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insomniac_lemon1 year ago

Hey, just want to say that as someone not usually into the ASCII look I like what you've done with visuals of Dungeon Mercenary. Understandable if you move on, though I think you could go further with Unicode characters (walls ◢■▩🮒🮁🙫🮕🮙, enemies ☠♞🕷, character 🯅, etc ☁⛊🗲⎚⁍⚿🗝❄⸾🁱) or even color unicode 🍓🐀🐉🌟🏺🚪🪨💗. Maybe even some simple combinations (2-3 layers, auras etc)?


Simple polygonal art could also be mixed with this and go a long way. This is possible with tilemaps (using scenes) in Godot 4.X but the main issue would be lack of AA in the web(+mobile?) export or tilemap clunkiness.


Back to your games, I think the biggest issue with UI is mouse-hover descriptions being too overzealous... making enemy descriptions on right-click so you could add pathfinding (when not interrupted) would help. I would probably also make the forge able to merge items per-type (equivalent to melting non-equipped+applying in one step) and also make spells not take (normal) inventory space (or allow them to be merged/recycled in a similar way).


Personally I would like more options/opportunities and especially more slack when it comes to inventory management, as combat will still be the biggest factor.

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smelc31 year ago

Hey insomniac_lemon, thanks for the advice 👍

Unicode characters can go a long way indeed, but...  you need to have a bitmap font that has all the ones you want to use :-) The one I used for Dungeon Mercenary was quite complete w.r.t. to others that were available, but it was really years away from the font you have in a browser.

Interesting point about the too many hovers. I had never thought of that.

Thanks for your feedback, very much appreciated 🙏

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insomniac_lemon1 year ago

Yeah, I see. I did some basic font tests in Godot, desktop exports seem great for basic unicode characters as system fonts have it. Web exports don't seem to allow any fallbacks, manually downloading Twemoji.Mozilla.ttf gives what I expect for color unicode but doesn't provide the basics except for some that got upgrades. These are vector and I can use multiple fonts (and a custom font providing just what's needed might even be a good option), though using a label in a tilemap is actually a bit clunkier than designing a polygon (for repeating tiles). But it could work (far easier to get the visuals than the rest of a game), though I'm not really a developer.


For some context on my previous comment, I've had a few runs where I get a lot of the same type of equipment but none of it is really better (unforge-able or I'd need to backtrack), which I guess is a common roguelike frustration. I have made it to level 7 a few times, but it's a bit unfortunate that data (scores, achievements) is lost as soon as the page is refreshed. On the pixel version, lacking permadeath is somewhat of a hinderance when I start dying in the 2nd dungeon sooner than the initial death.

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