I didn't even know there was any prophecy or that I was feared, to be honest. Most of the intro seems to suggest that I'm long since forgotten, and most people wouldn't even remember my name, much less consider me a danger, especially reduced to a mortal coil. The only thing I had kind of gathered is that there was some kind of explosion when I possessed the creature that I make in the character creation, or even that I fell from above, because it looks like I start in a crater next to a tree that was smashed in the event.
I'm gonna pump a few more hours into it quite soon. I'll get past that beginning if it kills me. Thanks for the advice on playing Necro and Poacher. I'm going to give them both a try again. If I'm to be honest, I didn't even consider that the rabbits and deers might not be passive if I raised them.
Funsocks
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I'm here to whip a dead horse and maybe add my insights, because I'm having this same issue. And I play almost exclusively as Rasimi. I have a DEFINITE speed buff over everything else. I've tried playing as a pure warrior and I found the game boring. I like playing Glass Cannon type characters, kiting, and in other games, healing and support.
I've played 10 games in a row over the last 3 hours, and this is typically my experience:
The worst units in my case are Human Travellers. I can outrun anything else. But a human traveller before my first level up and the game is over. I'm almost certain they have nightvision and they're not easy to outrun as a Rasimi, in the middle of the forest north of the river at the start, at night time. I read the other threads and saw your advice on using trees to avoid enemies, but in my experience, the buildings in town work much better. Run around them in a circle until your pursuer is out of vision range and then beeline away from them when you're opposite sides of the building and hide behind trees to make your escape. Works a charm. Except for Human Travellers, who will pursue you endlessly to the edge of the map. I've never seen a message that "Human traveller stops to regain stamina" like some of the other enemies. They just relentlessly and nonstop pursue you for all eternity. I'm not sure if roads give you a movespeed buff that isn't awarded to enemies, but running straight down a road as a Rasimi can throw them off. Except for when you stop to rest and sleep and they just "randomly" wander to exactly where you are and beat your face in.
For my playstyle specifically, I use a Rasimi for the speed buff, crucial for kiting enemies. I play Warlock for the unlimited "ammunition" as I feel that Poacher is nearly unplayable in it's current state. No ability to craft bows until you find a "carpenter's bench", which I've never even seen, and no one starts with arrows as a recipe. So you get 20 shots and the game is over if you haven't killed at least enough Amazons to replace your arrows. And you have to sleep for 2 days every time you fight an amazon or the next one will kill you. Am I missing something? The arrows seem to not break sometimes, but it's hardly consistent. I get more arrows back that are fired at me than I get fired at enemies.
I can think of a few solutions to the pursuit thing which would really depend on you as a developer. Firstly, look at the code for Human Travellers and make sure there aren't any variables that are set to 10 instead of 1.0 or something, because those enemies are insane, bloodthirsty and relentless.
1. Increase enemy stamina consumption on movement. Enemies would need to rest more, which would give every character an opportunity to pick their battles. As a warlock with 21 stamina maximum because of my fatigue, I DO NOT want to fight ANYTHING. Even a rabbit is risky because it might be near a boar which will kill me if I drop to 0 stamina.
2. Decrease player stamina consumption on movement. Similar to the above, but would allow adventurers to "Get more done" in a day. As it stands, walking 100 feet down a road consumes the same amount of stamina and fatigue as felling a fully grown tree with a stone axe, which from personal experience can take the better part of an entire day. I feel like moving around is too punishing, but I realize that carefully selecting your movements is part of the strategy of the game, so this is perhaps a suboptimal solution.
3. Decrease the amount of fatigue added by resting. Fairly simple. Pressing "r" drops your maximum stamina by 1 instead of 3. Allows adventurers to get more stuff done in a day and not risk dying because they can't move for lack of sleep, which is hard to come by in a world where everything except rabbits and deers attacks you on sight for no apparent reason.
4. Give enemies a maximum pursuit range, or a radius from their home area where they will not continue to pursue. I have no idea how hard this would be to program, but it makes perfect sense from a roleplaying standpoint. Human Merchants aren't going to leave their shop to chase a Rasimi with literally no gear on ten million miles into a forest that's full of amazons.
5. Add an Adrenaline system. If the player takes more than, say, 50% of their maximum HP in a short period of time, they're automatically awarded a boost of fatigue as their fight or flight reflexes deign to select "Flight". Perhaps make this stacking so the first 50% adds, say, 25% max fatigue, and when you drop to 25% and below, you get another 10%. At which point, your body has nothing left to give. Another suboptimal solution as this would throw the balance out for warriors.
6. My honest opinion on the best method, one which would require extensive programming so I hesitate to even suggest it, is add a faction system. Humans, Elves and intelligent races won't attack you until you start slaughtering their people. Fishmen, sure. Owlmen, fine, they're beasts. Boars are fiercely territorial. Amazons, sure, if you wander south early. But I feel that humans that spawn 2 screens away from where you start the game and who randomly and regularly wander several screens from their spawn shouldn't be immediately hostile. It's just too relentless.
And thank YOU for the response. It's not often that developers are willing to be on the ground level with the players to make the experience work. I'll check out the upcoming releases page to make sure I'm not asking questions you've answered.
I can see what you mean about NPCs in a roguelike. I don't think it really needs to be non repetative, though, especially if you're just dealing with say, a worshipper of the old gods that may give you some random quests to go kill something for extra souls and maybe a merchant with a few random weapons. I don't really expect huge webs of dialogue when the game is at such an early stage, and I don't think anyone else would. I think the main reason behind that kind of addition would be the indication that you plan to implement it, if you do. And if you don't, that's fine too.
I find your explanation a lot more digestible than my own, but if you're making things breed, they have to be given souls. And since you're no longer responsible for that sort of thing, by making mortals breed, specifically your own worshippers, you're weakening your enemies and creating a way in which you can siphon and steal their power. They instead would have to shear away pieces of their power and their souls. It seems like the sort of machinations that a dark lord that has inhabited a Vampire would put into motion, or something like that. After all, what's the span of a few human lifetimes when you've been slumbering for hundreds of years, waiting and plotting? I'm sure we could whataboutism each other until the cows come home about the intricacies of Godhood. For now, I'm happy with your explanation and with seeding the idea of approaching the same situation in drastically different ways, which can be some of the fun of Roguelikes. It would also invariably add replayability, a staple of the genre. Replayability between successes as well as between failures.
Since we've got some dialogue happening, I would like to be a bit less... friendly I guess, and describe some of the issues I have. I didn't want to just come into the chat shitting on your game that I'm sure you've worked very hard on and which I enjoyed, but I feel I'm also not being enormously helpful unless I act, at least in some capacity, as a critic. The roguelike I've probably played the most is Catacylsm: Dark Days Ahead, which has open source code and a sizable community constantly working toward improving the experience, so it's probably a kind of harsh basis for comparison, but it's an experience I relate to this game a lot.
I spawned in an empty field next to a log I could interact with, with rocks all around me and the ability to make a stone axe and a stone knife. My first instinct was to craft exactly that. So with my character that wasn't minmaxed, I started chopping a tree and was immediately accosted by a fishman who killed me. Now, I've played a LOT of Cataclysm, so I'm not adverse to the difficult start, it's just that it's usually optional. I can't really say much except that I feel like there should be a lower tier of enemy that even beginner wizards can fight hand-to-hand without any real issue. A wild dog. Some goblins. Something that's just meat and bones to allow total beginners to wet and whet their blades a little, because even as someone who has experience, the start is brutal. Even if you spawned in a big cemetary or something with a wall to buffer the 80 health humans that you can literally never outrun.
My first and second character was a Lich Necromancer, so I instinctively gave him a lot of intelligence, at which point I could only raise the pile of bones in my inventory that spawns a 45 health presumably fishman corpse than can only barely fight 1 fishman on it's own, and my own character is useless to try to help. So I realized I made a mistake and died a second time. After playing some of the game, I realize that a summoner kind of needs to begin with all their points in Strength to pick up those early corpses. If this isn't your intention, you might want to add a wand or a staff with a basic magic attack that scales off intelligence. From my own powergaming perspective, Troll and Orc are the only viable summoners at the moment. I don't know how much programming it would be, but a tooltip on the races and the classes to advise how they should be built early probably couldn't hurt. Some of them are obvious. Build a Troll Warrior. Some are not. DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES make a Lich Necromancer.
Life three. Let's try some crafting again. This time, I'll play as an archer and craft my own arro - Nope. I need a workbench that I can't craft to make bows, and I can't make arrows at all. So I've got 20 shots and if I can't kill amazons by then, I'm boned. Oh well. We making a wizard. Unless I missed something obvious? Maybe you can craft arrows if you deconstruct the ones you spawn with, but your bow is going to explode into a thousand splinters after you fire it ten times for some reason and you can't make a carpentry bench early to replace it, so I've always got the issue where I have to be able to fight other things with bows to progress.
Life four. Time to powergame. I (feel like I) have no choice to play what I want. Rasimi Warlock. Minmax intelligence. S, 1, left click. S, 1, left click. Repeat. I clear the entire beginning area and fight an owl king at level 1 with no issues at all. Level up. More intelligence. I guess I randomly got an ability that puts fear on the enemy. 2, left click, 1, left click, 1, left click. Is this the whole game from now on? I'm looking for a long term objective, a reason to even want to craft or something to other than press 1 on more symbols to make my number bigger. It needs SOMETHING as a goal. Even a throwaway line of dialogue from my character (which could change based off your race for flavor) that says something like; "I can smell the putrid soul of the Human King far to the north, bloated and swelling from the suffering of it's pathetic underlings. Perhaps such a soul would grant enough power to tear the rift back into dreamworld... There is an obvious disparity between this creature's abilities and the abilities of it's guards, but perhaps if I harvest some souls...". Instant motivation with a few lines of dialogue. I have something to cling on to as a player and a long-term goal. It's still a video game at the end of the day.
Sorry for the huge essay, but I would really love to see this project be the best that it can be. I read your plans for future released and I'm salivating already. I'm also glad to feel your pride pouring out of your words about the visuals. It's absolutely some fine work, very unique, and perfectly functional. I won't take up any more precious development time with my mouthwords.
Adieu.
Hello. I purchased this title and have been playing it for hours. It's a great little roguelike. I particularly like the 3d symbols and 3d feel of the world. It really adds to the genre and gives the game a unique aesthetic.
I have a few questions from a roleplaying standpoint, which may also be suggestions depending on how you look at it or your design philosophy. Please keep in mind that I haven't got very far yet. Walked around, killed some baddies, went to a town and here I am. I'm mostly interested in your design philosophy before I go ahead and suggest people buy this game.
1. Are there any NPCs I can interact with? I realize I'm an angry Old God, but are there any tribals or worshippers of the old way that won't immediately attack me on sight for no apparent reason? How can that wandering Human Merchant tell that I'm an Old God and why does he care? Does just the possession make my character's eyes glow red and start extruding black, corrupting ink onto it's surroundings or something? I'm confused from that respect from a roleplaying standpoint.
2. Is there any objective (or any intended objective) beside wipe out all life in Dreamland? Gods need worshippers. If you kill everything, you rule over an empty rock. With the sole exception of perhaps a Lich Necromancer, I don't really feel that objective is conducive with roleplaying and allowing the player freedom of choice to shape the world. It might be interesting playing as a God of Fertility and getting more points by "Winning" the game while killing AS FEW enemies as possible, changing the game from a grindfest to a long-term balance of resources, in this case worshippers and souls.
3. Is there any storage, or how persistent is the world? Is it safe to leave my wood and some backup food in one of the houses I've slaughtered the inhabitants of?
4. Lastly, is there any town building, manipulation, ect? I kind of imagine some time in the future, my Vampire Count will be able to have his own manor with a coffin in the basement. My orc could have a war tent. My troll, a gore pit. My lich a ziggurat. My catperson a giant cardboard box filled with yarn. It could be interesting having the duality of character that might emerge from destroying your mortal body and needing to leap into an inferior vessel. You need to serve it's needs or it's soul will become distraught and unstable. This also ties into the previous comments. It's better to force the mortals to their knees than into their graves in most cases. It would be interesting to enslave some mortals and force them to build a giant temple in your name or something. You might even be able to take sacrifices, awarding you souls that could be generated in script rather than finding an empty tile with more symbols to slaughter.
Thanks for your time and your contribution to gaming. Even without my rose-tinted ideal of what the game could be, it's still a genuinely fun experience with some great visual aesthetics and an interesting crafting and weapon destruction system reminiscent of something like Breath of the Wild.