Quick update. The inventory improvements seem to work. Now clicking on an item highlights which slot it should go to. I need to emulate the changes on the game play inventory but otherwise it looks good. Quick question. What should I do for the weapon slots for characters that don't use weapons like the tree giant and autonomous cannon? I'm thinking I could just make those trinket slots. I suppose the tree giant could wedge a magic sword in between it's knuckles like a knuckle duster.
I'll look into it tomorrow. Another development, it seems like the random crash bugs are gone. I changed a couple of settings and updated my GUI code and now the crashes don't seem to happen any more. No idea which of those things fixed it but glad it's fixed.
Hi guys, Here's a screenshot of the updated GUI design. On the bottom left of the screen is the new HUD. Now there is a new circle indicator that shows number of attacks remaining. Also, there is a button (the one with the ?) that brings up the character's stat sheet with more detailed info. image by rajdhillon909, on Flickr
Hi guys, Any feedback on difficulty and speed of character levelling / progression? How far have you gotten in the game? Anyone made it past the first boss battle yet?
I like the new UI! Makes it easier to plan my moves without having to dig into the character menus. So far I'm at the first boss (I think? Big spider?) and I'm getting destroyed. The tight hallway with like 10 enemies means my characters get picked off before I can get close. My guys are all level 1 still. Might've been nice to get a level up before here but it's not the end of the world.
Thanks for the feedback. Should be easy to tweak to allow for a level up before that fight. Can you let me know what your team composition is?
@Zerovoid: which group do you use, and on what difficulty? I found the huge spider pretty easy with my ranged-focused party on medium difficulty. But admittedly I had a few pieces of overpowered equipment, because I played around with the store to see what it offers. I'll do a fresh start and see how it goes with normal equipment. And I agree, having a levelup before the first boss would be great, both for the gameplay and psychological effect. Maybe adjust the experience in the stages before a bit?
Just saw that the Stormseer's last ability, Breath of Life, has only one use per battle and a 15% failure chance. I'd remove the failure chance. Same goes for any other one-shots. Skills with one use only should always work.
Some more feedback: 1) When the Assassin teleports onto a Potion, she does not collect the Potion. I need to move away from the tile and back. Is that intentional or an oversight? 2) Give the "End Stage" tile a marker, so it's clear where you have to stand to finish. Once you know, it's pretty obvious. But I just played stage 3 I think, where the exit is on the left. Took me a bit to figure that one out. 3) Melee heroes that do not use two-handed weapons (like bows or two-handed swords or halberds e.g.) should be allowed to use a second one-handed weapon when they cannot wear a shield. I found it pretty odd that the same huge axe is one-handed for my Duelist, but two-handed for my Assassin. Felt inconsistent, especially when going by the weapon's visuals. Party progress note: My Assassin just made her first level-up, and the others are close behind. And with at least one more battle to go before the Spider boss. If most of my party get a level-up before the boss, I think the XP are okay so far. Seems to me that you get more XP when you have more kills. Also, how many levels are there?
Great feedback ... thanks! Quick question, at the moment, I have characters recovering a certain amount of action points each turn. At level 0, it is 1 - the max AP total. Then with each level up, you increase the AP recovered per turn by a random amount. On top of that, there are items (and ability effects) that can increase the AP recovered per turn. It's a bit clunky, and I"m thinking of going instead with a system whereby the minimum AP recovered is always 0 and max is always whatever your max AP total is. So as you progress up in levels and increase your max AP, your max AP recovered per turn increases in step. On top of that, items could still give bonuses to the amount of AP per turn as they currently do. I'm leaning towards the latter as it just seems more logical but would welcome your thoughts.
Sure. My team is a Mage Hunter, Golem, Minotaur, Archer, Pyromancer and Knight. It could be that my team just sucks; I tried to pick a selection of tanks, attackers and ranged. So far I dislike the Golem, his movement isn't great and his starter skills require him to plant himself but I don't find him tanky enough for that. So far the Minotaur is who does most of the killing for my team. The archer and knight are alright, neither seems overly good or bad. The Pyromancer seems pretty good, the AoE of his first spell is pretty large though so it's easy to kill your own guys. I like the Mage Hunter, he seems a good combination of strong but pretty delicate. I'm on Normal difficulty (whatever the default is), and have purchased a couple items from the shop but not a ton. Mostly some armour for the weaker members of my party.
That's a bug ... or at least not intended. I'll try and get that fixed. Agreed ... it's already on my to do list. Just haven't gotten there yet. Yes ... the XP reward formula is actually fairly involved. You get a certain base amount of XP for finishing a level ... even if your character was nothing more than a spectator and did nothing all battle. Each character gets more XP on top of that base amount for the following actions: - Hitting the enemy (proportional to the difficulty of the enemy ... tougher the enemy to hit, the more XP for hit rewarded) - Killing an enemy (proportional to how difficult the enemy is to kill ... more points for tougher enemies) - Performing an ability (proportional to the difficulty of the ability ... measured by AP cost of the ability - doing a high-level ability gives more XP than a low level one) You also get XP points for trying to and failing the above activities. So, for example, swinging at an enemy and missing gives you some XP points as well as you learn from the failure. Same goes for failing to cast an ability. So generally an active character that does a lot during battle will grow much faster than one that just sits around in the back doing nothing. However, if your character is knocked out during battle .... that character only receives half the total XP points that they earned. Essentially, the process of being knocked out cold causes them to lose some of those useful lessons. Therefore, it can be risky to do too much with one character because if they are taken out, you lose a lot of XP.
Thanks for the details. It seems like a solid team. The Golem might be a bit redundant because you already have two other characters with a melee attack range of 2. Therefore, you might want a healer in that party. I think generally the character selection is a little light on cleric / healer / buff focussed characters. I'm thinking of adding a dwarf Cleric associated with Light. Basically lots of healing and other buffs and some light spells that damage all enemies with a certain range of the cleric. Still ... that would be after release as an free update. If you are stuck on the Spider level, I'd suggest lowering the difficulty in the options screen and then setting it back to Normal when you are done with that level.
For sure. I don't want to scream "buff!" just yet because all my guys are still level 0. Could be that once he levels up he becomes a lot better. I'm gonna try on Normal a few times and see how it goes!
I really like your XP system, sounds very good. Thanks for sharing the details. I just completed the Spider bossfight with my new team with normal equipment. Very much a breeze Boss dead on round 2, followed by a few rounds of easy mopup. My team is still Assassin & Duelist for melee; Archer, Ranger, Stormseer and Shadowwitch for ranged & magic. With the Seer and Ranger I have two healers, the Witch can debuff; Seer, Archer and Ranger have AoE attacks. The Duelist can heal herself as well, but I didn't even need that skill yet. And the Assassin is an invincible murder machine. With her skill active, she has 100% Dodge, 82% Crit and hits like a truck with 4 attacks per round (from her weapon). Two of my Rangeds have multiple attacks now, too. More than one per round makes a huge difference. @Zerovoid: Mobility and Attack Range seem to be very important. If the Golem is too slow to get to an enemy each round, I'd say he needs more movepoints or a lot more tankiness. Each of my girls can usually get at least one target per round. I can see that taking a round or two just to get in range is a huge disadvantage.
Fun idea: If you folks can make some suggestions what you think lower-tier heroes are, and/ or what the worst/hardest party combination is, I'll give that a twirl to see how it goes AP Recovery: The new system sounds good, and more clean and elegant. No randomness (I really dislike random results for levelups, a few bad rolls can totally screw you up). And if max.recovery is always "current max AP", both items and level-ups only need to increase min.recovery. I'd make the min recovery always 1, though. Then you get at least something recovered, even if it's not much. But small stuff adds up, too.
@Zerovoid: I'll do a run with your team, see how it goes. Gives me something to compare my current team to, as well @Wavelight: You can select the same hero more than once for your team. Is that intentional? Game balance: I think whether you get a multi-attack weapon early or not can make or break a game. Even more so when you get one that your hero(es) with high to-hit chance can use. With 3 of my heroes having multi-attacks it's almost like having 10 more people on your team that early in the game, compared to single attacks only. Not sure if that's possible, but as this seems to make such a huge difference, maybe making sure that you get one multi-attack weapon when completing each of the stages before the first boss might be a good idea. Plan B - resulting in higher difficulty - would be to ensure that no multi-attack drops before the first boss. What do you other folks think?
