That is fair. I wasn't sure though, hence why I clarified. See you at Steam launch!
Palandus
Recent community posts
Some ideas for things "not" in the game as of yet:
1) Random events = After completing any activity with "more" than 3 actions (ie explore forest wouldn't count, but kill goblins would), there is a chance to spawn a random event. This would allow you to earn extra/more XP for some skill and some power, possibly bypassing other things. It would also make some playthroughs feel more unique.
2) Shortcuts = Perhaps after doing certain activity enough times, you can now skip it for future runs. So, say you do the defeat Forest Guardian enough times, you can now skip it, and go straight to exploring the forest. Or maybe after exploring the city enough times, you know it by heart now, or where the books are in the library. Skipping would mean you do get the xp, just not have to spend the time doing the actions.
3) Random challenges = Each run generates with a few challenges. Some might be to reach a certain skill level, or maybe complete a questline, or say do a certain kind of action enough times (so say you need to do 30 actions that grant precision xp). Completing a challenge grants you some permanent xp to ALL your skills.
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Anywho, check back in it later. As usual. Happy devving.
Some other ideas:
-> Using money we earn to build our own stronghold. Each portion of it could heavily train skills, giving us a mid-late game way to heavily build up skills in a run.
-> Or allow us to do something like Raven Rock (ES: Morrowind) where we manage a town and make choices on how it develops.
-> Give us a way to send something from a previous loop, into the next loop. So say you acquire the Purification Potion, but lack the time to purify the tree. So you send it into the next loop, so that you have it prepared and now all you have to do is defeat the Satyrs again. It would mean skipping a lot of skill development that would be used to normally gain that potion though.
-> Allow us to choose a profession at new-loop start. This profession doubles XP gains for a particular pair of activities. So the Farmer, might get doubled Farming and doubled Precision skill gains. The Knight, might get doubled Combat and Crafting. The Merchant, might get doubled Speaking and Reading. Etc... This would help to provide a focus for our runs, by letting us specialize into specific tasks. Then at the next loop, you can choose the same profession, or a different one.
-> Race exclusive secondary options. If you choose elves, you get special extra options for some activities. Maybe instead of needing to kill the Satyrs, the elves have a secret path that lets you sneak the purification potion to the tree and then it kills the Satyrs for you. Or maybe if you choose goblins, and you kill the fairy, their ingenuity lets you craft two of the potions, instead of one, but each is at 50% effectiveness. That kind of thing.
-> Allow us to invest in things in one loop, that persists across other loops. Say we have the ability to buy a magical farm. Any actions taken at the farm, persists between loops. So any farming you do there, you get persistent xp each round... so say you did 14 rounds of creating carrots. Then every loop, you'd earn 14 rounds of carrots farming XP... or more, if you spent more time farming there.
Haven't played it in a while, so played it now. Shaping up nicely, but some comments:
1) Perhaps remove the requirement to learn dwarven to open the big door. Also, if the door was broken, the gears to repair it would be accessed on the otherside, otherwise it wouldn't make for a good protective device, as then you could just bash the hinges and have it fall. Require learning dwarven or dragonkin at the library, for when you wish to pick a race.
2) Allow dwarven runesmithing to work on improving existing items crafted; ie iron sword, moon sword, etc... to enhance them further... and give more opportunities to runesmith.
3) Provide more sources of Iron and Mithril in the underground caves, with ways of utilizing them.
4) Able to craft barding for our dire wolf, fire lizards, and salamander, perhaps? Or more activities interacting with them. Maybe you can only access certain areas if you have them trained, as an example.
5) Have in the description the effects of each potion brewed with the fairy wings. Maybe also have other opportunities to find the wings too.
6) Why do we need Ecomancy to have grow cabbages unlocked? I get to make cabbage warriors, but not the cabbages themselves.
7) If farming is used to create twiglings and remove organic matter from that door, maybe farming should be used for harvesting / cutting down wood as well (instead of Precision).
8) Each city has an inn that can be visited and you can sleep in it to raise Sleep skill.
So tried out the latest downloadable version. Got a bazillion warnings to not download it or use it. I've downloaded other Godot titles, where its just the exe and the data archive, so maybe go with that.
Plays fine until you try to explore a cave. You get the select screen, and I choose 7 rooms 1 levels. After that... the game then freezes, my graphics card max fan speeds, then my monitors went black, and I thought for a moment it was about to BSOD, when the game crashed completely instead. Then things calmed down.
Also exploration felt much weirder. I didn't start in a town, I had no followers, and kept finding small xp with gold and xp spots. Though, it should say gold OR xp, as you can't choose both... for reasons. Also, text was a bit too large and didn't fit inside text boxes that well.
Everything felt like a downgrade. Why did you go with this direction?
Tried it again, some notes:
-> Way too many enemy bullets. Unlike the listed games, who gives the ship a small hitbox, our ship is the entire hitbox, which makes it quite unmanageable at points. So the game is more akin to Raptor/Demonstar in terms of hitboxes, so maybe do the same for enemy counts and bullet counts.
-> Orb is useless.
-> Flame is pretty but also useless. Have to get way too close to use it and its too easy to crash into an enemy and kill yourself.
-> Flame and Vulcan shots overlap, so I'm not sure if Vulcan was working.
-> Beam seems to be pretty useful.
-> If you move your mouse too far to the left or right, the game loses input control until you move it back. This can result in taking hits unintentionally or when the mouse returns, your ship then moves too fast and into an enemy and dies.
Tried it briefly, some notes:
-> Extremely hard with no meta progression yet.
-> Nuke has a lot of trouble hitting targets and its blast radius rarely hurts anything.
-> 2x Auto-Lock doesn't mean you get two targets or two beams.
-> Freeze wears off too fast.
-> Rockets do like almost no damage by Stage 1-3. Same with your basic attack.
-> No sound effects at all, and button on main UI doesn't add/remove sounds.
I had three perks that said that it applied party wide, and my last character had +15% critical chance. Though can't confirm if that is applied, as you don't have critical chance listed on the character sheet. Nor for dodge chance.
Each party perk I had once each. One was supposed to give greater defense. Another greater dexterity. And last one was like +15% damage party wide.
Some further feedback:
1) Graveyard level 6 is too hard. I've lost 2 well geared squads to it, and only completed it once... and barely survived. You really do need a level 7+ party to do it, but you can't do graveyard at level 7+.
2) Party perks are definitely not being applied.
3) I'm not sure Dodge is being applied. Even with +20 stat, and I think dexterity is used for it, and its at 31, the character still regularly gets hit, and not actually seen them avoid damage entirely.
4) I think defense isn't reducing damage completely, as I have one character that has like 40 defense, and regularly takes 1 damage hits.
5) If you have too many loot items, you cannot select the middle two characters, to see if they need any upgrades. Usually a result of doing Gobbling keep at depth 5 or depth 6.
6) Too many rings at Emberforge generate with low rolls, despite appearing to be rare or epic quality. Cost a fortune, but why would I spend it on their low rolls?
7) Noticed with the Emberforge, that each item is generated at a specific tier, with the worst items generated at far left, moderate items generated in middle, and best items generated at far right. Thus at late game, you have to reroll constantly to get epics in far right slot, to have any upgrades.
Playing some more, trying out new stuff, noticed these:
Bugs?
1) Hovering over Steam Icon says "Game Options"
2) Clicking either increase or decrease music volume, changes the music track.
3) The trait "I have +40% strength (min +5) but -15% defense" doesn't work. My character's strength is 5, so unless they rolled 0 strength, this isn't working.
4) Not sure team buffs are being re-applied as they level up and gain more stats.
Feedback (as promised):
-> Completed the current content, submitted my name, with a severely overgeared level 11 party. By severely overgeared, I mean that I was killing the ogre boss in less than 2 seconds on floor depth 3.
-> I found it very difficult to find epic quality gear for rings and chest armor.
-> There doesn't seem to be much value in going deeper than floor depth 5. The amount of scaled difficulty is so high that, you risk losing your team, by trying out depth 6.
-> Found it weird that the ogre epic sword was only 5-10 damage, as by that point all my weapons were 10-20 damage.
-> I tended to avoid Potion, Loot, and Trap rooms. They just didn't seem to be worthwhile to visit, even when I was on depth 5 for loot rooms, or even when I was out of Potions. You only get one potion per room, and by the time I need potions, sometimes I'm using 2-3 potions a combat encounter.
-> Really could use a sell all items button. Often I was doing fast runs, to get the campfire progress, and so I'd load up with loot each time, and then have to manually sell each item.
-> Ogre boss felt easier to fight than the Skeleton boss. Could simply be because I was overgeared though.
-> Earning levels got pretty hard, unless I was regularly visiting floor depth 4+.
-> Possible cognitive bias: My two lowest hp heroes, always seemed to get targeted by enemies, while my two tankier heroes, barely ever took any damage.
New Alternate Paths:
-> Craft Mithril Warhammers = When you have Goblin Brutes, craft these for them. That way mithril is useful to both elves and goblin paths.
-> Craft Potion of Flight = Using the Fairy Wings to unlock additional gameplay paths that would require you have some way to fly, to reach them.
-> Divine Rites = If you turn over the Necromicon, you can perform Divine Rites on all the corpses you've accumulated, to say train Holy Magic, a new form of spellcasting.
Balancing:
-> Piercing Needles = should grant say +250 power each time. It takes a massive time investment to reach it (entire wizard tower + purifying the tree) and it takes 50 seconds per time to do.
-> Help Vegetable Vendor = should give 2 speaking per time.
-> Learn Animal Empathy = should give 5 animal handling per time.
-> Ride Direwolf = Have it unlock when you tame it.