I really can't imagine that turn based gameplay is going to work very well in a first person roguelike
It's actually not that bad. While it may not be a roguelike, Legend of Grimrock is nicely done. Granted, the viewport is fixed like the old Wizardry games but it works.
We opted for real-time for numerous reasons; one of which is the opportunity to pull off multi-player. Being able to delve into a inhospitable/harsh environment with a friend and go against the odds is a concept I find very appealing.
It looks very interesting.
I got some good ideas for my own project just by looking at the screenshots.
The map layout is good, good connectivity and the multi level sections are great.
I like the depth of field filter, though I hope it doesn't interfere with gameplay. Sometimes these kind of visual enhancements look fine for showcasing level design but don't work once you get in to gameplay.
I noticed a bit of repetition of elements in some of the smaller corridors, especially picture number 3. Do you have a way of dealing with that?
When are you thinking of making a gameplay demo? I'd suggest making that a priority. Even a reduced function demo where you run around and engage in a little combat with some simple monsters will get people to engage with the game and give you some useful feedback.
We're playing around with different builds that have different levels of depth of field values and various other things like Bloom. There's currently a toggle for these effects and, while I'm trying to find a good setup, I like the idea of having and "advanced visual settings" category to calibrate to everyone's liking.
The repetition you see (or noted in picture #3) is mainly an issue with our current shufflebag algorithm that (should) prevent the same random values from reoccurring too frequently. We're confident that, once that's rectified, that a lot of the repetition will be subdued if not eliminated. My main art guy is also keeping a close eye on the art (adjusting the textures and models) while I'm focusing on bigger-picture aspects of the development at the moment.
The combat prototype is nowhere near presentable at the moment and our main concern for it is the pacing. It's one of those aspects that we believe we need to be satisfied with before looking for feedback from outside sources. With that said, I expect our "playable" demo that showcases the dungeon generator to be available sometime in the spring. It might be boring to just look around but we figured it might be interesting to see how the environment plays out (with traps and such) before introducing monsters.
We're actually putting a lot of thought into keeping that feeling without using grids or turn-based game-play.
A common mistake when trying to do this is to simply make a game real-time but very slow-paced, which I think rather misses the point. Turn-based roguelikes allow you to take half an hour deliberating per turn if you like, or you can keep hitting the keys and be the other side of the level in a couple of seconds - they are as slow- or as fast-paced as you want them to be at that moment in time. Roguelikes can be killed stone-dead by an enforced slow pace (for example, those with too-slow animations).
The turn-based gameplay is one of the aspects of the genre that I love and I also agree on the pitfalls of real-time... it's probably why our combat prototype hasn't come along as far as the dungeon generator. Structurally and visually we know how we want it to look like but, for the combat, we only have an idea of how we want to feel.
Right now, what we've got is what I've come to call a clock-based system. Every X moments, entities are synced and moved and their motions take (currently) X amount of time to complete so that they don't look like they're waiting for those moments (to avoid that constant stop-n-go feel). X is whatever seconds we're playing around with at the time. It's basically "1-2-3" ballroom dancing and/or how one reads sheets of music. That allows us to quickly adjust combat speed to figure out what's comfortable and fun. From a player perspective, you feel a bit detached (as some actions aren't instant) so we know that's not the answer... or (at least) that there's more to it than that.
We've even played with the idea of stopping the clock whenever you let go of the controls. These systems are still up for debate internally and I'd be curious to hear your feedback once we got something that we're satisfied with.
To explain an idiosyncrasy of this forum: Krice is perpetually making posts, whatever the topic may be, about how his never-seen-but-always-talked-about twenty-year project is going to do everything much better than everything else that has ever been made. In retaliation, Mushroom Patch has started making parody posts in the same style. Taking anything either one of them says seriously is a waste of time.
Noted. Thanks.
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