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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

Moar Thoughts and Ideas

A topic by Rebelbeta created Jun 29, 2019 Views: 225 Replies: 2
Viewing posts 1 to 3
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After a few days sitting on the game, some things wot I thought;

At the moment a few abilities on the Warlock class feel a bit redundant within their own class tree. For instance Meteor does a bit more damage, but feels a little pointless compared to the level 3 fireblast which has a much larger aoe and effective range. When going up against a typical single enemy, using Freeze Ray or Chain Lightning makes little difference at the moment. I see though opportunities for incorporating future destruction systems abound, adding more personality to these skills. Instead of seeing freeze ray do the typical thing and slow down an enemy, it'd be great to see the ability turn the ground to ice beneath their feet, Chain Lightning attract itself to nearby trees and metal objects, or Meteor crash through the ceiling peppering the enemy with rock and tiles :D

Lich race needing to eat and drink feels weird to me. Are they actually skelly boys with stomachs or is the skeleton head just a mask, a charade? Instead of food or drink I think it'd go a long way towards making them unique if they needed to regularly consume souls to survive. I can see some gameplay difficulties to implement, but I think facilitating them could lead to some interesting strategies. Maybe I just secretly want a zombie horde that doubles as a snack.

Map markers with writable text or something to distinguish between them would be really nice. Sometimes I can't pick up that purple mace or I've just got to drop a bunch of stuff in a random spot and unless I write it down it's doubtful I'll remember where it is :P

Last, as runs get progressively longer and higher levels are achieved, are we going to keep getting new skills every single level? Maybe one way to cut down on potential clutter and keep the earliest gained abilities relevant, you could get an opportunity to morph these skills into something more potent or change how they function entirely. Thinking things like splitting projectiles into a cone, wall, or other shapes, infuse with other elements or effects like drain life/fear, etc. 

All I got for now, thanks for reading :)

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You had some neat ideas for abilities that will be possible to implement in or after v0.3. I'll make a note for myself to not forget them.

Lich requiring souls is one possibility. I also had an exciting thought concerning v0.3. What if lich would need to drain the life from things around and replace tiles with dead grass/trees? It would probably be incredible to walk through and leave only death behind. One issue I see with this is the Capital where there are fewer things to consume, but then maybe allow draining corpses too, there is an abundance of them there. :D

As for the ability improvements, perhaps in a sense like there are runes in Diablo 3 that change the skill significantly, but its core remains the same. I'll add it somewhere lower on the list. The priority will be to get more abilities for all professions that have them up to level 5, and then I'll add more. Also in v0.4, there will be extensive modding support, so adding new or alternate versions of abilities should be relatively easy with editors. Modding would be possible even now, but it would be hard to edit animations just in the config file.

Thanks again for awesome suggestions!

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I really like the draining life from the area around you idea. Feel like it could also work as a generalized necromancer ability, maybe to self-heal or supplement eating/drinking/blood/souls across races. Love the thought generally of the character in one way or another visually spreading its influence behind where it walks,  reminds me of the game Black & White in presentation. Gameplay/fun issues could probably be mitigated with clever placement of life in various forms crammed into nooks and crannies to incentivize exploration :) For instance, I haven't explored the Capital fully yet, but it feels like the kind of place that would have catacombs/sewers/dungeon systems with some emergency life essence tucked away for the taking.  If you end up going the route with multiple z-levels and flying, perhaps migrating birds could fill some gaps in sparsely populating a desolated area.

With the ability morphing, yeah I was talking very long term :P Intrigued about the modding support, my skill level is maybe about to where I could reverse engineer my way through some of the jsons through some trial and error to add something if I had an idea I was really excited about, but I'm so visually focused an editor would probably be a huge boon to time and effort if I did take anything up.