Thanks for letting me know. It should progressed to Day 2. I'll check it out and push out the fix in the next build. thanks for identifying it.
Found the bug with the game not progressing to the next Day / Quest. Should be an easy fix ... I'll have it in the next update. So looks like the next playtest build will just be bug fixes. Hopefully, I'll get it submitted and reviewed / approved before Apple take the Christmas holidays off. Will try to submit it tonight.
Probably $3.99 on release. I'll add Chapters 2 and 3 (each around 25 - 30 levels) gradually and will increase the price with each chapter release. Once you purchase it though, you get all future chapters and updates for free. I may price at $4.99 on launch and then drop it to $3.99 after day 1 just to get it onto the price drop websites during it's opening week. Apparently, that's a good strategy for more exposure during the initial launch. If I do that, I'll let everyone here know that the price will drop by $1 the following day.
Whatever you do, do not short change yourself! It looks like you have put a premium game together and people will happily pay a premium price. You've built it around the recommendations of your target market, the gamers! I'll happily pay whatever price listed. At $4.99' it's still less than the cost of 2 cups of coffee. Reap the rewards of your efforts!!!!!
You might well be right ... but I reckon I'll try the gradually increasing price model this time round and see how it goes. I intend to re-use the code base for several other games. Quick update on bug fixes and such. I ran into the error where the characters are not responding to user inputs. It seems to be happening either when the system is low on memory or when some kind of null reference is getting kicked off. However, the null reference might be due to resources being unloaded due to low memory. I'm going to do some more research on it. I may experiment a bit by lowering the graphics settings on devices with 1GB or less of RAM. I'm running into it on my 512MB devices and those are on the low memory settings. It might be good to see if I see it on 1GB devices when set to the low memory settings. Can anyone else let me know if they run into that bug and on what device you are seeing it happen?
Hi guys, Pushing out an updated build for play testing this morning. I did some deep memory profiling and debugging and found that there were about 40MB of uncompressed textures sitting in RAM. I've compressed / optimized these and it seems to run very nicely now on my iPhone 4S. I'm not getting the weird bug of characters not responding to player input so I'm hoping the memory optimizations took care of it. Will see though ... fingers crossed. Also, the magic items seem to be working now except for a few slots like the Cloak / cape slot and maybe some other ones. However, I know what's causing that so that'll be an easy fix. For the most part though, magic items should now be saved and loaded properly between levels.
Also, can I get feedback on the game's difficulty in the current state? It seems a bit too easy to me. I think characters are a bit too strong at the beginning and I think enemy are pretty weak. I'd like to have a gradual progression such that at the beginning, the player has to keep his warriors close together and working together to survive. However, as characters improve in levels and get more magic items and such, they should be able to gradually work more independently when fighting low level enemies. So you could have one or two heroes holding a narrow point against a horde of low level creatures while the rest of the party work together to deal with the big boss character. I want players to also feel they can take risks with their more aggressive character classes such as the assassin. Have a high level assassin work by herself in stealth mode to kill the main enemy boss or vulnerable enemy wizards. So I think to achieve this from the current state, I would do the following: 1 - Reduce the hit chance / critical chance of all character classes at level 0. 2 - Increase Life of basic enemies so they generally aren't killed with 1 attack by starting heroes. 3 - Increase critical chance of all enemies so that the player has to be concerned about an enemy getting a lucky critical and therefore has to keep his mages / archers protected and his frontline warriors health close to max. I think the above changes would do it. I could probably keep the current state of the game's difficulty at the Easy setting and put the above changes in the "Normal" difficulty level. For "Hard", I'm thinking of just making enemy even tougher and including a permanent XP or statline drop for getting killed during a battle. Thoughts?
Lowered graphics Lowered the graphics options in game. My iPad is 512 mb. Seems to have lost my saved file and the dungeon loads with nobody in it. Re-downloading file and starting over to see if maybe something got messed up the first time I downloaded. Just restarted the game and running into the same issues. I like your thinking on making the enemies a little harder for normal settings. I played on normal and it seemed fairly easy.
Sorry about that ... seems like a bug in the load / saving character slots. I'd suggest deleting the app entirely and then re-installing. Though to be honest, I'd wait for build 1.2 that I'm uploading today. Lots of bug fixes in there.
Yep ... I agree. Some simple tweaks in stats should have a big impact on play style, suspense level and such for the player. I'll play around with that once I get these bugs ironed out. I'm hoping the version I upload today will be a big improvement.
When you play the game, do you see 20 character choices or only 6? On 512MB RAM devices, it reduces the available character classes to allow it to run.
I see all 20 character classes. Restarted and turned the graphics option to 0. Now I'm not getting stuck on the beginning of levels. Just the inventory of items is broken.
Really? That's fantastic ... I've fixed the Inventory issue but I'm still running into the issue of getting stuck at the beginning of levels on my 4S. It's driving me crazy because it doesn't happen when I run in debug mode on my 4S but it does happen every time on a production build. Perhaps it is memory / RAM related. If you're seeing all 20 characters, then it means your iPad has 1GB of RAM. If setting graphics to 0 on a 1GB device prevents the bug then that really does shine some light on the issue. I can force the system to go to low graphics mode on 1GB or less devices easily enough. If that's the solution then I'm going to do a little happy dance as this thing has been giving me all sorts of grief. Do you mind just to keep checking on your end and let me know if it re-appears on any levels? If so, please let me know which level. I wonder if I should just assign the graphics level automatically based on hardware detection rather than leave it as an option of the user? I come from a PC gaming background so it's just natural to me to have graphics options but perhaps it's not the way to go for mobile devices?
Running soo much better I'll get back to you. Re-running through Day 1, and so far so good. No more stuck fellas at beginning of level. The fire mage dude is pretty badass right from the gate. The Storm Seer isn't too shabby either. Like the Minotaur tank and the Assassin is pretty badass. Issues: 1. You've addressed the inventory system. 2. Pressing the "How To Play" button from the main screen crashes the game. 3. I'll let you know when I'm through Day 1 that it loads Day 2, or the following dungeons. I'd dump the graphics option pronto (Honestly, I can't tell the difference in graphical quality with it on 0)! It's too easy on normal for sure. This is, will be a rad, premium game though!
Thanks .... I should point out though that the next release (build 1.2) is still in review from Apple, so I'm guessing you're still working on the prior version. Therefore, I don't think it'll roll over to the next quest at the end of Day 1. The next build should fix that though. The How to Play button will show the tutorial but I haven't created that yet so not surprised it causes a crash. For the tutorial, I'm thinking of making it a bit like a digital game manual where it has pages and you just read the instructions on how to play along with pictures that explain it. I don't think I want to code a demo level that explains what to do step-by-step ... just seems too much effort. Would rather focus on adding real content to the game. Thanks again for the kind words and I really hope Apple approves build 1.2 before they go on their vacation next week.
Spoke too soon Oops... dangummit! Spoke too soon. My characters just got stuck on boss level. I think the tutorial doesn't need to be too in-depth. If you've played this kind of game before, and you like it this type of game, then your going to pick this game up... you should know how to play without any lengthy tutorial. It's pretty pick-up and play ready for the genre. I love reading about the characters, and the fact that there are twenty with a backstory... very cool. I'd place the story bits as a higher priority then the tutorial.
