I see. Is the first level meant to be that hard? First the bats almost killed me, then the skeleton one shot me on my first run. Taking damage felt somewhat random and extremely hard hitting.
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Haha the bats are indeed a pretty tough fight.
When designing the game, I was fondly reminiscing upon the "Hardest Map Ever" custom maps from Starcraft Broodwar. The makers of those maps combined the terrain and units abilities to create "combat puzzles" that required the player to plan out a sequence of abilities and timings to overcome the encounter.
In these "puzzles" you often had multiple siege tanks with a huge positional advantage going up against 3-6 light infantry units, so it wasn't terribly uncommon for units to get focus-fired or one-shotted due to a mistake. The bats encounter is an example of this design in practice: the "Ring of Frost" spell you start with applies knock back & slow to the swarm of bats, which spreads them out and allows you to pick them off one at a time, but you have to time it just right and reposition yourself for that tactic to work.
Reflecting upon your feedback here, perhaps the "Roguelike" aspect of restarting the level doesn't mesh well with that "Combat-Puzzle" aspiration due to the long reset time? I had at one point considered adding frequent dark-souls-bonfire-style checkpoints every few encounters, but I didn't include those because I found myself enjoying the "high stakes" aspect of the long resets.
Thanks for the details!
Oh my, haha. If you want to go down that route, I probably wouldn't start the tutorial level with such a tough approach. I mean, I didn't even know how anything works yet, what my options are, etc... After dying there was not much of a learning aspect. I just thought "Ok, I died fast. No idea why or how... guess I'll just skip everything then." Then I died again. And I was out of options, lol.
I did make use of some power up ring that would empower my next attack I think. And the health potion. The ring of frost spell I didn't even had a chance to use. At least not in combat, because I died so fast.
The bats I thought would be easy, because they were the second enemy type I encountered and generally bats aren't something I'd expect to be tough opponents.
I guess high stakes can make sense, when you know what you're doing. But it can be equally annoying depending on what you want your game to be. For instance, I like games like Dungeon Siege, Divinity or the WC3 Rexxar Campaign. But I'd save often because losing a lot of progress would be a chore. However, repeating a single encounter could be enjoyable. Then again, sometimes I'd want to play hardcore for the higher stakes and permanent decisions. It all depends.
Ah, those are very interesting thoughts. As an aside, Dungeon Siege II was precisely the game I had in mind when making the character portraits and formation mechanics. WC3 was also a major influence. Sounds like you're exactly the sort of person I made this game for!
The bats are working as intended if you didn't expect them to be tough, as this is more of the Dark Souls design influence at play. In fact, I only put the weak little wolves before them to lull the player into a false sense of security hahaha!
Regarding the difficulty curve of the tutorial level, perhaps I could sequence the encounters a bit better. I still want to hit the player with the bats right away to establish that the game is meant to be challenging, but I could go for more of an "unfolding" aspect with regards to the items. I could expand the snowy area in the northern part of the map to have some frozen skeleton enemies that are vulnerable to fire, and include the ring of frost spell as a loot drop. Then I could move the bat encounter to be unskippable, and use it to teach the player to look for additional resources on the side paths as well as spanking the newbs.
Regarding the notion of a "hardcore mode", this is why I placed about 2/3 of the encounters off of the main path, so that players are able to skip fights. Most of those little "side paths" have rewards at their end to make them worth the effort, but they are meant to be optional. I designed it in this way to introduce "risk vs greed" calculations to the scouting phase of the core gameplay loop. Perhaps I could even pander to speedrunners by placing some shortcuts in to some of those side paths...
This has been especially valuable feedback, thanks a bunch!