itch.io

You need to give her a love potion.

In this position press Enter.

Do you know what this game lacks? Labels on the chessboard! All squares are nameless, I can't write my moves or moves of my opponent using chess notation.

Linux version, please.

By the way, I already broke all your codes. Prooflink: http://freetexthost.com/feybksrfl5  (Enter your last code in order to view it).

I should mention that finally the yield box in the Castle works. Yes, you said that you have fixed it in the previous version, but in fact it started to work only in this version. This was the biggest problem for me. Probably you could mention that you really fixed it this time.

How about bugs? Were any bugs fixed?

Please, make PC version!

Bug or not a bug - stick with PC. The game isn't optimized for mobile platforms, it's "one size fits all".

Also:

1.The most cost efficient thing for post-battle HP recovery is "Potion" (smallest amount of gold for 1% of HP)

2.The most cost efficient thing for post-battle MP recovery is "Beer" (smallest amount of gold for 1% of HP)

3.If you plan to resell things that you bough with your insignias in the Spire of courage, then "Steel armor recipe" is the best investment (best (gold from reselling)/insignia ratio).

4.If you have finished all personal quests with Chiyo, then you will be able to craft items in her room for free.
5.You can remove all negative stats, restore HP, restore MP and revive your fallen comrades FOR FREE by sleeping in the royal bedroom.

I liked the idea about friendship with AI. 

Now what I disliked: not enough save slots. Normally I save a game each time when given choice. But your game presented much more choices than there were save slots avaiable. Please, make more save slots.

For example, you're standing in area where you just harvested Katryx Ore. There is a way to make the resource reappear (with all defeated enemies, but it's side-effect) quickly. For this, open your skilltree and then go back (you don't need to change anything, just open skilltree and then leave it). Then go to harvest the resource. Repeat until you have enough of said resource.

Among other things, this trick works with Orangium and Wild Dispel Herb (near Ebron.)

"A modern intepretation of the traditional Zen meditation" What Zen meditation do you mean?

This is a fun little puzzle game. I enjoyed it! Thank you.

P.S. Also, it seems like I found the best trading route. I assumed uniform distibution when I calculated expected value of profit. I also prefered absolute size of profit over relative size (i.e. it's better to have huge sum of money as profit, even if rate of profit is small). Turned out that this city in Dorgania is the best route (I ignored the city where you get items in return instead of money. Yes, it's possible to sell them, but in order to be more or less sure how good this trade route is I would need to gather data about prices of bought goods. It would require me to use said trade route many times in order to collect enough statistics and I felt that it would take too much time). I ignored time needed for caravan to arrive because I would be too impatient to wait for arrival of the caravan even on shortest trade routes.

I have additional options on my mind. 

1."Plot? What plot?". Just missions, without any attempts to explain why dwarves are fightings with such and such enemy.

2.Rebranding. Making dwarves openly imperialist and emracing it.

"But at the cave, the gnomes count as acting under hypnosis."

Wait, what? Who hypnotised them to attack spiders?

This is not a good excuse. If the territory belongs to other fraction, then it has every right to forbid the dwarves from passing through their territory.

I think you need two things. A noble goal to justify invasion in areas of other fractions and reason for unification of other fractions, without making dwarves imperialist.

How about something like this?

Dwarves are a peaceful fraction, although they are always ready to protect their homeland and their people. They lived in peace with their neighbours (amazons and wolves). Their only military problem was occasional raids of bandits. But then, the Cataclysm happened. By use of extremely dark magic their world was merged with another world, with the world of the Empire. The Empire exhausted resources and destroyed ecology in its world, so it used magic to merge its homeworld with another world (by the way, it was NOT the first time when it used said ritual, it explains why its races are so diverse), full of life, resources and potential slaves. The Empire used force to unite various races that hate each other (like orcs and spiders), using "divide and rule" strategy. Said races don't hate dwarves, they are just slaves of the Empire. As the only fraction from their world that has  the biggest military potential, the dwarves were forced to defend themselves and the neighbours against the Empire. Against all odds (or maybe because forces of the Empire were overconfident) the dwarves were successufull at defending their homeland. But some of dwarves (including women and children) were caught by the Empire and turned into slaves. In order to free them dwarves gone beyound their borders. They won fight with slavers of the Empire. Then they wanted to make peace with the Empire after that (although trying to make peace with the Empire is just as stupid as trying to make peace with cancer. It's a parasite, it can't live without destruction.), but then their mages noticed something strange: out of sudden grass turned yellow! Many small bugs died. Whole anthills just dropped dead. They concluded that it can mean only one thing: something drinks life energy from their area like crazy. Animals and plants were sacrificing themselves in order to protect the dwarves (the dwarves are very close to nature, almost like elves in other settings) And this "something", according to their research, is located in the heart of the Empire. Instead of conquering them the Empire has decided to drain life energy from the dwarves and their homeland with some kind of dark magic ritual and then get hold on their resources (and possibly enslave survivors, if there will be any). The dwarves must act quickly and reach the heart of the Empire before they become too weak to protect themselves.

Okay, so we have grimdark setting where every side is an imperialist scum that tries to take over the world. Again, it doesn't help. The fact that everyone is an imperialist scum does NOT make dwarves less guilty. Even if there is war of all against all, they could just defend their homeland, instead of invading territory of other fractions (for example, the spiders have nothing to do with invasion of goblins. And place where the spiders live is clearly not homeland of dwarves).

It would be fun, but I don't see how it resolves this problem. Actually, it makes it even worse: if many forces, that aren't friends with each other and aren't controlled from the same center fight against the same enemy,  then most likely, this enemy is some kind of an imperialist bastard who wants to take over the world. It would imply that the dwarves are agressors, that the dwarves are bad guys. 

My idea was simple: to craft an item from bought ingredients and then sell it for higher price than it cost me to buy ingredients and craft the item. 

I found three such items that can be crafted with positive profit:

1.Flash grenades.

2.Hats.

3.Simple coats.

Hats are more profitable than simple coats and made from same raw materials, so you can just ignore simple coats and craft hats instead.

In order for hats to be profitable we need cheap fabric. And we will be able to get endless supply of cheap fabric if we will buy the Bitterroot farm. After that the farmer will sell us 1 unit of fabric for 175 gold.

To produce flash grenades we will need beer. It's sold in the Aldlyn Bar (among other places).

We can buy the grenades recipe from the blacksmith of the elvish village (AKA Ebron).

I think there is potential weak spot for your game from point of view of plot. Dwarves fight against many different enemies: goblins, bandits, witches, spiders, bats, etc (add giant octopus who attacks only dwarves to this list). And I'm sure than in new levels there will be even more diverse enemies. This begs question: why are so different enemies acting against dwarves? It looks like almost the whole world hates dwarves.

Why don't you just adopt the price mechanism that I already proposed? It's not like I have patent over it and will sue you for patent violatation.

"But firstly I should finish core game. I have a deadline to 10 of December to make version 1.0

1.0 is 10 levels. 40-50 guild-mission"

Sounds good. More missions would allow more time for price mechanism to adjust prices.

"I think I can change price each battle. But also I will make sure that there are victories in different locations and modes, so that the player cannot lower prices with the help of a particular easy mission.

So if player won several times in a row one level I will not lower prices."

I see problems with such approach. 

Firstly, there will be no way to lower prices once player won all missions.

Secondly, if you will punish winning several times in row, then players will easily bypass it by letting enemy kill them after each victory.  And if you will use limit like "If you won 3 times, no matter if in row or not, then prices won't be lowered next time", then it would be bad too, because isolated number of wins isn't indicator of difficulty. Maybe a player was able to win this specific mission 3 times (NOT in row), but was able to win other missions 10 times (NOT in row) or even more.  Compared with number of wins of other missions, this mission probably is more difficult.

"What do you think the best method to show time left for active background (wolf, rolling stone)?"

Probably floating text that moves with camera. So a player wouldn't need to have his/her eyes constantly glued to place where wolf/stone/etc should be. Beside, speical audio effect to indicate that wolf/stone/etc became avaiable would be helpfull too.

"Also there is a chance that player can cheat the game."

Of course. By the way, it's why I susggested number of wins, instead of win/lose ratio (otherwise a player would be able to cheat by allowing enemies to kill him). But the same logic is applied to any code. A player with some hacker skills can find a bug and use it to cheat the game. But would you give up? "I can't write perfect code, thus I should just give up". I don't think so, most likely you would just change your code. You can use the same approach in proposed price mechanism. If you will discover (or a player will discover and inform you) way to cheat it, then you can always just change how the price mechanism works. Or even return to static prices, if you decide that you can't fix it.

Another advantage of dynamic prices: As a developer you can include new bonus (or remove/change old one) without need to carefully recalculate static prices. 

P.S. Among with cheating, there is another possible problem with dynamic prices: Price adjustment takes time. Considering relatively small amount of missions (18 missions total. 19 if we count bonus mission with the giant green ogre.) prices must adjust quickly enough (probably giving ability to replay guild missions and make them able to influence the prices will ease this problem a little.).

Suggestions: 

0.I can't read tips during loading mission of game because it loads too fast. Consider adding "press any key to continue".

1.Skill for figthers "Ignore frozen enemy", so use of corresponding bonus would allow them to reach enemy base quickly.

2.I noticed that shooters, when there are many of them, tend to overdamage enemies. I.e. when they shoot at the same time they shoot the same target more times than enough to kill it. While other enemies nearby, thanks to their luck, stay alive. Maybe you could fix it (so no enemy would be overdamaged. And consequently, it will lead to enemies receiving more total damage), or make special skill "Coordinated attack" for it.

3.Some missions for guilds are quite fun. Please, consider adding ability to play them again, even without getting reward.

4.Display time left for calling wolf pack leader for help again, rolling stone again, etc.

5.Display time left before a player would be able to call the next wave.

6.Make prices in the shop to adjust automatically (Ideally it will make prices more fair, prevent overreliance on some bonuses, almost non-existent use of other bonuses and motivate player to win missions that are most difficult for him/her). It could work like this: Each time player buys one bonus the price for said bonus goes up . Each time hard battle was won without use of said bonus its price will go down (of course there must be limit, like minimum price equal to 1 crystall. I doubt that you will want zero and negative prices). Of course the trick question is "What to count as hard battle?". Probably you could make your game automatically collect data (personally for each player. So prices in the shop will look differently for each player) about numbers of wins (for each mission type) on maximum level of difficulty.  Then the game would mark top five (or maybe other number, like seven or three) missions with the lowest numbers of wins (zero number of wins for fresh missions would be counted too) and tell the player that if s/he will win any of them, then prices for any unused bonuses will go down. If too many missions have equally low win count (Like maybe this specific player have never played any mission on the hardest difficulty), then top five missions are selected randomly among them. Possible pitfalls: If you will consider implementing this mechanism, then please make sure that the game doesn't count missions that are not playable yet on hardest difficulty (either because their levels are not implemented yet or player didn't reach them yet or player have never played on said level even once, so the highest level of difficulty is not avaiable yet).

About reward from the guild of thieves. My fault, I just needed to steal gems from the orc. I wasn't paying much attention when I was reading their mission text.

How can I get rid of the obelisk? 

"I don't implement good old timer because I want to add visual explanation of why a player loses."

This explanation looks silly, to be honest. "Oh, no, piece of junk that we call base was destroyed! Guess it's too late to steamroll these dwarves with hordes of ogres that we have."

1.On the second thought, endless wave of strong enemies doesn't look as good as I thought. If you want to kill player for sure, then why don't you just implement good old timer and make the game say "you lost" when time is up? (Of course you also would need to show the time left during the game). Besides, some players will be upset/angry when in vain attempt to stop the unstoppable wave they will spend their bonuses, especially expensive ones.

2.Related note: for such missions currently the game says that a player must reach the base of enemy in order to win. But it's only half of truth. Player can win just by destroying all enemies, without reaching the enemy base. Probably you could either add this additional winning condition into description or change code to prevent winning when all enemies are exterminated, but the base is not yet reached.

What if I kill said "unkillable enemies" with meteor bonus(es)?

"Overlaping would fix in future, it is problem for all units"

What do you mean by overlapping?

P.S. Okay, I tried to kill the ogres with two meteor bonuses. It worked, I won! Probably you should make endless flow of strong enemies if you want it to work as timer.

In the guild of mages I can't get mages as my reward. As for guild of thieves, I can't get money bonus as my reward.