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(3 edits) (+1)

Okay so I finished this game recently in about two days and feel the need to share my thoughts. Do note that I haven’t played a lot of rogue-likes, DRPGs or dungeon crawlers, so it can be literal skill issue on my end. Only ones that I can say I played are the Rogue from 1980s and TES: Daggerfall.

I played the game as some random classes on hardcore at first, since I just assumed that the game is short. After getting my ass whooped, I started playing as a musketeer on standard.

Oh yeah, if you haven’t played the game yet, play it first before reading this comment! It’s a great game and I don’t want to ruin it for you xd


Furthest I’ve got playing on hardcore is the first room of the Parish, getting killed by the dream eater guy. Which is my first issue with the game. I don’t know if I missed something, but I think that guy is just impossible to kill xd. Getting killed by him on standard and reloading removes him from the level completely. He would always spawn once when getting into a new section (except in the archives I think?), kill me, and not spawn in that section anymore.

Another enemy that I found hard to deal with at first were Shamblers. On the very first encounter with one, I got soft locked by one at the entrance of the level. I tried to leave and re-enter, hoping that the game would reset his position, but getting back it was still in front of me entrance. I was stuck in place because I couldn’t move because of the fireplace stuff being on the sides. Maybe replace those with torches instead? It would also be nice to have torches around the levels too actually, since there’s not that many points in the game where you get to use the tinderbox. Maybe you could balance that item how Amnesia TDD does, making the lantern run out a lot faster, forcing you to light up candles and stuff.

It would also be nice if we could speed up the animations. Attacking, rotating and pickup/drop animations were a bit slow for my taste.

And the bosses were pretty easy to deal with, at least for me. Only the final boss was a little bit challenging, because I had to move around to avoid attacks and stuff. But then again, I played as a musketeer, I was just stacking the pistol with upgrades and shooting everyone away xd


And that’s about it, that’s the main stuff I wanted to mention.

Unlike other commenters here, I haven’t really gotten any cursed items in my runs. I think how Rogue 1980 handled that was curse just stopping after some time, letting you take the item off (and re-curse you if you put it on I think?).

Also, I can make music for your if you want me to. I’ve been making music for about 4 years now. Last year I started considering doing music for games, and would actually love to help you out on this, to also get my music resume going xd

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Thanks a lot for your feedback! That's really valuable insight.

The consumed dreamer guy you mentioned is technically a monster one area harder than where it spawns (out of depth monster in roguelike terms), and its chance to spawn increases gradually while going through the game until it spawns and then its chance to spawn resets back to negative until it can appear sometime much later again. It can be quite unforgiving if it spawns early in the game, maybe too much, and I'll think about it.

That point about torches around the levels and lantern lasting less is quite cool. I'll think about it. I had a technical problem with the lights on each side of the stairways if they were on walls, it would spill light behind the walls as well, so that's the reason they are on the floor. I'll look into this again since that was my original intention.

Animations are quite slow yeah, I'll look into how to speed up them, with a changeable option in the settings. Some of the animations are tied quite hard into the game logic's speed so I don't know yet how to make them faster without breaking something else :).

Bosses being quite easy is somewhat unavoidable with some character builds. Ranged classes are easier to play at this point. I need to look into this as well how to fix them without making them too hard for melee classes.

For cursed items I want them to be permanent but I'm making it easier to uncurse them.

Regarding music, I really appreciate your offer, but it's something I want to do myself and I'm able to create music as well. I do mainly rock/metal music so at some point I want to take the challenge and do something else, like game music for an own project :).

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I had a technical problem with the lights on each side of the stairways if they were on walls, it would spill light behind the walls as well

You don’t have to put the actual light source on the walls. You could do the light as it already is, and just put a sprite of the torch on the wall, and maybe just apply some effects to the sprite to make it look like it’s glowing

(1 edit) (+1)

Yeah, that would work. I tested by making them the same lights as in the hub area but a little dimmer and it works just fine. I could now change them back into torches which can be lit and turned off by choice.

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Looks pretty nice too