A very interesting game, though in my opinion sticks a bit too close to the source material (WoW-style healing). While interesting at first - later becomes a tiny bit boring due to not enough feedback from the enemies.
The town customization looks interesting, and I like the fact that you can (or will be able) to create your party for the dungeon - that's really cool. Equipping items is a neat mechanic, but it didn't feel like it affects the game too much. But the spell variety is cool, even though I feel like they need a couple of levels of buffs to start being viable.
Bear in mind that I'm not much of a healer player myself. But it looks very promising.
Cool game, I like the concept. It's a bit like MMO healer gameplay, without the MMO part. I see in another comment you mention hotkey gameplay being challenging to do right. I would look into Monks in Guild Wars 1, specifically the protective spells. It is without a doubt the best designed hotkey gameplay I have ever seen, and it's not even close. Prot monks in GW1 PvP was some of the deepest and most interesting stuff, I'm getting nostalgic talking about it. It encouraged an extremely proactive gameplay style that really rewarded the player for having deep knowledge of how the game worked, what the enemy team was doing, what your own team was doing, etc... It's such a deep well, and it's barely been tapped. It would be a great resource to draw from here.
I also see similar complaints as to what I had earlier in Necrovale gameplay (its boring, just fighting the same skelly over and over). I think the problem more turned out to be one of higher level game structure, not repetition. You have done a lot of work to guide the player to their next objective, but where things really started to click together for me is when I gave them a bigger picture. In my case, it was just a map that came up showing all runs they would be doing, and where the bosses were. Nothing more than Mario did over 30 years ago. It's a minor thing, but it gives the players a sense that there is a certain journey they will be undertaking.
The idea that there is a long way to go needs to be embedded in the back of the players mind. If they have that, they can endure a lot of repetition and tedium and grinding and imbalance and whatever other problems inevitably come up. Because ultimately, the player wants to be spending time in the game world. Its important as the designer to message to the player that you want them there, that you are on the same wavelength.
I appreciate your feedback. I have an overworld system but maybe i need to reorder things. I think I valued getting the player started with the game more than i should have. I'll work on the introduction. Providing some where, what and why context for the game.
New player model is great! Cant wait to see that quality for the other classes and enemies eventually!
Found a few things:
When in town, you cant always move the camera when the cursor is on the edge of the screen, only when theres still some space left
Skilled the chain heal and found that aiming at enemies is a bad idea, because if your target enemy dies while still casting, it will not retarget -> spell is wasted. I wish it would just target the closest valid thing in that case so i get something out of it
Very few stutters, but there were 2 i think: One at the start when attacking the first enemy group and then when i summoned a circle of healing for the first time. Both were short stutters though, nothing compared to what i experienced in earlier builds.
I noticed you got a shader compilation step in your loading screen when i deleted the shader_cache to look around, maybe i had those 2 stutters earlier, because i still had the shader cache from last DD and some things were added and not compiled at start?
Thanks for the comment. The Shader compilation was done basically a day before demo day so unfortunately i didn't get everything. I get similar results when I clear my shader cache as well. I'll be tinkering with it because I'd like it to be 100% good rather than 98% good.
I see what this is going for but for now the sameness of the skellies kinda kills it, they're all pretty much the same and it seems like you can out-heal their dps pretty easily after a couple of level-ups
The game should probably show your character's healthbar on his model alongside the other NPCs for readability It would also be useful to see the sweetspot of some spells, like Holy Light has an upgrade that makes it more powerful at 10 meters and that could be shown when hovering over the spell. Maybe spells that require you to be still to cast should stop your character instead of giving you an error.
I ran around the first floor for a while, the exit tracker led me to the top-left corner of the map instead of the exit:
I'll continue to see what I can do to spice up the core gameplay. I need new models which will help. Hotkey combat poses some design challenges without the game becoming crazy and unfair from the get go. It's a tough line to balance but i'll look at where it peaks and dips.
I've actually had a lot of thought when implementing that specific holy light upgrade, to the point where i've been meaning to change it for around a month. Not sure if you care about my youtube at all but i'll probably make a short video about why the design of the upgrade failed.
I've had the exact same bug with the exit tracker once and then i couldn't repeat it ever again. I'll spend some time working how what circumstances need to occur for this to happen and implement a fix to it.
Comments
A very interesting game, though in my opinion sticks a bit too close to the source material (WoW-style healing). While interesting at first - later becomes a tiny bit boring due to not enough feedback from the enemies.
The town customization looks interesting, and I like the fact that you can (or will be able) to create your party for the dungeon - that's really cool. Equipping items is a neat mechanic, but it didn't feel like it affects the game too much. But the spell variety is cool, even though I feel like they need a couple of levels of buffs to start being viable.
Bear in mind that I'm not much of a healer player myself. But it looks very promising.
Cool game, I like the concept. It's a bit like MMO healer gameplay, without the MMO part. I see in another comment you mention hotkey gameplay being challenging to do right. I would look into Monks in Guild Wars 1, specifically the protective spells. It is without a doubt the best designed hotkey gameplay I have ever seen, and it's not even close. Prot monks in GW1 PvP was some of the deepest and most interesting stuff, I'm getting nostalgic talking about it. It encouraged an extremely proactive gameplay style that really rewarded the player for having deep knowledge of how the game worked, what the enemy team was doing, what your own team was doing, etc... It's such a deep well, and it's barely been tapped. It would be a great resource to draw from here.
I also see similar complaints as to what I had earlier in Necrovale gameplay (its boring, just fighting the same skelly over and over). I think the problem more turned out to be one of higher level game structure, not repetition. You have done a lot of work to guide the player to their next objective, but where things really started to click together for me is when I gave them a bigger picture. In my case, it was just a map that came up showing all runs they would be doing, and where the bosses were. Nothing more than Mario did over 30 years ago. It's a minor thing, but it gives the players a sense that there is a certain journey they will be undertaking.
The idea that there is a long way to go needs to be embedded in the back of the players mind. If they have that, they can endure a lot of repetition and tedium and grinding and imbalance and whatever other problems inevitably come up. Because ultimately, the player wants to be spending time in the game world. Its important as the designer to message to the player that you want them there, that you are on the same wavelength.
Keep it up.
I appreciate your feedback. I have an overworld system but maybe i need to reorder things. I think I valued getting the player started with the game more than i should have. I'll work on the introduction. Providing some where, what and why context for the game.
New player model is great! Cant wait to see that quality for the other classes and enemies eventually!
Found a few things:
I noticed you got a shader compilation step in your loading screen when i deleted the shader_cache to look around, maybe i had those 2 stutters earlier, because i still had the shader cache from last DD and some things were added and not compiled at start?
Thanks for the comment. The Shader compilation was done basically a day before demo day so unfortunately i didn't get everything. I get similar results when I clear my shader cache as well. I'll be tinkering with it because I'd like it to be 100% good rather than 98% good.
I see what this is going for but for now the sameness of the skellies kinda kills it, they're all pretty much the same and it seems like you can out-heal their dps pretty easily after a couple of level-ups
The game should probably show your character's healthbar on his model alongside the other NPCs for readability
It would also be useful to see the sweetspot of some spells, like Holy Light has an upgrade that makes it more powerful at 10 meters and that could be shown when hovering over the spell.
Maybe spells that require you to be still to cast should stop your character instead of giving you an error.
I ran around the first floor for a while, the exit tracker led me to the top-left corner of the map instead of the exit:
I'll continue to see what I can do to spice up the core gameplay. I need new models which will help. Hotkey combat poses some design challenges without the game becoming crazy and unfair from the get go. It's a tough line to balance but i'll look at where it peaks and dips.
I've actually had a lot of thought when implementing that specific holy light upgrade, to the point where i've been meaning to change it for around a month. Not sure if you care about my youtube at all but i'll probably make a short video about why the design of the upgrade failed.
I've had the exact same bug with the exit tracker once and then i couldn't repeat it ever again. I'll spend some time working how what circumstances need to occur for this to happen and implement a fix to it.
Thanks for the feedback as always.
this rules, love it