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Mantis-Eye Labs

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A member registered Feb 24, 2014 · View creator page →

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Thanks! There are buffs for your attack power (which is hidden from you because I didn't know where to display it) and max HP but they're pretty rare and don't have a major impact (since leveling also raises them). Health just became the most important currency so I hyper focused  on it (which is also why the heal spells exist).

The UI could definitely use some work, and I agree it's a pain to not know anything about monsters before you attack. I also kind of struggled with the transition from roguelike back to wordle, and killing every enemy was the best I could come up with. The main problem is I couldn't think of a way to have the roguelike portion influence the wordle portion because I basically just copied wordle, which doesn't require any outside influence since it's already a fully functional game.

A decent iteration would be to not straight up rip off worlde and come up with something that would benefit from some action in roguelike mode, but that's a lot of work! In the current version something like having the maze have an exit as an alternate to killing every enemy would probably be satisfying enough?

https://mantiseyelabs.itch.io/rotgk

Oh actually the bug was totally unrelated to the drawing thing. It was essentially miscounting the number of characters on the line so it would truncate way too soon. I made a quick fix for it so it shouldn't happen any more!

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I'm so glad you liked it! And yeah, I instinctively pressed tab a ton of times when I was making/testing it. Would for sure be something I add to a full(er) version.

That chop off thing is a known bug, it's due to the way text is (dumbly) cached to avoid re-drawing. I actually thought I had gotten rid of it but apparently not. Fortunately you don't need to go into that directory to complete the tutorial!

The itch page linked up top of course! https://mantiseyelabs.itch.io/last-login-failed-7drl

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oof that's a bad bug. I didn't run into it myself but I added "backspace" as one of the default behavior overrides (spacebar was the only one before), hopefully that fixes the issue. Always kinda tricky when you take tons of keyboard input.

It does! One way.

Didn't finish it and also spent more than seven days on it. :(

Also just realized space was the preview key so it was super annoying. Playable technically, I guess, but not fun.

Anyway I disabled the default action for space so it should be fine now, and I tested it on Firefox and it seems okay now. Let me know if you're still having issues!

Alrighty, that was a pretty quick fix so I made O and P teleport keys as well. Let me know if it doesn't work!

Huh that's pretty weird. Surprised Firefox bubbles up the spacebar outside of the iframe. I don't know if I'd call it unplayable, but its certainly pretty annoying to have to scroll back up whenever you want to restart. I'll see what I can do.

Ha okay that makes sense. Obviously I never tested it on anything other than english qwerty but looking at the Spanish keyboard layout I see brackets were a bad choice. I'll  add something more universal tonight, probably O and P, that should fix the issue. Under normal circumstances I'd let you rebind keys but that's not something I was super concerned with with a seven day limit. Thanks for the info!

Huh that's weird. What keyboard layout/language and also what browser are you using? The WASD keys work as expected?

It's a dungeon puzzler roguelike I think? No matter what it is, I finished! It's a roguelike where you can't directly attack enemies and can freely warp between the levels (which are only 6x6). There's some resource management and games should be pretty short (couple of minutes). It's not perfect but overall I'm pretty happy with it. Let me know what you think!

https://mantiseyelabs.itch.io/shift-stack

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Yeah the thing causing the error message is Electron, however it's probable that the crash is due to my own misconfiguration. There's some stuff I needed to play with when hardware acceleration is/isn't involved that's sort of nebulous. It seems fairly reliable on Windows but I might just scrap that stuff entirely on Linux and just let people disable GPU manually via a command line option if they need to.

Oof, not good. Okay first off, do you have 32-bit or 64-bit? The version I built is only for 64-bit. Just want to get that out of the way since it's the simplest solution.

If you are running 64-bit then I will have to try to figure out what's wrong since I thiink I tested it in like 14.04 or 16.04 but it definitely wasn't 17.10. I'll see what I can do!

Hello! If you are still interested I just released a Linux version last night. Enjoy!

Yep, it's next on my list. Once I get a VM up and running I should be able to build a Linux version. Just gotta make time. Thanks for your interest!

Yeah, I have seen that bug before but it's super hard to replicate and I'm not sure what causes it. Definitely one I'd like to fix for sure!

Ah crap I thought I fixed that. I need to just build a test map where I can quickly generate scenarios like that. Thanks!

Yesss this is so awesome! A lot of that is great exploratory stuff that I wanted to be part of the experience of learning it. Like being able to blow up a bunch of the level if you want (there aren't any secrets that you can't see when the level loads). It might be good to revisit attacks/attacking in the tutorial too though, but it also might just be something you learn on your first playthrough or two. The idea is you play it, get owned, but you always know what went wrong or at least have some idea. I think I still need to refine that a here and there, so this is super helpful feedback. They're of course welcome to beta keys! Also tell them they'll be in the credits, too ;)

Also got your email with the video and will watch that this weekend. Ugh also the bug you found is one that happened to me recently too. When you attack the bat  he doesn't have the ability to just not move backwards if his way is blocked, so he'll just default to backing over the enemy who is blocking. Should be easy to fix but definitely not optimal.

Thanks for all your help and thank Caleb and Devon for their help as well!

That would be awesome, thanks!

Woo! Thanks for playing!

I think the resolution issues are the most pressing thing for me now, since it seems like it's confuse everyone but I've internalized that system so much that I can't see the issue myself. I guess my main question is, since everyone has been playing as Ghost, does the confusion stem from planting bombs while doing his special? His special grants any two actions per turn, so you can move two spaces, plant and move, attack and plant, move and attack etc. In conjunction with bombs that can get a little weird since you can take three steps before it explodes if you plant right after activating it. It might be worth denoting how many actions you can perform or something... in some way.

Also if the confusion just comes from general play regardless of his special ability that's also something I need to address but that seems like more of a fundamental flaw.

Oh wow, this is awesome feedback, thanks! I like that you already managed to get to the end (aside: I am very bad at my own game). The levels not feeling "special" actually came up with someone else and it's something I never thought about. The other tester mentioned that it didn't seem like there was much different between levels besides the colors/etc and that's (mostly) true. I think it was just me making a video game (ice level! water level!) without really thinking about it. There's not really supposed to be a ton of variation between levels but I might try and do something a little more involved. There are small limits on enemy spawning (no exploding enemies in the first two or three levels) but I might go further thanks to these suggestions.

I will have to see if I can figure out what caused that freeze. Not good :(

The biggest takeaway I've gotten is I need to provide more feedback to the player as to what is actually going on in the game. It's super hard for me to evaluate the game in that way, which is why getting fresh eyes on it is amazing. I've already got some ideas and I'll need to make a bunch of (hopefully not huge) changes that will hopefully make it feel better. Thanks a ton for taking the time and playing and writing all this down. I super appreciate it! I'm excited to put some more work into this thing.

If you're testing any feedback is appreciated. Just post your thought here. If you don't want to post anything you can also email me directly via Mike dot Watson at gmail. I really appreciate it! Thanks!