We Slay Monsters - Roguelike with Poker-esque combat out of Early Access

We’re refining our data collection to answer this exact question. For sure the difficulty curve needs to ramp up more, which is one of the things we’re focusing on with this early-access period. We’re focusing on the UI and hud for the update we’re working on now, and then we’ll spend some time on the campaign and difficulty progression.

We’ll just have to disagree on this. How equipment works is still subject to much scrutiny for sure (we want to add more interesting effects, for example). I want to keep the equipment system simple and not add inventory management, and how the card combat works is pretty integral to the game. Its just may not end up being your cup of tea.

Indeed!

It does, I’m just relying on Unity right now to handle most of the input (i.e. I have mapped NUM7 to diagonal movement), I just haven’t had a chance to dig into the num-lock problem yet. I’m sure there is a solution.

You may not have been using this way of attacking, doesn’t mean other people aren’t. I use it all the time, since I prefer to play with the keyboard and not use the mouse. I’ll keep an eye out for other feedback on this issue and see if any adjustments need to be made.

One of our assumptions is that people will learn as they play which cards are melee and which are ranged. For sure the UI can be improved around this, and we’re working on it (adding tooltips vs. having to right click, for example), but there are only 6 cards per profession. When you play Diablo (or, at least, when I do), you learn what your different skills do and if they are ranged or melee. Maybe this isn’t a realistic assumption on our part.

I have added these all to our Trello board as ideas to consider. Obviously they have huge implications to game balance, and there are many ways to skin that cat (if we reduce monster damage, healing potions costing a turn is less important, for example).

This:

  • There should be a way to get more healing potions during a level. And/or a way to heal up without a healing potion.

We just added healing potions (3-pack) as something that can be purchased in the store.

This:

  • Healing potions should fully restore your health.

We have another Trello card for this as well, maybe not fully restore, but health potions should be more useful, especially at higher levels.

Yeah, I wrote “if this was my game” to say that this is not the case and so how you view the inventory is more important. That was my idea to deal with the issue and several related ones - your own solution might be totally different, or you might not feel this is an issue at all - that’s entirely up to you, of course.

Of course, but you cannot attack ranged this way, can you? I was just trying to say that, when it’s not even possible to launch an attack, isn’t it safe to assume the player wants the cards deselected? Depending on how you coded your game, it might be simple or complicated to make this just a setting in an options menu - if the former is the case, please consider implementing it at some point. :)

I guess that’s one way to look at it. You do have a point, I’ve since kinda gotten used to it for a bit.
Then again, since I feel at mercy of the RNG anyhow, I essentially click cards and sometimes (rarely) attack something further away if I can. When something is next to me, I’ll usually attack it first, unless something more dangerous with a ranged attack is there by chance.
Also, I’m trying NOT to figure out stuff on my own before I post about them.
If you come late into a game that has an audience, it’s a pretty frequent phenomenon that you run into appearently idiotic things that were introduced long ago, people learned how to deal with it and then it was never changed because everyone was used to it working that way.

Sure, sure. I can only reiterate that this is of course your game and ultimately, you have to make these calls. I’m throwing the stuff out that bothers me without reflecting much on it - just enough to put it into words.

But you cannot access the store within a dungeon, or can you?
Anyway, if healing potions stay as weaksauce as they are, you can forget about this request, as in my opinion, potions are of very limited niche utility anyhow.

Yeah, well, I spelled out my reasoning. When you’re in true danger - low HP with an enemy next to you - you’re doomed anyhow. Almost always better to try for an attack and hope for critical damage or a teleport. Only if potion healing were TRULY significant, it’d make sense to quaff one.

I managed to win another dungeon after losing another three.

Main annoyance this session: Holding down the key to keep moving still does not work.


rezaf

You can range attack this way. If you have ranged cards selected, and an enemy in the direction you press, the attack will fire in that direction toward the enemy. I added it to the list of suggestions.

And I appreciate the feedback about all this stuff, even if I don’t agree with all of it :)

There are two “stores” - one in the Academy that gives your hero starting equipment, and one that appears each time you fill up your gold bar in the dungeon. When you fill the gold bar in the dungeon, you’ll now see health and discard runes show up in the shop that shows up.

We have some bug fixes going in Update 21 that will contribute to making the game easier. One, players were shortchanged on Gold, causing you to not visit the shop in the dungeon as often as you should, and two, the orb shield buff didn’t stack properly so multiple applications shortchanged you on the buff. Both of these should contribute to making things easier, in addition to any tweaks we do to address balance.

Given the turn-based nature of the game, I’m not sure how to make it work like you’d like here; Monsters and “the world” get a chance to move after you, and sometimes this can take time, so reacting to continued keypresses is harder than it might seem. I added it to the list to think about how we might do it. Separately, we have had some sort of “quick travel” option on the to-do list for a long time for those times when you’ve cleared out parts of the dungeon and need to travel long distances. This might address the same need.

This time I’ll just throw one out there before later coming back to your post with (hopefully) new insights:

Why? I totally understand your troubles, they were one of the reasons I made the fog of war remark in one of my earliest posts in this thread.
When monsters are visible to you, they are active, they move around, this takes time and thus slows down the “speed” of the game.
However, changing the nature of this would be a huge task, so I’m not proposing a modification like that.

Instead, what I’m asking for is very simple: After your AI turn logic concludes, check for a movement key in pressed state. If one is found, act as if the player had just pressed that key for the first time, and then proceed as normal.
That can’t be hard to implement and can save a very significant amount of keymashing on any floor where the player has opened a room and then had to track back from it because the monsters in there were too powerful.

More from me later.


rezaf

Update 21 “Pesky Pirate” is available on Steam and itch.io.

Full patch notes on our devlog:

@rezaf, lots of balance changes in this release; nothing specifically that you were asking for, but hopefully you’ll find the game much easier. Check out the patch notes for more info.

It most definately is much easier, I’m sure you’ll have some folks complain it’s too easy again now. :p
I attribute most of that to the automatical 10hp gain on level up - it’s no longer possible to have a stroke of bad luck with three subsequent level-ups without hp gain. Also, you can now consistently pick two other things each level up, which also helps I guess.
A good idea - better than those I proposed, you might say.

However, since we’re back from me being unable to win ANY dungeon to me consistently winning almost every dungeon, what becomes quite evident is a lack of progression.
It’s all samey dungeons you start with samey characters that start on level 1 and go up to level 10. There’s samey combat with samey mechanics and everything progresses on a samey path. Some enemies have mildly interesting special abilities that break the mold a tiny bit, but other than that (or disregarding that), things are a bit dull.
You can upgrade your homebase to start with better stats and unlock other bonuses or even classes, but that all makes hardly a difference.
I can’t really put my finger on it, but things lack the magic a roguelike typically brings to the table.

Unless you can come up with some ideas that make levels much more interesting, I think you don’t have to bother with a complicated unlocking mechanism for level ranges in dungeons - just make them completely linear with no detours.

It’s really annoying that the game is slowed down to such a considerable degree by each additional visible monster.
This can have a huge impact - I had a level 3 enemy open the door to an adjacent room with level six enemies, and one of the monsters therein opened the door to the room with the dungeon boss whilst I was still dealing with the lvl3 enemies. I managed to flee the area and first mop up a different branch of the dungeon to level up, but what benefit does the game get from situations like this?

Since you appearently have better ideas than what I can come up with, I’m not going to make any suggestions, but I truly hope you can adress these things in any way.

I also had some bugs - sometimes the keyboard focus seems to be invalid - at least once I managed to move when the level up dialog was visible, which resulted in me being unable to do anything but quit the game. Another time, all input focus was lost on a seemingly random occasion, and I could neither move nor call up any dialogue or menu or do anything else. Quitting the game still worked, thankfully.
I’m not sure if this is a bug, but if you have two enemies with entangle on screen, they are almost impossible to defeat since they reliably spam the ability - even if one of them is out of range. If you can isolate one of the two, there’s usually a turn when you have full access to your cards before he calls on his ability again, so you can come up with some actual combo. Like I wrote, maybe this is intentional…

Finally, it’d be neat if you could control more stuff (like all dialogs) with the keyboard.

Hope you had happy holidays. :)


rezaf

Couple of things; there are another 15 or so monsters still to be introduced, which should add variety. We’re adding some more quest types, and are going to be working to make the dungeons more interesting (both visually and challenge-wise). And the campaign should give a sense of progression too. The game isn’t where we want it yet, for sure, in terms of interesting stuff and “fun-ness” factor.

We have some ideas along these lines, and other folks on the steam forums have suggested some ideas. One idea is to allow players to disable some (or maybe all) of the animations, which would speed up the game a lot.

Yes, this is a known bug that we’ll hopefully get fixed with update 22.

I’ll double check on this; they should only be able to cast entangle if they are in range, which (from memory) is about 4 or 5 map squares.

Yup, on the list. I prefer keyboard commands as well.

I did! Went to Vegas and donated some money to the casinos there :)

Yesterday I uploaded Update 22 “Eerie Eyeball” to Steam and itch.io.

This update introduces more persistence into the game world in preparation for the campaign mode, as well as the normal slew of smaller enhancements and bug fixes.

@rezaf, some stuff you suggested (like more keyboard commands and being able to move inappropriately) made it into this release.

I’m really liking the game so far. Haven’t really delved deep enough yet for critique that wasn’t already mentioned. I will say my fiancee likes the art and chuckled a lot while watching me play.

High five!

Glad you like it :) Love to hear any thoughts you might have. We’re working hard to make it great.

I do have an issue now. A couple times the keyboard has stopped responding and I have to use mouse to control things until I restart. Most recent time I was in the arena and it happened so I quit out and now the game simply won’t load. It goes to the blue screen for loading right after the Furiously Inactive logo splash and then sits forever. I even uninstalled from Steam and reinstalled and same issue.

Yes, we’ve gotten some reports of they keyboard problem, and we’re looking into it.

The issue you are describing sounds like a problem with your saved game.

Can you email me this file?

On windows:
C:\Users[OS USER NAME]\AppData\LocalLow\Will Work For Lunch Games\We Slay Monsters\dungeon.dat

On osx:
/Users/[OS USER NAME]/Library/Caches/Will Work For Lunch Games/We Slay Monsters/dungeon.dat

Send it to david [at] furiouslyinactive.com

Once you email the file, you can delete it, which should allow you to start a new game.

Sorry about this. Early access and all that :) Seriously though, we try to fix this kind of stuff as quick as we can.

I’m enjoying the game, but have one suggestion. When upgrading something in your camp, it would be nice to not be thrown out of the upgrade menu. For example, after building the Teacher’s Quarters, you are thrown back into the camp screen and you have to click on the Teacher’s Quarters again before you can upgrade the Intelligence field, at which point you are tossed out again, and have to re-enter to upgrade the next component.

Glad you’re enjoying it!

This is already on our list to address. We have a Trello card for this.

Played another dungeon yesterday.
Maybe I was just (un)lucky, but there was not a single monster with a special attack in it.

Is all progress wiped everytime you upgrade the game? Cause it was mildly (actually really) annoying, I had played a couple of dungeons and upgraded “home base”, and now I was back to square one. Without indication of any kind…

The fact that I hardly noticed this reminded me that I hope you add something meatier to the dungeon <-> overworld relationship and/or progression in general. Like I wrote earlier, it all feels very very nonconsequential.
Now that you removed some of the rough edges and smoothened out stuff, the game is a little yawn inducing.

I wrote earlier that it ought to be painful to lose an experienced hero, but as of now, there don’t seem to be experienced heroes? You always get four (?) random dudes to chose from when starting a new dungeon.
I want to say this ought to change, but I can see this would break your entire balancing, because everything in the dungeons sorta relies on starting on level 1 and going up to level 10. So it’s probably something that must remain as it is.

I’m not really sure what “feel” you’re going after in the game, in some builds the dungeons were a long slog, with difficulty spikes and sudden death “opportunities”, in others dungeons were breeze-through affairs one could finish fairly easily and quickly, only to be back at the world map, where all you could do was pick another dungeon bound to field the same dubious qualities.
Do you have kind of a vision of how you want things to be once finetuning is further along?

I think the summary screen you get after finishing a dungeon, with the pseudo-achievements, is kinda neat, and one idea that came to my mind was to expand upon that. If you’d rather not read stupid ideas, you can skip the rest of this paragraph. ;)
If you’re still reading, how about having a “bestiary” screen of sorts in your homebase. “Unlocking” (first encountering) a new monster adds something cool (whatever fits in your game design), maybe killing certain thresholds gives you bonuses against this particular enemy or type of enemy. Implemented properly, I think a simple change like this might make opening every new room feel exciting, because killing three more archers will unlock an acher you can play with yourself, disposing of ten more rats will make all rats take extra damage from your attacks and killing a new type of boss will add a card with a unique modifier to your deck. End of the stupid idea section.

Also, did I hallucinate that or had you implemented audio controls in an erlier build? Because I now was again unable to lower music volume.

To end with a positive note, I feel the UI is coming along nicely - there are some remaining quirks, but there were lots of improvements since when I first played. Great work, imo. :)


rezaf

Every monster has something unique; it isn’t always a special attack – sometimes (like Cows) it’s something they do that effects the environment, or (like Flying Sharks), it’s something they can do (fly - which isn’t that interesting in the current dungeons but should get more interesting as we evolve them).

No, this is actually the first build I’ve had to do that on, because of the changes necessary to the save game formats to support the work I’m doing on campaign mode. Everyone should have gotten 5,000 gold in their academy to compensate and build things back up.

The difficulty isn’t right yet; that’s the hard part with games like this, IMO, is getting that just right. I’m going to leave things mostly as they are until we get all of the other professions done; I imagine that last several Updates before we go live will be entirely focused on tweaking the difficulty and progression.

The idea is your academy is churning out new recruits (all level 1) to help local towns with their woes. You have 4 graduates available for each profession, waiting their turn to perform a quest as their final examination. Once you choose a recruit, a new (random) one replaces them.

Dungeon generation needs work for sure, along with the difficulty. I want dungeons to get progressively more difficult as you play more of the game. This will be accomplished in several ways; one, you will unlock harder monsters which will appear. Two, the dungeons will get longer and more complex, with more opportunity for surprises. In other words, early in the game, as players are learning, it should be slightly more predictable and easier, but that will change to more unpredictable and more dangerous as you progress.

There are plans for other kinds of quests in dungeons as well, like rescuing someone, or freeing five imprisoned townfolks, etc. There are also plans for “challenge” levels, especially hard levels with greater rewards.

Some cool stuff in here, I like it! I created a Trello card to remind me to figure out how this fits in with the other stuff. We already have a Hall of Records planned where you’ll be able to see stuff about the monsters, graduates, etc.

It’s in the main “options” menu.

Thanks! The next update has even better stuff.

Uploaded Update #24 “Shuffling Shrub” to Steam and itch.io last night.

Full patch notes on our devblog.

Thanks for the update. I know my wife has been really enjoying this and tries out each update so I will let her know :).

Awesome, glad she likes it! Working on adding the rogue profession next, and more stuff for the campaign mode. Stay tuned!

Update #25 “Odd Octosquid” has been uploaded to Steam and itch.io.

Full patch notes, as always, on our devblog

I still have some keys I’ll share with QT3 folks, just PM me and let me know if you’re interested!