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Ptafix4 years ago (1 edit) (+1)

First off, I want to congratulate you on what you have done during this jam. It’s really impressive what you have done in that time frame, especially alone.

Now I would like to add my feedback to everyone else’s as I beat the game on my third attempt. I found out there is not much reason to fight anything but the boss. Really all I did was run around in each level, explore it fully to make sure I didn’t miss anything and then leave through the portal. I didn’t fight anything before the last level. There was simply no point to it. I didn’t need to kill them for ammo as the yellow loot gave plenty of it (and there are smaller enemies during the last level for emergency ammo) nor for health pack as I could usually dodge them easily.

I don’t know if it was due to me playing in the browser (though I did not feel any lag nor freeze) but the AI looked a bit “slow”. As in the enemies would often keep running past me if I sidestepped them. This is probably the main reason why I could ignore everything, I only had to move on the other side of the corridors to not be bothered (albeit I did get blocked and almost surrounded a few times).

I think that would be my only critic: there is a way to take the fun out of the game (ignoring everything until the boss) that feels quite competitive (less risk for pretty much the same reward). I believe the scoreboard very much reflects that as well. The higher score are ranked after the lower score because of the time. The more score you have, the more you killed and the more time you had to spend.

I can’t say I have a good solution though. The easier fix I can think off is making the AI react sooner which would slow down the game (and I believe I read there were performance issues).

Edit: Okay that was a huge wall of text. Didn’t realize that sooner so I’d like to repeat that your game is very much impressive and well done, especially for a game jam. My comment is indeed on the longer end and mainly focused on the one negative aspect I found (or at least what I would consider as a negative aspect) but it really does not mean I think your game is bad, far from it. From your game’s form it appears this is your first jam as well, all the more reason to be proud of what you have accomplished.

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vansonhk4 years ago (33 edits) (+1)

Thanks for your support!

Yes you're right! The enemies AI feeing a bit slow is both my intention and a workaround. The AI sensitivity in fact represented by how frequently an enemy updates its path to the player by running A* pathfinding. If enemies always run the A* pathfinding, then the enemies will always stick to the player without any rest. That'd be a real difficult mode.

But the main reason is that the NavMesh A* pathfinding is a CPU killer and I didn't know of any way to optimize. The larger the map is generated x more enemies on map, the more likely the game is going to get laggy. Thus I did 3 things:

- Make map generation smaller in room / corridor sizes

- Make AI pathfinding less frequent

- But I am able to discriminate different AI's reaction time (green guys react slower, red guys / boss react still fast enough to catch up with the player) Attempt to keep the boss intelligent enough.

Also If playing in browser feels laggy - maybe download offline version and try again - usually performs better!


Oh wait - you mean - you are able to beat the boss with like 2-3 tries? Man that's awesome! You're a legend! You've nailed it. In order to optimize the defeating time as well as conserving precious hitpoints, one should skip unnecessary fights as demonstrated in my walkthrough video. 

And there's one roguelike thing I have missed putting in - the presence of corridor traps, spikes, rope plants, poisonous mushrooms, speed mushrooms, locked exits, teleportations, sentry cannons - which should be able to enforce speedrunning players into some battles - prevent players to run freely while allowing 3rd-party methods to execute the enemies. This would preserve some fun for pro players. 

A a big con for Roguelike games is there's no way to conclude the officially fastest speedrunning time other than by luck - the same applies to Minesweeper speedrunning. My solution is to hold time-limited competition events with Fixed Seed Numbers so I have Fixed Proc Gen Maps for fair judgement

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Ptafix4 years ago

Now that you mention it, it’s true I have mainly seen the green guys seem lost. Having different reactions times depending on the enemy’s difficulty level is quite interesting.

Now I have heard of an idea that might be useful to you for the pathfinding (though I never tried it myself in Godot so I don’t know how practical it is here) but there is that idea where you cut the map into a “metamap” representing the various corridors and their connections in the map (if that speaks to you, imagine a graph where each corridor is a node while the arcs between the nodes are the connections between the corridors. Then you’d have to run A* on the main graph to know what is the next node you should go and compute your precise destination with A* in that node.

I don’t know if I’m clear enough in my explanations. Trying to reformulate:

  1. You cut the map in chunks (representing corridors and rooms)
  2. You compute a “general” path among the chunk (searching a path from the AI’s current chunk to the player’s current chunk)
  3. You compute a “precise” path from the AI’s current chunk to the next chunk in the “general” path (if the player is not in the same chunk that is)

I believe this mainly helps with long distance computations of A* which might apply to your game. Again, I don’t really know what impact on the performances this really would have but that may be worth a shot.

As for your trap idea, I reckon that probably should be a good solution to stop people from ignoring everything like me. If you have to stop for traps, you can easily get closed in by the following AI and thus have to fight at least a bit.

All in all, maybe I will try to download the game to see if I feel any difference from playing in browser. And maybe check if I can beat my score as well. Although I have to say, I got a bit lucky in finding a good strategy during my first try (I tried fighting during the first two floors but then tried to see as much of the game as I could so I ignored the AI and explored every floor). Doing that again when knowing the controls better as well as what to expect from the game made winning way easier.

Apparently I cannot write anything without making a wall of text currently, sorry about that. Especially considering I could probably sum everything up in three or four sentences instead of making ten paragraphs every time.

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