grounds, but I'm back in the burrows.
Breeding Grounds 1 for real
Very cramped, which is leads to interesting synergies with my new snake buddies. Enemies don't seem to aggro them unless they actually get attacked, so they're more useful for keeping the melee bugs away from me by blocking narrow passages without anyone attakcing.
Had a wall piece not load in, meaning I got to stare into the void.
This place really IS full of bugs! I tried unequipping my shield and most of my gear exploded off of me as my mind stat blasted down to -2
It happens consistently when I reload and try again.
Anyway, continuing on.
Now that I'm paying attention, there's a LOT of missing walls.
Breeding Grounds 2
IDK if the breeding grounds are so interesting that players will wanna do two whole levels of them.
Met a special enemy of the flying buggers called "count queen of flies", which is kinda awkward sounding.
Paladin Basecamp
I was not expecting the paladins to be like actual christian-cross-wearing templars. Seems a little weird when you're fighting weird made up cults for the most part.
Anyway, on to side quest.
Lost Corridors
Think I might've tabbed out at a bad time and broke the loading screen.
It worked fine after reloading the autosave though.
New models look nice in action.
Truth seekers are annoying for a wand-user, but fortunately my snake buddies have no such problems, because I haven't got the stats to use any melee weapons I could find up here. I usually just wait behind a wall while they get snaked to death.
Oh so the temptress got a new model instead of being removed entirely.
I got careless, died and reloaded my autosave, and my snakes were still there. That's weird.
Is attack rating working alright? I tried equipping a ring that says it gives me +9 ttack rating but I can't see any change in my stats screen.
Every enemy here has a gimmick intended to beat ranged players, but the only one I'm really scared of is the temptress: I've died like 8 times on this one level and every time, it's because I get rushed by temptresses.
They're hard to notice before they're already in your face because they're small and dark, I can't disengage even with haste 2, and they can take off half my health before dying. Sometimes I get lucky and one of my snakes distracts them and they crumple like paper.
I think they'd be fine as glass cannon mooks if they had less defense. Trying to click on one as she's rushing towards you at sonic speeds is hard enough, but having them proceed to ignore a lot of your attacks that looks dead on gets frustating.
The slug dudes sometimes bug out, teleport and rotate around a point. I can't tell what's causing it.
I got killed by it once, my only death that wasn't from a temptress - a slugman decided to rotate around behind me, told me it was "nothing personnel", and blasted me with lightning. (I ain't even mad, that was amazing).
Pokkan died surprisingly easily, since I saw her coming and had time to think about setting up all my buffs beforehand.
I think your end screen's "time played" counter is busted.
whoa, congrats on beating the whole thing!
thank you for taking the time to do another complete run. it really warms my heart knowing people are interested enough in the game to play it multiple times! truly the best of feels.
>I can't believe you took out the temptresses but left in the ghoul recolors smdh
i can, she was my least favorite model. had all kinds of issues!!
>Possible bug report: I keep hearing a loud "clank" noise when enemies attack me from the front, and I think it might be because the shield weapon art counts as being constantly active, without costing any mana.
yeah - it's something that i'm trying to get to the bottom of. no clue what causes it, but it can also completely freeze (!!!) your movement. it's awful.
>I hate liches I hate liches I hate liches I hate liches.
reflect projectile is your friend
>Enticing potions aren't very enticing if they start dropping alongside greater health potions that do the same amount of healing with no downside.
they're randomly rolled at the start of each run. there's 4 (i think?) random rolled potions per game. i assume this one was the heal for 60 but drain mana one
>This place really IS full of bugs! I tried unequipping my shield and most of my gear exploded off of me as my mind stat blasted down to -2
i hate inventories so much it's unreal. bugfix coming through as we speak.... i hope
>Every enemy here has a gimmick intended to beat ranged players, but the only one I'm really scared of is the temptress: I've died like 8 times on this one level and every time, it's because I get rushed by temptresses.
yeah - i'm experimenting with some anti-ranged sentiments right now.
the slug-hug-bug is very annoying, but i'll solve it later since i think only like 1% of all players make it that far, and it's usually other devs.
i have a LOT of bugs on my plate it would seem. hoping to cover all of these to make the next DD a lot less frustrating to deal with.
thanks again for the playthroughs and detailed feedback. i will address all these issues (and the ones mentioned previously) ASAP!
>i assume this one was the heal for 60 but drain mana one
Yeah, that's the one.
Anyway, I saw you'd done a hotfix so I thought I might as well try out a quick 2-handed run.
Lower Dungeons
Found a virile axe of shock, so two-handed playthrough is definitely go.
I slept a bit on the weapon art - +20 attack rating is pretty great.
Forgotten Passageway
Ran into a special enemy ghoul that I could barely hit even with the weapon art, so I'm down to 3 health potions. Great.
Found a ring of life steal so this run might just go well though, especially if I pair it with this fast-attack club I found.
And the red knight dopped an axe with more life steal. I wonder if that means I'll regen 2 health per hit?
Lower Dungeons 2
It's still really tough going, but with 2 hp recovered per hit, it's doable.
The gates in the prison bars here are a good size for choke points, for reference.
Found a spear that I'm contractually obligated to try out. It's very short for a two-handed spear, looks kinda goofy.
It's got really good base damage for the attack rate though. I probably should level agility enough for the multi-strike to get more use out of life steal, but dammit, I like axes.
Vedomot was too shy to come out, so I guess I'm moving on up.
Brief Respite
It's nice to ahve the sun cultists be a threat for once.
A problem I'm having with melee combat that I didn't have with ranged is the difficulty in clicking the same dude in a mob of enemies consistently to focus your damage. With ranged you can just shift-click in the general direction, but with melee you actually have to hit the right guy. What's worse, clicking in the general direction like you would with a bow makes your dude do an attack animation, but it's a trap: as far as I can tell you can't actually hit anything by doing so.
Finally died to a boss goat lady.
Conclusion; Once I understood that the W weapon art was more useful as a hit bonus than a damage bonus, I had a much easier time of things.
I'd still say it's a lot weaker than playing with a wand or bow though - even with two really lucky item drops giving me life steal, I didnt' get past the sun cultist area because I simply can't avoid damage like I can with ranged weapons.
>Vedomot was too shy to come out, so I guess I'm moving on up.
was there a bug of some sort? she didn't want to leave or you didn't interact with her? if bug, did you save/load/try again/return to the stairs? any more details about this?
as for the balance, this was merely a bandaid patch since i was fixing something else so i tweaked some numbers. at least you were able to reach the halls, which is probably more than what was possible beforehand.
>What's worse, clicking in the general direction like you would with a bow makes your dude do an attack animation, but it's a trap: as far as I can tell you can't actually hit anything by doing so.
the way this goes is that if the game doesn't think youre interacting with an enemy, you'll just play an attack animation without any intent on hitting things - there isn't a collider check or anything, since i didn't think you'd need one. it means you can't do a pre-swing where an enemy would walk into an attack animation or something. will need to look into this further.
thanks again for playing... again! melee upgrades soon..
>was there a bug of some sort?
No, no, sorry, just saying she didn't spawn.
oh right
she's actually quite a rare spawn. something like 1 in 10 chance to get her. most players will go through the game only seeing her name on the end-screen - they're missing out!
ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooh that's a paddlin
I think this a competently put together Diablo clone. It's fair moody, the combat is OK, it still needs some work. Enemies are a bit spongy. The first floor has some tough enemies considering it's the first level. I would like some more loot as well. I found it kinda hard to see too, walls kept getting in the way of me seeing some enemies and the lack of contrast in the some places didn't help either. A minor thing, but I found it hard to read the introduction menu text, it's very small.
Keep working at it!
thanks for the feedback! the stream was also packed with useful insight, thanks for streaming it!
Trying the regular Version first, if it crashes, I'll switch to low-end. My PC must be too bad then. Began at slightly after 8.00.
I like the new Weapon select Screen instead of Floorstuff. Very neat. Wand and Sword for now, I'll go bow later, I wanna try that fire Crossbow. Also no Despair (yet).
Why is Weaponswapping bound to ö? Thats 3 Keys left of Enter and horrid to reach when one Hand is on the Mouse. It seems to me that initially when unlocking new spellwheel slots my Spellwheel cleared itself, no Idea if that just happened occassionally or all the Time tho, or if it was something else. The Spell I got was through my Wand, so maybe that has to do with it. Also it still says every level increases Slots, but you don't gain a slot per point of Int.
Savegame Button stopped working once I entered Floor 2. Couldn't open the Savescreen anymore.
I really like the new Inventory Graphics backdrops and Stuff.
A special Enemy in the Bossfloor, really?
Its still great that Potions come out of Bookstands. On the same Node, most Books I get are shocking Discharge, is there some issue with random algorithm or is this intended?
After alt-tabbing savescreen worked again and was open for some Reason, tried to enter a name, defaulted to autosave, didn't let me save because that one was already in use, tried a different slot and name, opened Stuckscreen, so apparently I was not in menu-controls I guess? Now it doesn't work again. Great Savesystem, huge improvement from last Time.
Nice Cultist Lore. But why does she have a Hitbox blocking my Projectiles when dead?
Went through a Door, got Stuck. Couldn't move into the Room further, couldn't move back out through the Door, only left and right a tiny bit.
At least Autosave/Load seems to work somewhat I guess. Time to redo a bunch of Stuff. Ran into the same Room, same Issue. Guess everything beyond that Point is off-limits to me.
Killed Vedomot, should've seen it coming, I'm stupid. Found a few more Areas I couldn't walk through on the Way, is your Navmesh not generating Properly? Weapon seems Amazing, shame I can't use it, since I can't move past that Door to continue climbing the Tower. Guess this Run ends here. Hopefully the next one will be better.
This Time focusing on Hitchance early on, since I'm hoping the Weapon will be the same, and if it isn't I still have a Stat useful for any build. Run ended right on Floor 1 this Time, same Navigation(?) Issue.
Going to retry the low-end Version, maybe that one actually works. Found Grimspike and bloodlust immediately, got excited, died. Realized my old saves carry over, got curious, and turns out, Nav issues are not a Thing apparently in the low-end version, so that worked out and I can continue my first Run. Great? Could confirm that Weapon stays the same tho, so I'm definetly trying a Run with that Monstrosity. Couldn't resist, tried it real quick, 100% going to run with this after this wand one.
Assuming the Frostpriests are also resistent to magic, this run failed because of the Focus on Wands. Thats fine.
That it crashed my GPU again after starting the next run isn't, but again, thats my trash PC.
This Time Floor 1 is littered with Golems, and I found a no return Stairs, are both of these intended? Also couldn't interact with the Stairs. And no Well. So my 1 Potion isn't going to get me Far. Tons of Golems in melee focused on early Levels really is tough.
Could place a Manapotion on the 2 right Tiles of a Book, and afterwards when picking up a Healthpotion from my Inventory that one disappeared. Happened only once tho.
Killed Shadowstep from the Sewers before the Boss, now I'm locked into walking slowly. Without Potions and slowwalk, died to Boss. Time for another Run.
This Time I can get into the save menu, select and rename a File, but not confirm the saving. Either overwriting or regular saving.
Binding Quickswap to ^ doesn't work, had to use y. And Nav Issues are back. Luckily not in an important Area for now.
And now as I'm finally on a Run for the Demons Weapon she doesn't spawn in lvl3? Rude.
Some Book just randomly turned invisible in my Inventory until I moved it.
Trying to swap my Gloves when I apparently needed their Stats for something (maybe?) Caused me to flow into -6 Dexterity despite leveling only that, which disallowed the use of anything, including Potions. Or at least it showed Potions as red in Inventory. Could still use them through the Hotbar.
With -6 Dex, -10 Defense and -35 Armor the Game surprisingly did not become noticeable different. I still hit and still take roughly the same Amount of Damage as before. Makes me think any Stat but Damage, Mana and Health doesn't actually matter. Died either Way, run was screwed anyhow, due to not being able to equip anything anymore.
Item dropped through the Wall on the other Side.
Finally got that Demons sword again, without wasting too many Points into int.
On loading, not all Walls that were previously visible disappear, and the Loot-Goblin becomes broken.
Found a Handaxe early on that apparently gives 19-28 Damage, but only increased my damage from 1-1 to 2-11 when equipped. Something seems wrong there. IcePriests are ridiculous.
I'm going to take a break, I'll do some more Runs later today or tomorrow or something, will update this Comment and then continue on afterwards when I do.
Wands seem incredibly overpowered. You are ranged and can kite, so no defense Stat leveling necessary, and you can just pump everything into Int to constantly increase your Damage. This also allows you to constantly learn all Spells, so you can abuse them against Enemies that are resistent to ranged Attacks, like those Priests or the Faceless Ones. Compared to Bows who just don't seem to be able to increase in Damage, and especially to melee, which forces you to get hit, requires you to invest constantly into strength to keep Damage up, and into accuracy to actually hit. And of course into defense and health aswell, so you don't just die, since you will be taking damage in melee, as opposed to wanding.
oh i missed this bit as well. i'll reply here
>Binding Quickswap to ^
curious. i'll investigate. is ^ the alternate to "6" on your keyboard? that's how it is on US boards.
>And now as I'm finally on a Run for the Demons Weapon she doesn't spawn in lvl3? Rude.
very low chance, only 2-3 people have met her so far. i like random events like this, especially when there are multiple.
>With -6 Dex, -10 Defense and -35 Armor the Game surprisingly did not become noticeable different. I still hit and still take roughly the same Amount of Damage as before. Makes me think any Stat but Damage, Mana and Health doesn't actually matter. Died either Way, run was screwed anyhow, due to not being able to equip anything anymore.
i believe this is caused by autoequipping items from the ground when using a backslot, but i'll need to look further into this
this is a very balanced and playtest ready build, i see :^)
>Wands seem incredibly overpowered.
they're very good, until the lateer parts when enemies are much quicker and have projectile resistant skills and abilities. i'm trying to have different difficulty curves depending on equipment, but it's easier said than done
feel free to stop here, it surely must be very frustrating playing such a broken build. i'll hopefully get it patched up and ready for my next submission
^ is left of numrow
good morning, thanks for playing! there's a lot here so i'll tackle them all now
>Weaposwapping
it's bound to "`" on QWERTY boards, which is right next to "1" and "Q". probably different on Ze German Keyboards, but you're right that it can easily become inconvenient for non-US keyboard owners.
>The Spell I got was through my Wand, so maybe that has to do with it. Also it still says every level increases Slots, but you don't gain a slot per point of Int.
yes, i posted about this a few times. since the weapon gives you the spell access, when you stow the weapon on your back you lose access. the issue here is if you swap back to the wand, the spell isn't re-selected. i'll add that in the future.
>Savegame Button stopped working once I entered Floor 2. Couldn't open the Savescreen anymore.
Saving is awful and I wouldn't wish it upon any man
>A special Enemy in the Bossfloor, really?
I think Bloodguard has been there since DD 46 or so? it's been a while
> is there some issue with random algorithm or is this intended?
pure random, just unlucky rolls. better than getting all Slow books
> Great Savesystem, huge improvement from last Time.
sorry
>Nice Cultist Lore. But why does she have a Hitbox blocking my Projectiles when dead?
oops, i didn't know she did that. will fix.
>Went through a Door, got Stuck. Couldn't move into the Room further, couldn't move back out through the Door, only left and right a tiny bit.
yeah, i had a quick navmesh fix in the new build (as i've read you discovered). will need to work on that more soon
>Killed Vedomot,
you're the second person to have her in your run! how nice. read her name backwards!
>Assuming the Frostpriests are also resistent to magic, this run failed because of the Focus on Wands. Thats fine.
they have evasion, like the Unseen guys. trick is to have a ranged weapon and quickswap to a melee one when they're the only ones left alive
>This Time Floor 1 is littered with Golems, and I found a no return Stairs, are both of these intended? Also couldn't interact with the Stairs. And no Well. So my 1 Potion isn't going to get me Far. Tons of Golems in melee focused on early Levels really is tough.
not sure what you mean?
Floor 1 being the starting floor, so golems are Maulers? No return stairs? what is this referencing? And the next-level stairs were uninteractable? not sure what's going on here.
>Could place a Manapotion on the 2 right Tiles of a Book, and afterwards when picking up a Healthpotion from my Inventory that one disappeared. Happened only once tho.
oh, an inventory bug? it's been a long time since i saw one. i assume this might have something to do with the other issues - most likely something broke when recreating your character or clearing your inventory, which messed everything else up because spaghetti code and unity exceptions don't gel well
>Killed Shadowstep from the Sewers before the Boss, now I'm locked into walking slowly. Without Potions and slowwalk, died to Boss. Time for another Run.
stuck walking slowly? Shadowstep is a random (procgenned) boss, i assume with a +Cold attack modifier. did the cold slow never fade away? strange..
>This Time I can get into the save menu, select and rename a File, but not confirm the saving. Either overwriting or regular saving.
I hate saving so much it's unreal
thanks for playing and for the detailed review. as i mentioned before, this build needed (a lot) more time in the oven. i hope the next, more stable iteration fixes these problems.
I ment a random generated tough enemy, not Bloodguard. On the Floor with the first Boss tho, which means 2 Potionchugging fights in a row without a chance to refill.
>Floor 1 being the starting floor, so golems are Maulers? No return stairs? what is this referencing? And the next-level stairs were uninteractable? not sure what's going on here.
Maulers, yes. I was assuming they only spawned after the first Boss, which got me confused. With the Stairs I mean the No-return-possible ones, which probably are the ones you're coming down from into the Dungeon in the first Place. Which would make Sense if they always spawned into the room you start out in, not in some other room midway. Thats waht got me confused.
the stairs SHOULD always spawn. i guess i might've forgotten to include them in a start room? i'll check now
thanks again for the feedback, it's very appreciated
Next Run, this Time with a lighting lifesteal Wand, going very smoothly so far.
Skeleton Pits are really nice, downed Samsara, got some nice Equipment. For some Reason my Chest disappeared in between. Maybe I was accidentally playing around with equipment, lost my Stats, got it unequipped and dropped tho, don't know, too lazy to go back and look.
The Breeding Grounds generated with a Room that didn't have a Wall. I couldn't walk outside or anything, but it looked weird.
Found a completely invisible and untargetable Enemy in Breeding Grounds 2. After loading, every Enemy is now tiny and apparently deals a lot more Damage then before. Paladins are normal size tho, maybe it fixed with getting in a new Level.
The after-paladin Level is massive. Here's the Game End Screen. Wands proved superior in the End. As for Equipment and Stats, Paladin shield, lifesteal Wand, nothing special elsewhere, just generic +1 int or something. 22 Const level 5 or 6 times or so to get to 22 for the Breastplate, other then that, only int, up to 50.
whoa, the tiny enemy bug lives!
and congrats on beating the game! you and TGIG dev are the only two players who beat the game this DD, despite all the errors
I'd love it if you could send me the Playerlog files (C:/User/You/Appdata/LocalLow/osur/ToK.20/) so i can investigate all these reported issues. thanks again for playing, i hope you had at least some fun despite the issues
When I switch from wand to sword and back does it reset my spell wheel and selected spell? Also when I die it reset. Also when I switch between loadouts I and II it resets.
Why can't I use the same shield in two loadouts with different weapons?
I'm confused by how to cast spells. Edit: oh ok it's right click.
I was watching a streamer play and he was kiting enemies. Am I supposed to do that? I don't know how to run away and attack at the same time.
I would like to be able to stack or reorder the potions on my quickbar.
I picked up a spellbook I didn't have the stats to learn. I right clicked it anyways just to see what would happen, and my character dropped it. But I had 'right click equips' set so I don't think he should have dropped it.
Overall I suck at this! I only made it to the boss once and just died a bunch. Am I not understanding something? The game does look very good and feels polished.
thanks for playing and taking the time to write out your thoughts!
yea, it's clear i need a tutorial. i just need to figure out how to make it *immersive*.
>When I switch from wand to sword and back does it reset my spell wheel and selected spell? Also when I die it reset. Also when I switch between loadouts I and II it resets.
yeah, as i mentioned in PAT's comment, it's something i need to figure out. the idea is that the spell is granted by the wand, so when the wand isn't equipped (it's on your back, thus doesnt give you benefits) then you lose the spell. re-equipping it should return the spell, though, that makes sense. i'll need to figure out how to make that work in the future.
>Why can't I use the same shield in two loadouts with different weapons?
that would be an interesting mechanic - to only switch ONE hand. perhaps in the future.
>I was watching a streamer play and he was kiting enemies. Am I supposed to do that? I don't know how to run away and attack at the same time.
if you want to! you can hold shift to attack without moving, the idea being you move, hold shift + click, move, etc. there are multiple ways to play, though. you can facetank enemies (but it's more dangerous). the idea is that melee is hard at the start, but easy later, while ranged starts off easy but gets hard
>I would like to be able to stack or reorder the potions on my quickbar.
a purposeful design decision to not be able to stack, but a reorder might be interesting. good idea.
>I picked up a spellbook I didn't have the stats to learn. I right clicked it anyways just to see what would happen, and my character dropped it. But I had 'right click equips' set so I don't think he should have dropped it.
an interesting idea i didn't think about. i'll give that a try and see how it goes. usually i like having right-click-to-drop since it allows for very quick inventory clearing if needed, but i understand your thoughts here.
>Overall I suck at this! I only made it to the boss once and just died a bunch. Am I not understanding something? The game does look very good and feels polished.
It's a hard game! it's meant for people who played old ass arpgs and thought they were too easy. either way, i'm very glad to hear you gave it multiple tries and i hope you enjoyed your time playing. i'll try and get all of these ideas implemented or at least prototyped by next DD.
thanks again for playing and for the thoughtful feedback!
Well it's not that I specifically want to switch one hand. Let's say I'm at the middle or late game and I'm fully geared and I have some magic gear and some melee gear. But there still might be a few pieces of gear that are great with either build. But the way you have it right now, I can't have those in both builds.
Played a run. Video:
Despite the video being choppy, I didn't notice any choppiness while playing. The last update really made a huge difference!
I had difficulties with the controls. I wanted to find the key to quickswitch between both weapons, but I didn't find it. I changed one of the binds that looked like it would work, but nothing seemed to happen. Switching between the loadouts removed my spell from the right click. Not having the martial arts on the screen and having to memorize them is difficult.
I found a nice axe, but it made me took too much damage so I had to switch back to my default setup.
I played mostly by kiting, like last time. Maybe the martial arts help for melee builds, but that should be introduced in some way because I cannot mindlessly spam left click like in other diablo-likes. It looks more involved. Ranged attack on the other hand are intuitive and super safe. How does a melee build work?
Maybe I missed something, but is there an use for trash loot? Is there a place to sell it or convert it into something useful? Part of the fun in diablo-like games is being able to hoard items to sell for pennies.
If you left click a monster while holding shift and using a melee weapon, the character wont attack. Maybe because I was clicking on an enemy out of range?
That last monster healed himself. I wasn't able to tell until I realized he stopped doing the ability if I missed an attack. And also drained my mana, which sucks badly. The fountain did give me an ability to heal mana but I discovered it by pure chance and even then the knight used his mana burn as soon as I had mana. I wasn't able to click fast enough in the mana heal, then switch to damage spell, then spam the spell and repeat all while healing myself. This feels like a puzzle enemy, there is nothing wrong with them as long as the player knows they are facing a puzzle. Otherwise it feels like a hopeless situation.
I will try another run later this week because this one was too short. The game has a playable framerate (like 300% increase!) which makes playing it much easier.
30 minutes long! thanks a bunch for doing this. i'll be sure to watch it all shortly
really quick:
"`" (the traditional valve console key) is the weapon swap key. i should've probably been more clear with that. a tooltip when mousing over this in the menu (or having the info show up in the textbox) will do the trick, i hope
>Switching between the loadouts removed my spell from the right click.
since it's a item-granted spell, and you're no longer equipping the item that gives you this spell, it gets unequipped. you're right that it should get reequipped when swapped back, though! 'll look into it
>Maybe I missed something, but is there an use for trash loot? Is there a place to sell it or convert it into something useful? Part of the fun in diablo-like games is being able to hoard items to sell for pennies.
Only the Golden Goblin object, that eats your crap loot and spits out goot loot - but that's later in the game. I need to make an interactable object similar to that for the early game
>If you left click a monster while holding shift and using a melee weapon, the character wont attack. Maybe because I was clicking on an enemy out of range?
Correct, holding shift prevents all movement
>This feels like a puzzle enemy, there is nothing wrong with them as long as the player knows they are facing a puzzle. Otherwise it feels like a hopeless situation.
Correct, he is! Man-fight him and try your best, he cries like a baby if you hold your ground and chug a potion or two..
thanks again for playing and recording! this video will be invaluable for me! i hope you had fun as well
i finished watching your video, you've given me great insight in how you think with this and it's very appreciated. you also showed me a bug with auto-picking up items when you're on your backslot.
i also believe i will need a lot more hints for the Bloodguard, since it's not particularly clear how you're meant to face him, and he doesn't ask you to Stop Running nearly enough.
thanks again for the video and feedback!
There are some quality of life features from Diablo it certainly wouldn't hurt to copy. The obvious stuff like "clickable weapon text boxes when you hold alt" and "enemy health bars", but also some things like 'when the inventory or stat screens are open, shift the camera so the player is focused in the middle of the remaining side of the screen'. That helps gameplay be less obstructed even with a menu open. An often rather tricky thing to do without some exploits / glitches is to make sure equipping/unequipping items with +stats like +hp preserves your % HP instead of absolute value, so putting on a +2 max hp item makes me go from 60/60 -> 62/62, instead of 60/62. Of course, lots of ways to screw up the coding on that. Could use something on the control setter to warn/stop you if you map multiple functions to the same hotkey.
Also another very important one I noticed- left click lock-on! When you click on an enemy in a diablo game, it will act as if you continue to hold that click aimed on that enemy, even if the enemy moves. For ranged attacks you'll stand and keep shooting at it no matter where it moves, for melee attacks you'll follow it if it gets out of range. That becomes very noticeable and necessary when you have enemies that are moving around erratically instead of attacking, like the goat cultists
Overall looks great! didn't notice too many bugs. When I died and restarted my minimap wouldn't show
thanks for the feedback and i'm happy you had fun! a lot of the QoL things you mentioned are on purpose - i don't like healthbars, i don't want the player to cheese their health with +hp items, i want players to have items in their inventory instead of checking them from the ground, and so on
i understand these are probably annoying to most people, but these are design decisions i like and will try to make work somehow
>Left click lock on
that's a great idea and it's currently on my To-Do pile. i'll start it off as a toggleable option and see where it goes from there!
thanks again for playing and taking the time to write out feedback!
I can only get to level 5 before inevitably getting filtered. Trying to go back from there transports me to the wrong staircase (it will place you next to staircase on level 4 going down to even lower level).
Loading times can be quite long.Correction, it's probably softlocked on "Returning to Lower Dungeons 2" while trying to go back from higher level.Loading can be quite weird. After dying I picked Try Again and it started all over in another level, so I loaded from autosave and it teleported me to a different coordinate of that level.
I think I'm starting to understand the game more. Instead of comparing it to Diablo 2 it probably resembles Diablo 1 quite closely (which I never played), and suddenly everything clicks. Because of that mindset a lot about the game feels underwhelming, like loot, skills and movement speed.
In such a dark game it would be nice to see a hub area to lay back and resupply.
thanks for the feedback! sorry about some of the level weirdness.
unsure of what you meant by the Try Again issues. By another level, do you mean another floor (ex. Lower Dungeons 2 or Upper Halls, etc) or another level as in the map regenerated itself and you start the game once more except with another layout? if it's the former, that's quite concerning
there is a hub level, but it's quite deep in! there are still some pacing issues i'm trying to figure out, since constant fighting can get quite tiresome.
the game is very heavily inspired by Diablo 1 and the games of that era before D2 took over the world. so the pacing and speed is all based around slow movement.
also, which build did you play? perhaps the issues were resolved when i fixed some save/load issues this morning.
thanks again for the feedback and i hope the level issues didn't detract too much from the experience! it's clear that this build probably needed more time in the oven, the next one will be more stable i swear
As for Try Again, the minimap was wiped and my spells were not there (I'm not sure about other stuff, I didn't check), so I assume it was like a new game.
The build was from yesterday morning.
Diablo 2 is one of the very few games where I don't mind starting in a hub area - usually I prefer a good gameplay kick off instead of overwhelming amount of NPCs. I need to think about it some more.
This time I played it melee only, no spells at all or ranged weapons (bouncing back projectiles still counts as melee...right?). This is the only run I've played on this version so when I talk about a lot of balancing things it'll be compared to when I played bows and spells last version. Played surprisingly well with a trackpad. So besides the bugs I showed before:
I'm sure I had more to say but I forgot/didn't write it down. I had a great time playing though. I think the amount of playtime will be pretty good in the final version with the last areas. More monster variety would be great too of course but I get why its not that simple. Adding a hardcore option alongside the despair difficulty would be a fun "free" thing to add for us masochists too. Can't wait to see more great things from you. Ending stats:
thanks for the massive feedback and all the bug reports!
i'm going to first fix everything, but afterwards i'll end up using many of your ideas. i especially like giving a shield as a potential starter equipment.
i also fixed the attack speed bug this morning with the last hotfix thanks to your reports.
also, congrats on being the only person thus far to have beaten the game! world record any % :^)
to answer some questions:
trapped chest sound is the normal sound but heavily pitched down
>When you have an item that gives you stats to allow you to wear another item and you take it off it gets thrown on the ground even though you have space for it in the inventory. Would be nice if it was put into the inventory instead, or turn "red" and inactive and you'd have to unequip it yourself.
i'll have the inventory placement implemented, that's better than it dropping on ground.
>Two handed weapons don't seem worth it at all, I wanted to use them but they all looked so much worse than going one handed and shield I didn't. Not really higher damage than one handed and much slower, you get less stats too, less weapon arts.
I think i need to buff the Attack Rating for them. missing multiple times with a low AR weapon and low attack speed is brutal
>Not sure if I was just hallucinating it but sometimes it felt like you got damaged out of nowhere, like walking close to the cultists (witches? the early women enemies... I did play on a small laptop screen though, maybe I missed something. "Think" I got damaged by fireballs even though I reflected them.
I've heard someone else had this in the halls of pain, will investigate
thanks again for the detailed feedback and all the bug reports, i truly appreciate all your help
I wont really be talking about everything here since I don't like repeating what other people said. Graphics and sound improved a lot and even the game balance seems more fair than in the previous version.
I played "ToK.20_windows", so there is a good chance you already changed or fixed most of the issue, but I'm going to post them anyway.
First suggestion. It would be nice if you setup some kind of online changelog. Even just for demo days, so people can see what bugs are already reported or fixed.
First is the broken wall bug. As you have said, this probably breaks your save since I couldn't load it after seeing that bug. Autosave for that same level worked fine however. This is a different spot than in the video, but it is the same wall orientation.
There is an ordinary room behind it. I uploaded the save here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1goKerQChz_W-upbV57p5LY3ihSu-eDM0/view?usp=shari...
As I said, it's broken and can't be loaded.
Another save problem, I loaded level 4 save and this happened:
Couldn't move or do anyhing. ALT+F4, loaded the save again and it worked.
Next list are either small anoyances or minor bugs.
Items can drop behind walls (By the way, the bugged wall is in the red circle since I forgot to put up the automap in the previous screenshot).
Doors are very anoying. It's nice that they open when you walk into them, but you can still close them, which got me hurt quite a lot of times when I wanted to walk and I closed them instead. I would suggest you either remove the ability to close them completely, since enemies can open them no problem, or you make enemies incapable of opening them and they would have to break them down first, so there would be actual purpose to closing them. As they are now, they just cause pain.
It would be nice if I could open the spell book by clicking on the spell slot next to the mana orb.
Clicking doesn't count as a "press any key" on the loading screen.
Can't drink potions from the inventory by right clicking them, even if I enable the "right click to equip" in the options menu. This got me killed in the prison encounter because I wanted to use potions straight from the inventory, but was dropping them instead.
Enemies pop in \ out of existence instantly when they enter \ leave your field of vision. Would be nice if you added some kind quick fade in \ out effect.
Adding impact \ miss sound effects for ranged weapons and probaly footsteps or more idle sounds for enemies.
That's pretty much all I noticed. I didn't play through the entire game this time, since I have to fix my roof, but It's safe thing to say that the game improved a lot since the last time I played. Keep it up.
thanks for the feedback and the bug reports!
there's a lot of things to fix this time around. looks like i'll be busy bugfixing for the next while.
i'll be sure to cover all of these and i hope your roof gets fixed swiftly!
Playing this right now. I'm hoping to actually finish all of your content this time, now that I finally have some time to relax.
The art is great, music is comfy and very fitting, animations are great. Enemies are very satisfying to kill. Difficulty feels just right - really hard (for me) but not unfair. Every encounter feels tense. It's nice.
I discovered magic entirely by accident. I picked the sword and staff as my starting weapons, but didn't realize the staff gave me access to a spell until I looked through the menus. Fireball is cool and satisfying to use. Haven't used any others yet.
The sound skellies make when you kill them is perfect. Hearing the crunch is like music to my ears.
I moved onto floor 3 and alt tabbed to write this. When I tabbed back in, I think the game was still loading, because Towerguy wasn't anywhere on my screen and I couldn't move or open the map or anything. The usual loading screen wasn't visible. After a while the "Press any key to continue" screen popped up and everything started working again.
The only nitpick I have (had?) was that the map didn't have an opacity slider, but you or somebody else informed me in the thread that +/- works for that. I'm still playing through it, so if I have any useful feedback I'll edit this post. It's genuinely really fun though, and it's hard to find any serious faults. I'd buy it.
Edit 1: Trying to reproduce and record the loading screen bug. Saves also weren't working, but I died and restarted and now saves and the loading screen(s) are both working again. I'm gonna keep trying to break it to see if I can get a recording though. Also, I used a potion during a loading screen while pressing every button on my keyboard to see what I could break.
thank you for playing and for the write up. i'm glad our levels don't suck this DD :^)
>I moved onto floor 3 and alt tabbed to write this. When I tabbed back in, I think the game was still loading, because Towerguy wasn't anywhere on my screen and I couldn't move or open the map or anything. The usual loading screen wasn't visible. After a while the "Press any key to continue" screen popped up and everything started working again.
never heard of this before, i'll jot this down and try to replicate this. since you say Towerguy (stealing this) wasn't on your screen, I assume you mean the default (not the loading) screen was on. was it the screen of the last level, or the screen of the level you just loaded in to? perhaps a loading screen just didn't load properly in general - if it happens again then that might be the case.
i'm very glad to hear you are having fun and i hope you enjoy your time. there is a stopper at the end of the Halls of Pain, but the "end" of the demo occurs when you defeat the quest enemy you'll hear about after many more levels. feel free to stop at the stopper-prompt (where you get asked for the password)
thanks again for playing and for the feedback!
I'm trying to break it again so I can record what happened, but so far I've been unable to do so after dying. Saves weren't working for me with the broken loading screen run either. Everything works now on a new file. So far I've had no luck with breaking it after that run ended, but if I manage to break it again I'll record it and send the footage your way. Also, just wanted to say that the music in the halls of pain is extra kino.
thanks again. if you still have that broken save, send it my way!
Pretty cool! Reminds me a lot of the first Diablo game.
The game makes a great first impression, with it's animated loading screens and nice 3D models. Loved the atmosphere and the music.
Just one complaint: when you are asked with "pressing any key" if you press S or I the game will show the stats menu or the item menu right from the get go.
It's also quite hard, I died a lot, but I'm not too much into this kind of games so that might be on me.
thanks for the feedback! glad you've enjoyed it and had a bug-free experience. hoping the performance was OK as well, since i heard many devs had issues in that regard.
Performance was perfect, but I have a kinda beefy PC so I was expecting it.
5800x, 3070 RTX, 16Gb of RAM. Ran the game with no issues at all at 1440p.
it's gotta be said that this is probably not my kind of game, cos I found the combat to be a bit of a chore and comparing loot I didn't find terribly thrilling.
presentation is pretty good though, audio's very nice and it's got a cohesive if slightly low-quality and slimy art style, no complaints there.
the bloodstained knight or whatever, does it have a healing ability? I fought it with a bow for many many seconds, perhaps even minutes, and it didn't die. I died instead, of boredom and of suspecting that it was still at full health.
I ended up getting through the whole game on my second attempt though, up until the little AGDG password check thing. Took an hour and then some. spent the whole time somewhat convinced that I was playing the game wrong, since my method of defeating enemies was usually to kite them until they died, which is kind of long.
It was a while until I figured out how to use magic, and I still haven't figured out how to access this 'Spell Wheel' I've heard to much about.
The stairs at the start of the game go up, and yet it is implied you came down through them? Did protagonist start their adventure by going from the second floor of the ToK down to the first!?!?!? inexcusable plot hole, it should be a staircase going downward, or a great doorway or something.
I like lifesteal, and the fact that getting full health when levelling up is effectively lifesteal. also got some lifesteal items which may have elongated my survivability to levels far beyond what I'd earned
thanks for the detailed feedback and the playtest! i appreciate you sticking through a game where you might not necessarily love the genre
to answer your queries:
yes the Bloodguard heals - he is a big fan of healing if you try and kite him, but he's a pushover if you stand your ground and hit him (preferably with a melee weapon)
the spellwheel is Q, i really should have something to tell the players what keybinds are by default while ingame
the lore is that you took the dungeon path, which is less populated, by going down some stairs. now you have to go up them again!
i'm glad to hear that you didn't encounter any bugs or other major issues, and i will look into making this less boring and kite dependent in the future
thanks again for playing!