Head down the mines for some ultraviolence against the goblin menace with your boys (and girls)? Sounds like a great time!
I don't think you've worked that long on this version if I remember correctly, you've gotten a lot in there already. You probably know about most of the things I'm about to say already. Windows Defender starts crying when launching the game, should at least zip the EXE file.
The dialogue options are numberer but you can't use the number keys to choose? ARGH
Walk animation speed needs to sync up better to movement speed, a bit slide-y.
I'd like to see a turning animation, it should still be really snappy though.
Movement feels pretty sluggish, I think you're pathfinding for every click? If you have no obstacles in the way the character should turn toward and move right away towards the point.
Stutters when you first encounter new things, shader compilations? Stopped for a solid 2 seconds one time.
Should clicking a companion in the companions window re-recruit it? Didn't realize I had to drag at first.
ALT-Tabing and then clicking back into the game sometimes makes the item highlighting stuck.
Everytime you go to a new area it zooms it, annoying.
My map stopped working suddenly, couldn't bring it up again.
Drinking a potion locks you into an animation? I love it.
Needs more feedback when your character gets hit.
This happened while picking up the bow, so it can happen without you manually trying to bug it out.
You can also get stuck on corners sometimes, companions too, looks like they try to turn corners too quickly.
Something to keep in mind going forward, might cause some issues; if you place an item it seems like its still selected and can be grabbed by pressing space/enter, tooltip also gets stuck doing it: https://files.catbox.moe/gfloux.webm
Is allocating stats for your companions necessary? I suppose it depends on where you plan to take the game, I could see you going for a more Dungeon Siege like thing with you controlling all characters fully or keeping more to the standard orblike thing with you controlling the main char but having some dudes run around slaying with you. At least the companions should have some simple modes you can set them to; passive, defensive, or aggressive are pretty standard for example. Both approaches could work I think.
While I do miss the 2d graphics this seems much more sustainable and ultimately I think its the right choice, it looks really nice already. Excited to see what you'll bring to the game next.
Thanks for the very detailed feedback, you're doing gods work!
if you place an item it seems like its still selected and can be grabbed by pressing space/enter
Holy moly, i haven't known about this at all. It only works for equipment slots too it seems, very weird one.
My map stopped working suddenly, couldn't bring it up again.
Had this too once or twice when testing, but couldn't figure it out in time for DD
Everytime you go to a new area it zooms it, annoying.
Thats fair, i can save the zoom value between stages and load it.
Pathfinding in general is a pain. It seems the navmesh doesn't give you a straight path most of the time, because its made up of lots of tiles. So it calculates from tile to tile instead of start to end in one swoop. Also i didnt spent a lot of time for the town navmesh, since theres no combat there and it wasnt critical. Being stuck at corners inside the dungeon is a different story.
Stutters and lag are a WIP and a learning curve for me. I tried to reduce the "first time" stutters by hiding lots of stuff in the main menu. Arrows/fireballs for example shouldn't tank the performance anymore as they did previously. Going through everything right now to see what else might cause this.
Is allocating stats for your companions necessary?
This topic is haunting me right now. Duneon Siege had a great system, but im both too lazy to restructure my stuff to fit that model and im also too lazy to manually command my little guys. So probably will go with a few behavior presets like you suggested. Im also opposed to have the companions be defined by whats in their weapon/spell slots. That took away all their character in DS.
Thanks again, got a few new pointers on what to work on!
This is a pretty polished game you got here! I didn't run into any issues or bugs though I'm unsure if I reached the end or just quit too prematurely. A couple things of note to me:
-Sometimes my guys pathfinding would bug out, this happened near the top of the building at town. -Attacks and combat were solid, but the animations did feel a bit sluggish. This was especially bad for the bow which kind of felt not too great to use over melee weps.
-I kept trying to right click to move but I guess that's just league brainrot.
Hey thanks, especially for the vidceo! Seeing how you revived the sorceress using the spell actually showed me another bug, good job! And if i saw correctly, you too had lag spikes in the beginning that pretty much went away after a while.
The pathfinding is indeed a bit iffy, especially in town since i didn't put too much effort into baking navmeshes there to prevent that. In the dungeon it should be better, but doors are still not optimal because of some collision edges.
Don't worry about brainrot, you figured out how to open the companion inventory on your own pretty quickly. Watching the streams i feared it was too hard to find or not being intuitive enough.
Theres a second level you didn't find in the video, but its mostly the same with slighty stronger enemy versions, a few better items and more bugs too.
That's right, forgot to add, the "clicking on enemies" is for some reason sort of finicky, which does seem important for this kind of game. When equipped with a bow you sometimes move instead of firing, which perhaps could be solved by increasing the "area of interaction" to outside and around the enemies themselves.
And so we conclude the adventure of Dangus and his merry band of ruffians.
He flirted with the priestess, he entered the mines and got as far as the gamedev allowed him too, he slayed greenskins and leveled up.
Companions are nice, their pathfinding seems wonky and their animations freak out when they teleport to you.
Since you do not actually control the companions one interesting gimmick would be if what type of weaponry you gave them got different upgrades depending on their class. A sorceress with a bow gets fire arrows etc.
Systems-wise its too early to make any real suggestions, need some more magic and skills first.
Tonally I think making it a bit cheeky is the correct choice. I would add text banter popups between the companions that occur while you are in the mines, just small lines popping up as you traverse. I would make the internal relationship of the party humorous and slightly hateful, something like "I cannot believe I have to put up with these idiots" from the sorceress, casual antihumie-sentiments from the dwarf and some snark from my man Dangus.
The maps, both the minimap, and the regular one, is pretty confusing. Open doors sometimes create issues for the pathfinding of the companions.
Thanks for playing and the feedback! Always good not to read about crashes or freezes too.
The wonky and janky parts need to be ironed out over time obviously, so for instance the companions freaking out when teleporting to you is mostly their cloaks/cloth physics. Didn't find an elegant way to fix this yet, but maybe its enough to just make them briefly invisible and fade them back in?
The banter you suggested was already in the back of my head too, because i would like to make them very personality based and unique. That also goes for their skills/gimmicks which is also kind of a problem on how to customize them. Dungeon Siege just gave you modular options that let you mold each guy the same way if you wanted, which i want to avoid. The bow sorceress suggestion could be a first step towards that.
Hopefully for next DD i can get rid of the bugs, get the FPS up a bit more and get some more content going. Maybe even give the followers some real abilities. Thanks again!
I'll look into that too. Biggest impact until now were all the unnecessary processes i used. Theres also some things i need to tweak with AI behavior, since there seem to be a lot of calls in the profiler.
I think you got some weird loading bugs. The game sat at a frozen grey screen for over 30s after launching. Windows asked me if I wanted to kill the process because it's not responding. Same thing happened when I loaded into the level and it kept micro freezing for a second or two as I walked around. I alt F4'ed after reading the cringe dialogue. Sorry.
Thanks for trying! Not sure where all the freezes come from, but after reading your comment i pulled out a weak laptop and it was bad there too (it has no real graphics card, so i dont really use it for testing anyways). Tried to identify whats causing these problems and made a new version with some improvements i hope. If it was really REALLY bad on your system it probably won't make it fluid though.
Comments
Having companions feels great! The battles are a lot more hectic with a team of party members. I like the Baldur's Gate style dialogue UI too.
Head down the mines for some ultraviolence against the goblin menace with your boys (and girls)? Sounds like a great time!
I don't think you've worked that long on this version if I remember correctly, you've gotten a lot in there already. You probably know about most of the things I'm about to say already. Windows Defender starts crying when launching the game, should at least zip the EXE file.
The dialogue options are numberer but you can't use the number keys to choose? ARGH
Walk animation speed needs to sync up better to movement speed, a bit slide-y.
I'd like to see a turning animation, it should still be really snappy though.
Movement feels pretty sluggish, I think you're pathfinding for every click? If you have no obstacles in the way the character should turn toward and move right away towards the point.
Stutters when you first encounter new things, shader compilations? Stopped for a solid 2 seconds one time.
Should clicking a companion in the companions window re-recruit it? Didn't realize I had to drag at first.
ALT-Tabing and then clicking back into the game sometimes makes the item highlighting stuck.
Everytime you go to a new area it zooms it, annoying.
My map stopped working suddenly, couldn't bring it up again.
Drinking a potion locks you into an animation? I love it.
Needs more feedback when your character gets hit.
This happened while picking up the bow, so it can happen without you manually trying to bug it out.
You can get stuck on NPCs: https://files.catbox.moe/43o6rf.webm
You can also get stuck on corners sometimes, companions too, looks like they try to turn corners too quickly.
Something to keep in mind going forward, might cause some issues; if you place an item it seems like its still selected and can be grabbed by pressing space/enter, tooltip also gets stuck doing it: https://files.catbox.moe/gfloux.webm
Is allocating stats for your companions necessary? I suppose it depends on where you plan to take the game, I could see you going for a more Dungeon Siege like thing with you controlling all characters fully or keeping more to the standard orblike thing with you controlling the main char but having some dudes run around slaying with you. At least the companions should have some simple modes you can set them to; passive, defensive, or aggressive are pretty standard for example.
Both approaches could work I think.
While I do miss the 2d graphics this seems much more sustainable and ultimately I think its the right choice, it looks really nice already. Excited to see what you'll bring to the game next.
Thanks for the very detailed feedback, you're doing gods work!
Holy moly, i haven't known about this at all. It only works for equipment slots too it seems, very weird one.
Had this too once or twice when testing, but couldn't figure it out in time for DD
Thats fair, i can save the zoom value between stages and load it.
Pathfinding in general is a pain. It seems the navmesh doesn't give you a straight path most of the time, because its made up of lots of tiles. So it calculates from tile to tile instead of start to end in one swoop. Also i didnt spent a lot of time for the town navmesh, since theres no combat there and it wasnt critical. Being stuck at corners inside the dungeon is a different story.
Stutters and lag are a WIP and a learning curve for me. I tried to reduce the "first time" stutters by hiding lots of stuff in the main menu. Arrows/fireballs for example shouldn't tank the performance anymore as they did previously. Going through everything right now to see what else might cause this.
This topic is haunting me right now. Duneon Siege had a great system, but im both too lazy to restructure my stuff to fit that model and im also too lazy to manually command my little guys. So probably will go with a few behavior presets like you suggested. Im also opposed to have the companions be defined by whats in their weapon/spell slots. That took away all their character in DS.
Thanks again, got a few new pointers on what to work on!
Yeah, I was trying to close all open windows, I think it's space in Diablo 2. Well it's like that in some orblike.
This is a pretty polished game you got here! I didn't run into any issues or bugs though I'm unsure if I reached the end or just quit too prematurely. A couple things of note to me:
-Sometimes my guys pathfinding would bug out, this happened near the top of the building at town.
-Attacks and combat were solid, but the animations did feel a bit sluggish. This was especially bad for the bow which kind of felt not too great to use over melee weps.
-I kept trying to right click to move but I guess that's just league brainrot.
Hey thanks, especially for the vidceo! Seeing how you revived the sorceress using the spell actually showed me another bug, good job! And if i saw correctly, you too had lag spikes in the beginning that pretty much went away after a while.
The pathfinding is indeed a bit iffy, especially in town since i didn't put too much effort into baking navmeshes there to prevent that. In the dungeon it should be better, but doors are still not optimal because of some collision edges.
Don't worry about brainrot, you figured out how to open the companion inventory on your own pretty quickly. Watching the streams i feared it was too hard to find or not being intuitive enough.
Theres a second level you didn't find in the video, but its mostly the same with slighty stronger enemy versions, a few better items and more bugs too.
That's right, forgot to add, the "clicking on enemies" is for some reason sort of finicky, which does seem important for this kind of game. When equipped with a bow you sometimes move instead of firing, which perhaps could be solved by increasing the "area of interaction" to outside and around the enemies themselves.
And so we conclude the adventure of Dangus and his merry band of ruffians.
He flirted with the priestess, he entered the mines and got as far as the gamedev allowed him too, he slayed greenskins and leveled up.
Companions are nice, their pathfinding seems wonky and their animations freak out when they teleport to you.
Since you do not actually control the companions one interesting gimmick would be if what type of weaponry you gave them got different upgrades depending on their class. A sorceress with a bow gets fire arrows etc.
Systems-wise its too early to make any real suggestions, need some more magic and skills first.
Tonally I think making it a bit cheeky is the correct choice. I would add text banter popups between the companions that occur while you are in the mines, just small lines popping up as you traverse. I would make the internal relationship of the party humorous and slightly hateful, something like "I cannot believe I have to put up with these idiots" from the sorceress, casual antihumie-sentiments from the dwarf and some snark from my man Dangus.
The maps, both the minimap, and the regular one, is pretty confusing. Open doors sometimes create issues for the pathfinding of the companions.
Music is good, the sfx are funny.
Thanks for playing and the feedback! Always good not to read about crashes or freezes too.
The wonky and janky parts need to be ironed out over time obviously, so for instance the companions freaking out when teleporting to you is mostly their cloaks/cloth physics. Didn't find an elegant way to fix this yet, but maybe its enough to just make them briefly invisible and fade them back in?
The banter you suggested was already in the back of my head too, because i would like to make them very personality based and unique. That also goes for their skills/gimmicks which is also kind of a problem on how to customize them. Dungeon Siege just gave you modular options that let you mold each guy the same way if you wanted, which i want to avoid. The bow sorceress suggestion could be a first step towards that.
Hopefully for next DD i can get rid of the bugs, get the FPS up a bit more and get some more content going. Maybe even give the followers some real abilities. Thanks again!
There seems to be quite a few particles going around, perhaps add an option to scale them down and it might solve some issues?
I'll look into that too. Biggest impact until now were all the unnecessary processes i used. Theres also some things i need to tweak with AI behavior, since there seem to be a lot of calls in the profiler.
Bow are terrible weapon, you can't use them as the mine is too cramped.
Otherwise keep fighting the good fight.
I think you got some weird loading bugs. The game sat at a frozen grey screen for over 30s after launching. Windows asked me if I wanted to kill the process because it's not responding. Same thing happened when I loaded into the level and it kept micro freezing for a second or two as I walked around. I alt F4'ed after reading the cringe dialogue. Sorry.
Thanks for trying! Not sure where all the freezes come from, but after reading your comment i pulled out a weak laptop and it was bad there too (it has no real graphics card, so i dont really use it for testing anyways). Tried to identify whats causing these problems and made a new version with some improvements i hope. If it was really REALLY bad on your system it probably won't make it fluid though.