That at least sounds more useful. I gotta try this again.
This is essentially what I was getting at. They lose sight of you and don’t follow you any longer, but since you don’t lose sight of them (due to lack of fog of war), you have to watch them fumble around. This might sound ridiculous to you, but it actually CONSIDERABLY slows down the game when you have to backtrack halway across the floor to a different unopened door and are forced to watch six monsters move back and forth pointlessly after each single step you take.
I’m fine with the floor size, even though … yeah, you borrow roguelike elements, but the game doesn’t feel very roguelikeish at all. Except you always being in danger of dying, you basically steamlined everything out that could make this feel roguelikeish. For better or worse.
Like I wrote, keep us posted about solving that end-level bug, I’ll give the game another go once it’s fixed.
Update #19 has just been uploaded to Steam and itch.io, will be available on Desura later this week.
This update features the addition of the warrior profession, and a ton of other stuff.
Full patch notes available on our blog:
@rezaf, I put a bunch of stuff in to try to prevent the “unable to claim final treasure” bug, but since I was never able to re-produce it, I can’t really be sure the stuff I did fixes it. I can only hope :)
I still have some keys available for QT3 folks, just PM me here if you’d like to give it a try.
Lol, I only tried #19 briefly (twice, I think), but got killed pretty late in the level on both attempts, so I couldn’t report back on the issue about ending levels.
Now, today Steam downloaded a new update, and now the game is like BRUTALLY difficult. You added some mechanics that I think aren’t well thought out. For example, in my first dungeon, the first enemy was an archer. These guys can pick on you from afar (if they can do that, why the heck are my magical attacks not ranged as well?!?), but thankfully I rolled many absorbs, and could corner the guy in a … err … corner.
Opened the next door, there was a level three archer in the room (I was still lvl1, level ups seem to have slowed down considerably?) which one-shot me. Yay.
Attempted a different dungeon. Strange treefolk with another badly balanced ability: entangle. So, two of my cards are permanently unusable? Might as well commit seppuku, cause single card attacks (if only to clear these spots so MAYBE another card is more useful) ain’t gonna do me no good. Yeah, dead. Yay².
Back to the other dungeon. Wtf, exactly the same floor layout? What kind of roguelike is this? Oh, and the same archer. Hi dude. Wait, where’s he going? Ah, he opens up the back door calling the monsters three level above me to aid. I already know the only other door has a sub-boss with a ton of minions I ain’t gonna be able to tackle. Or maybe … nope, dead. Yay³.
I think you guys should do some rounds of balancing…
0.9.19.1 (The second update) only fixed Arena mode. So #19 was already Brutally difficult :)
The wizard has 4 ranged attacks and the warrior has 2, so I’m not sure what attacks you’re trying that aren’t ranged. If you try to combine a melee attack and ranged attack, it only works at melee range. You can right click on cards and it will say what’s ranged and what’s not. We’re working on adding tooltips to make it easier to discover this kind of information.
It’s not permanent, the entagle debuff lasts 3 turns, and the Walking Trees can only use that ability once every 5 turns. The discard runes come in handy in this situation as well, or the summon card ability.
This is by design, and part of the campaign mode. Each chapter in the campaign will have several story quests, and several random quests. Once the seeds for these quests are generated at the beginning of the chapter, they are locked, so revisiting the same town (that offers the same quest) will produce the same dungeon. If you die doing a dungeon, the plan is to leave a tombstone in your place of death, and the next hero that continues the same dungeon will be able to get some benefit for reaching your tombstone. Randomness being what it is, some combinations of monsters are going to be harder than others, and may require that you do some upgrades to your Academy before you can beat a particular dungeon.
Exactly why the game is in early access, so we can get feedback. We can only play so much of the game ourselves (and we do), so we’re relying on feedback from folks to help us.
But this is a roguelike, and it’s supposed to hard. The overwhelming feedback we got before Update 19 was that the game was too easy, so we did tweak it a bit, but not by huge margins (increases monster strength at higher levels, for example). And the addition of the new monster types added another layer of difficulty. We’re trying to make each monster be unique, and not homogeneous, so the same tactics that are used to fight different monsters may not work. Strategic retreats and re-grouping are sometimes necessary. I have beaten the game where the only monsters where archers and ninjas, so I know it’s possible. Not easy though. I’m aiming at about a 50/50 win/loss ratio for dungeons, and we are going to be looking at the analytics to check on where this is trending.
Yeah, I had no idea about this. And, quite frankly, I don’t think it’s a very usefuly mechanic - even if discard runes were free and unlimited, more often than not you cannot afford to make use of one, because it gives all enemies a free attack. On top of trying to go for good cards ALSO trying to go for good cards that allow a ranged attack is a ridiculous prospect.
Right at the start, using discard runes is suicidal, as I already described above. You can try to flee, and it sometimes works, but this is highly situational. If you run out of maneuvering room, it’s very likely game over time.
Fair enough, I guess, sounds like a reasonable explanation.
That’s a cheap-way-out excuse. This is not a roguelike, it’s a roguelike-like. You jettisoned many mechanics that make such things semi-acceptable in true roguelike games, where the player usually has a wide variety of tools at his disposal. You might have the right combat gear, you might have a decent scroll, or a good wand, or a useful potion. You streamlined all that stuff out of your game.
And there’s nothing wrong with that per se, but in my opinion, it obligates you to go easier on the player, especially right at the beginning of a game. Call me a wuss, but I HAVE finished StoneSoup once or twice (albeit with the minimum of runes), and I wouldn’t have stuck with it if I’d never managed to leave floor one.
Yeah. Well, maybe I’m just not part of your intended audience, then. Cause it’s definately too hard for me to enjoy now.
Btw., didn’t you send anyone else here keys? Feels like a pretty lonely discussion when I’m the only guy posting feedback. Come out of the woodworks everybody!
No, there is currently nothing like that, but it’s planned. In the academy screen, we’re going to have a “Hall of Records”, that shows all kinds of fun stats, including accumulated points, all unlocks earned, all monsters killed, stats for combos played, that kind of stuff.
We will also have Steam leaderboards and achievements.
We’re getting ready to push Update 20 “Dubious Dwarf” today. I’ll update this thread later when we finalize patch notes.
We’ll just have to see how this works out. In my playtesting, I use the discard runes a lot, so I guess we have different playstyles. I often use the discard runes (or summon runes) before I open a new door, to make sure I have a good hand going into a new room. And I retreat a lot.
And as far as ranged vs. non-ranged cards, again, we’ll have to see how this works out. Range vs. non-range plays very much into how the professions are differentiated, and yours is the first feedback that we’ve heard that this mechanic isn’t useful.
I should have included a smiley to indicate I wasn’t being particularly serious :)
Your post prompted me to do some analysis, and you’re spot on, the game is too hard now. Update 20 should be released today, and it tweaks difficulty downward overall, and for some enemies specifically (enemies with ranged attacks aren’t as painful).
I wrote about the analysis I did a bit on our devlog, if you’re interested:
Yes, I have sent keys to several folks, you are the only one saying anything. I agree, come out of the woodworks!
I haven’t yet had a chance to play more than a few minutes, will try to get that done soon. sorry. I know my initial observations were already mirrored by an earlier post though.
Just uploaded Update 20 “Dubious Dwarf” to Steam and itch.io.
This build adds tons of UI tweaks, and addresses some of the difficulty issues in several ways (monsters are overall slightly less powerful, some monsters have been nerfed, and players get slightly more powerful over time).
Full patch notes are available on our development blog:
I had the game freeze up on me yesterday. Just entering a room. Clicked a couple of cards, de-selected them and then could do nothing. Had to shut her down.
Yeah, we have seen this a couple of times; we put in a fix (not released) that might fix it. We have only had it happen once in our internal testing, so we think the fix I put in will fix it, but it’s been pretty rare so it’s hard to tell. We’re hoping to get a release out in the next week or so.
I got to level 7 or something again yesterday after updating to the new version. And it only took me three tries. Yay.
Then I opened a door and the dungeon end boss stood two tiles away from me. I was almost at full strength, but he obliterated me in three shots or something. Didn’t help he had some buddies close, including some of them entangling guys.
IMO, you really gotta find a way to avoid situations like these or at least give players a way out. For example, you might allow misusing a rune of discard to teleport back to the entrance hall.
You’re the game designer, what would you suggest a player to do in such situation? There were three ranged attackers standing against me, so I tried to retreat around the next corner, but since the enemies were already so close, they got two shots in and the boss followed me out of the room…
I also had like 85 life and still was killed in three hits. In the earlier versions, when I was fumbling around, I sometimes only occasionally picked a health update and still got through the first dungeons with relative ease. Now I think I took health EVERY TIME it was available, along with DEF if possible, or INT otherwise. I feel some enemies hit way, WAY too hard now.
Also, I’m not sure if it was bad luck, but I remember finding a lot of health potions in the earlier versions, whilst now … I don’t think I found a single one in the last half-dozen attempted dungeon runs.
Maybe you should steamline these out as well and unify everything into some sort of power crystals or something, which can be used to discard cards, to teleport back to the entrance or for a full heal.
As I wrote earlier, the idea with the minibosses … you know, I really thing it’s going in the right direction, but it’s not quite enough. And it feels a bit weird, since I sometimes ran into a miniboss in the first room I entered, or I ran into the level 2 miniboss after clearing out a room with lvl4 enemies.
Armchair designing, I’d combine my earlier idea with color-coding the dungeon doors with your miniboss idea and go for oldskool “keycards”, like in the old Apogee games. Defeat the green miniboss to get access to green doors, behind which monsters from the next level range await, and the miniboss giving the yellow key. This would also solve the “run into the boss early” type of situation I described in the first paragraph - you’d need the highest level key to even open the door to the dungeon bosses room.
Needless to say, though, this is still your game - I’m just saying that - in my eyes - the difficulty progression within a level doesn’t quite work yet.
The UI has steadily improved, but still needs a bit of work, imo. I’ll spare you details for now, but two little things:
Diagonal movements only work when numlock is enabled, whilst straight ones work in either state. Can you fix this?
Trying to move with cards selected requires you to manually unclick the cards first. Why is that? Can’t you just auto-deselect them and do the move? Or just leave them as they are, for what harm do they cause?
Finally, a probably stupid question: You keep saying it’s earlier to play with a warrior. How do you do that? I never saw any class selection opportunity. I figured it was something you had to unlock in your castle, but maybe I’m wrong?
Now, I already wrote earlier that maybe I’m just not part of your intended audience. That’s cool. So if you want me to STFU, just tell me so and I’ll bother you no more.
I’ll come back to most of this later today, but quickly:
To unlock the warrior, you need to build a barracks in your Academy. Once that’s done, you’ll see an arrow on the mission briefing screen that allows you to toggle between wizards and warriors.
With Update 20, monsters’ attack value is back down to Update 18 levels, which in some cases (especially at higher levels, monsters level 7-10) is a lot less that Update 19. Health is also lower as monsters get to higher levels. Level 7 against the boss is going to be tough. I’ll talk a little but more about this below where you talk about color-coded doors.
We only have one day of analytics since Update 20, but in that day, 14 out of 21 games started with a warrior were able to win, and 33 out of 66 games started with a wizard were able to win, which is more in line with where I’d like it to be. It’s possible the RNG hates you and you’ve just gotten bad dungeons :) I’m not trying to cop out on this, we take balancing the game seriously. What’s missing at this point in early access is the true progression that we’re imagining that players will go through. Moving through the campaign, building the academy (making heroes stronger), unlocking more difficult monsters. As of now, it’s pretty easy to unlock most of the monsters we have, whereas once we really start working on the campaign this will level out, and there should be less times where you face an extremely powerful foe (or combination of foes). We also imagining that there are some dungeons that are hard with one profession but easier with a different one. And we’re going to be adding in some sort of reward when you re-do a dungeon and make it back to where your previous hero died.
Of of the “fixes” for Update 19 was to make equipment more common as loot; prior to that, you would see health potions and discard runes much more frequently. We’ll continue to look at this and see if the loot distribution feels right.
I wrote about pretty much this exact idea last July on our forums:
At the time, we didn’t get much feedback (we had a much smaller user group), so I shelved the idea. I did do some work on a dungeon generator that built dungeons that were more linear though, so I’ve been thinking about maybe giving it a try to get some feedback. Specifically, I was thinking that earlier dungeons (while people are still learning to play and don’t have as powerful heroes) might be a good fit for this type of dungeon.
Very weird. I already created a bug card in our Trello project when you first reported this, but I haven’t had a chance to dig in. Some of this unity handles for us, so I’m not really sure what control I have, but it’s on the list to look into.
Moving can currently trigger attacks, so if you have cards selected, and move toward a monster, it will attack in that direction. This was done so you can play with the keyboard (1-5 selects cards). So what a player is trying to do when cards are selected is potentially ambiguous. We could just remove the attack-in-direction thing, but it’s how I mostly play so I’ve gotten used to it, and I’m not sure who else uses this.
It’s all good. My intended audience is anyone that likes the game. I get that we’re straddling some middle grounds here and that the abstractions we’ve chosen won’t appeal to everyone, but I hope the combination of things we’re offering create an enjoyable whole that people like.
Dammit, I already wrote a lengthy reply, but the retarded forum software ate it. cursing and swearing
You can always come back to me on the offer. ;)
You mustn’t forget the ranged attacks and special abilities, though. I remember some HUGE rooms from earlier versions that were easy to clear anyway as long as you were careful. Now, rooms are usually small, rarely with more than three or four enemies, but these are loaded with special attacks.
This used to be doable. And, frankly, I think that’s a good thing in the VERY FIRST DUNGEON of a game.
I failed 4 of 5 attempts, and that’s like dying on floor 1 of a conventional roguelike. This can happen, but the odds should be like 10%, not 50% like what you’re aiming for or even the 80% I experienced.
Never trust a statistic you haven’t faked yourself.
How many of those games were first-dungeons? How many experienced players doing their umpteenth one?
Sounds like something to look forward to.
Yeah, I obviously noticed that. But, frankly, at low levels, loot feels almost useless anyway, and there’s still no easy way to tell whether or not something is better than something else. If this were my game, I’d ditch the system altogether in favor of a real inventory, where a weapon (as opposed to drawing luck) dictates your type of attack (ranged vs. melee) and it’s status effects (poison, fire, teleport etc.) and has an affect on damage, where armor can have an effect on movement and defense and resistances … stuff like that.
I can see what you were going for, and I haven’t seen the system play out on higher levels (if there is such a thing), but my early-game impression is that the current system is nonconsequential.
Well, you should revisit it. And not only for starting dungeons, I’d presume it’s even more painful to lose an experienced character.
Back then I thought diagonal movement didn’t work at all, but I since found out it does work when activating numlock and thought I’d clarify.
And surely Unity allows capturing keypresses?
Yeah, but I was never moving into an enemy, at which point attacking this way is not possible anyhow?
I use this to see whether or not a card allows a ranged attack, since this is still faster than right clicking each card and reading it’s description.
I maintain my view that this luck-based approach to having ranged attacks sucks, but since you appear to be quite fond of it, I reckon it’s not subject to change - can you at least make a clear UI icon that shows clearly whether or not a card is ranged?
As I hinted at above, I since managed to win a dungeon - yay! It was only by blind luck, though - at one point I was down to 5HP or something.
And this is currently my main criticism with the game - I realized it’s less about difficulty and more about being utterly at the mercy of the RNG.
It’s too common to face a situation where every control about his own fate is taken away from the player. It’s all RNG.
More often than not, you’re downright doomed UNLESS the RNG decides you’ll live. In my opinion, unless the player is foolish and/or reckless, there should be ways for him to control his destiny. Thus my hopefully realistic suggestions:
Using a healing potion should not cost a turn.
Using a discard rune should not cost a turn.
There should be a way to get more healing potions during a level. And/or a way to heal up without a healing potion.
As long as there’s no better difficulty progression within a level, there should be an emergency exit - like sacrificing a discard rune to teleport back to the entrance.
Healing potions should fully restore your health.
Combat should be considerably less lethal (for both sides), especially early in the game.
I guess that’s all for now, additional ideas removed due to them not being short-term realistic in any way, shape or form. ;)
