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Soulash

Soulash is a fantasy roguelike where you play as a forgotten god set on destroying the world. · By Artur Smiarowski

General feedback for 0.2.1.4

A topic by Rebelbeta created Jun 24, 2019 Views: 218 Replies: 4
Viewing posts 1 to 3

My time is short today so I'll try to be brief but I won't end up actually being able to!

So total I played about 6 or 7 games, highest to level 5. Immediately after I commented about my vampire warlock having the easiest time about it, I started getting slaughtered lol. Individually only the unique named enemies would give me trouble but as soon as something fast was too much for me, I'd usually get sent fleeing into one kind or another archer and now that npc arrows actually work they'd tear me to shreds, which I think is the appropriate counter but regardless came off kind off rough. Maybe if some of the early ranged enemies had a little less accuracy?

I had a way easier time on the poacher than in release version because arrows seemed to be in much more abundance and I was less scrambling around trying to make them. Before I rarely used that first level ability as costing an arrow felt steep, most recently I'd mostly been using the ability when I have an excess to keep the weight and inventory management down.

Success into the later levels felt fairly dependent on some luck on getting a good second and third level skill pick. The movement speed up ability and Intimidate were godsends. AI behavior and telegraphing is good though I noticed when using Intimidate against an enemy in tight quarters they would sometimes attack facing in the opposite direction.

Sound, GUI, lighting, Parallax and particle effects all pretty great. The only complaint here I thought of was the default physical attack sound got grating a little quickly when battles got large, especially with the necromancer.

Game really made me feel like the local bad guy some dingus hero gets a quest to hunt down. Playing to that strength, I'd love to see the AI be even more reactive to the player's presence to keep things moving even after you've depopulated the local area. Bounty hunters and ambush parties, civilians fleeing at the sight of you. Maybe boarded up windows and barricades start appearing? The townsfolk shout at you for the places you've destroyed and how generally awful you're making everything?

Ok that's it for now, thanks for the fun!

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I'm happy you're enjoying the game so far. :) I will think of ways to deal with ranged attacks, maybe it would be a good place to introduce some single-use craftable items that could help prepare for tougher encounters. There is a Fallen Knight skill on higher levels that gives immunity to arrows for a few turns, maybe something like that in a single-use crafted potion could be fun? The luck of skill picks is something that could be improved with crafting and preparation maybe too, so luck will still be affecting the run, but there will be more options to mitigate bad luck when playing.

One of the things I want to add are events that would make the game more unpredictable. This includes bounty hunters, templars or other parties trying to hunt you down, but also things like orcs raiding Mansfield, so when you approach it, you don't find villagers but a burned houses and looting band of greenskins to deal with. This is one of the things that should improve replayability that got hit by a mostly static world.  Apart from these events, after v0.5 when it will be possible to set up a base and combat will affect the environment, I want the gods to start coming to the mortal world to hunt you down and have epic battles. The full scope of this is quite far away, but Soulash will get there.

Thanks for great feedback! :)

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I haven't seen that Fallen Knight skill yet, maybe that will have to be my next run. Expendable potions definitely sound useful and enjoyable, though I wonder if our current method of learning crafting items would be a bit too much for consumables? I'm not sure if some kind of found recipe books would be called for, or if holding off on salvaging potions for mostly intelligent characters would be a compelling choice. Either way seems like it'd make sense and would fit to me. 

Excited about events and base building mechanics! One of my favorite things to do in Dwarf Fortress is going back and forth between an adventurer and building/evolving a main hub city for them in fortress mode. Maybe it's my personal bias :P but I feel like something resembling that would do well here. Not talking a whole fortress mode (Unless you want to lol), but having a changing base with minions I think would go a long way towards feeling like you have an impact on the world beyond it's physical destruction.

One thing I've been wondering about, are you thinking about expanding combat at all to multiple z-levels? No expectations here as I know this is something that can be very limited to engine and overall game scope, but I suspect it's a question you might get increasingly going forward. Thinking about it, I had a thought of maybe a fudged 2.5 dimensional combat, where a player could climb a tower or other sort of raised emplacement where the field of view is expanded out further for you to rain destruction down on a high number of enemies before descending to the ground melee. I dunno, just ideas!

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Ideas are always welcome. :)
You're probably right about single-use potions and crafting. It would be better to find the recipes in the world, especially since they should be valuable and not a viable choice for salvaging.

As for the fortress, well, I'm just going to provide building blocks and let people have fun however they wish. ;) If everything goes well, in v0.4 there will be a lot of new possibilities with modding too.

I haven't thought about fighting on different z-levels, not sure how well it would work. I'll need to change AI to start thinking in 3 dimensions, but casting spells up or down might be too easy. Technically it could be doable, right now when we walk in the world, 11 region maps are loaded at the same time, including one directly above and below. It would probably have to be expanded to more regions to cover the edges, so would have to be optimized some. Then again, it would be so cool to fly above ground or have flying enemies... I'll add it at the bottom of the list for now, and we'll see if we get there. :)

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"Bounty hunters and ambush parties, civilians fleeing at the sight of you. Maybe boarded up windows and barricades start appearing? "

"This includes bounty hunters, templars or other parties trying to hunt you down, but also things like orcs raiding Mansfield, so when you approach it, you don't find villagers but a burned houses and looting band of greenskins to deal with."

I love these ideas.