Hi! Yeah the game is under constant development and improving all the time. I release new versions *very* frequently via my Discord if you wanna keep up with how it’s going. http://discord.gg/tYfHgXc
Hey folks, Welcome to the Moonring Community. I'm Dene Carter, the creator of Moonring, Incoboto, Spellrazor, The Horns and a bunch of other weird things as well as being co-creator of the Fable series on XBox.
Moonring is a game for people who love '80s RPGs, and wish they played the way they remember them. As such, Moonring features a slick interface with automatic note-taking and mapping, along with many quality of life improvements.
The game is still very early, and the main quest doesn't exist quite yet... but it will.
If you decide you want to play a part in this game's journey then I'm delighted to have you and would be interested to hear what would make this game better for you. I'm not adding lasers, Pokemon or FNAF fan creatures, though. That would be silly.
In the meantime, enjoy the ride, and feel free to introduce yourselves so I know who is playing!
Thanks so much for the support! Yeah, I’m not at a computer for a couple of weeks and even then, I don’t have any experience with Linux! In the meantime, I hear that dragging the .love file out of the Mac app and dragging it to the love2D engine executable gets it to work perfectly. Good luck and happy holidays!
Thanks! Sorry to hear the news builds of Love aren't playing nice with Linux. Not quite sure what to do about it. That said, it should run with the latest Love2D (did so today) so you shouldn't need to use older versions, unless I'm missing something.
Thanks for the thorough reply. I'm comparing DR with Love2D (which I use almost exclusively these days) and shaders are about the only thing stopping me from jumping ship at this point. Many thanks again, and I look forward to seeing where this project goes in future!
Thanks so much for playing and making this! There's a new version coming out today with different combat, tons of bug-fixes, text edits and a re-balanced challenge level.
1) Linux version is already there. You have it. It's the .love file inside the .app on this site. You'll need a slightly earlier version of Love2D though, but after that it works perfectly.
2) Steam: As you say, I got greenlit. But then I looked at:
a) How much work would be required to do all I wanted to do to it to make it a suitable Steam release.
b) How little interest this game seemed to generate when I released it for free.
...and suddenly realized it was not really commercially viable. Shooters don't sell. Steam users are super-demanding . I wasn't sure it was worth the extra effort considering the overall lack of enthusiasm I was experiencing.
As a result, I've been working on other stuff instead. I hope that answers some of this?
There's no 'sell all's but you can see how many you have and type 'sell 32 b'. That's a good idea, though. Good you're enjoying it. I'll see if I can do something about the adventure's pacing, too.
Python is lovely, and Eve Online proves your point already. I'd be using it if I thought it was portable enough to target all my (potential) platforms
As for your experiences with TDDs... would you do them for yourself, with your Python code? If you think it scales to such small teams (1!), do you have suggestions for how to get into the right mindframe? Any resources you'd suggest reading?
I update the itch webpage every time there's a new version, and change the version number. If your current version is different (as shown bottom left when on the game's start screen), you need a new one.
Also, if I change the filename itself, I lose all download metrics!
If you subscribe to the game on itch, you should find you get bothered with a mail when there's a new version.
I've had one potential solution for this requirement in the back of my mind. What I *could* do is externalize a data file which is read in, and allows players to map keys in a table: e.g. {{"A","Z"}, {"B","C"}, {"D", "F"}} etc. This would remain the same between games, and live next to the save file. It would probably utterly break the game if created incorrectly, though, but deleting the file would fix any issues.
I'm not keen to add this as a UI feature in game as it flies in the face of the whole thing. Having Arrow showing up as 'A' but activated by 'Z'? Sounds like a disaster - it's hard enough to get people to leave their comfort zone of their 5 fave spells as it is (Have you tried being a FlyKisser? Or a ShuffleMage? Both are kind of awesomely fun ways to semi-break the game).
Sound like it might do the job? I can offer an alternative super-hacky method if you're up to editing code and just want to see if it's worth it. PM me from the Fluttermind website and I'll go into the grubby details.
In my case it's simply because I'm writing this entirely by my self, and I'm trying to get as much stuff in/fix things as quickly as possible which inevitably leads to errors. In addition, in my many years as a professional dev, I've never seen anyone work to a TDD - they were all the rage in 1998, and swiftly abandoned by EA and Microsoft thereafter. This is partially because - unlike most other software - the actual design of game systems changes rapidly. This is exacerbated as teams get smaller, resulting in a large line-of-code-per-coder ratio; basically, the fewer people you have, the more impact any one person tends to have (by necessity). Since there's less need for communication between a team of, say, 'one' many things are simply held in the mind of the coder, and you'd easily double the length of development writing and re-writing TDDs, and the 'try it and see' prototyping methodology would fail as speed gave way to doubt.
Large projects with very few inputs and outputs in a non-realtime system (say payroll, where I worked as a coder, briefly, at IBM) the expected outputs on any inputs are 100% known. Writing software to spot deltas between expectation and actual results is relatively trivial. Games are a lot more complex, with a lot of chaotic interaction, and it would often take longer to write test cases than it would to 'try the feature out' and get errors.
In the particular case you mention, I *could* have isolated inputs and outputs, and written a test script to ensure this was occurring. But that only makes sense after the fact, once the problem is perceived. For this to be effective as a general strategy, I'd have to write code covering every input and output in the game, under every random level generation, with every variation of key-press pattern. This is simply not tenable, and almost certainly the reason most AAA teams do nothing of the kind outside of a couple of locked down, easy to test areas. At most, they'll write a 'bot' to complete the game and ensure they've not completely ruined it with the latest fix.
This is the case for most AAA games, and why test-teams are the usual method of weeding out this kind of thing. Since Spellrazor is a free game, creating additional costs for testing would be inadvisable at this stage. As a result, I'm using you kind folks as guinea pigs.
Okay - spent this morning chasing this. Got to level 12 and nothing bad happened. Admittedly, I didn't get the 'perfect' timing you speak of, so I can't guarantee there's no hang, but seeing as I've been playing since 10am, it can't be too common. I'll keep an eye out though. Thanks for your help, as ever.
This is more than awesome. You can't imagine how lovely it is to hear the clack of the controller and the tick of the buttons while this is being played. Thanks so much.
