Messages

31

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Afterlife 3: Legends of Rickard Bronson (a freeware roguelike platformer)

« on: January 28, 2013, 11:52:46 AM »

I don't find the game very manoeuverable right now, take for instance when you jump and then umbrella-jump and touch a block on your right.. no matter how higher the umbrella-jump goes, you can't anymore lean right.. your flight is gonna be vertical. That's the sort of stuff I'm talking about.

By hitting the attack key just after umbrella-jumping, you can use the momentum of the jump without hanging onto the DHU, meaning that you won't rebound from walls in the same way. There's also a trait called Hang Glider which allows you to steer the DHU in the air.

The game is a little bit too hard at the moment.. unless it's your intention to keep it Nintendo-hard.

I wouldn't take "Nintendo-hard" as an undesired criticism.

It is very much designed to be a game that gets easier with experience though, and there are different ways to approach it strategically: for example whether you aim to reap every item from a level, or rely on speed-running for a good time bonus; or whether you try to fight as many enemies as possible to collect treasure and mana, or whether you avoid combat and play stealthily, or even as a pacifist, in order to avoid angering the hellion factions.

There are also quite a few unlockable advantages which you'll encounter as you achieve more within the game.

Traits cost too much.. every baloon only gives 1 star, I never managed to collect 100 of them in order to get a trait.

Collecting balloons will gradually gain you mana, but an even quicker way is to kill enemies using the DHU, especially using combo attacks. I usually aim to have one or two traits by the end of Act IV - and depending on the traits you choose, you can accrue mana even more quickly from then (Balloon Animal, for instance, increases the amount of mana available from balloons).

And fixing/replacing the balloon is very expensive.. can't think that everytime I get hit I have to pay 200 coins to repair it. And no balloon pretty much means game over.

I actually know players who intentionally don't use the balloon for much of the game, relying almost entirely on exploring on foot, and there are items which can effectively replace it for situations in which it might be necessary. Then again, there are players who explore and fight almost entirely in the balloon, and use their money to upgrade it heavily for that purpose. In any case, the more carefully you play, the less likely you are to need to spend your money on repairing and replacing the balloon, so it's often a good idea to think carefully about when to park it somewhere safe while you explore.

Ryan

32

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Afterlife 3: Legends of Rickard Bronson (a freeware roguelike platformer)

« on: January 26, 2013, 01:30:19 PM »

the game is awesome, I am having a lot of fun :-)

Thanks - really glad you're enjoying it.

Hopefully, you'll find that the controls feel more natural as you get used to them. They're a lot tighter than in most straight-forward platformers, in order to allow plenty of fast-fingered manoeuverability in the kind of unexpected situations that spring from randomised levels.

33

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Afterlife 3: Legends of Rickard Bronson (a freeware roguelike platformer)

« on: January 26, 2013, 12:56:07 AM »

I hate those kind of jump games.

I did warn that the action-based side of things was likely offputting for a lot of people.

Actually, those jumps really aren't as hard as they might seem at first (the trick is just to take your time; you get two extra jumps for each target you hit and have plenty of time to realign yourself after each jump) - and it's a skill that's often useful during the game in combat and for gaining mana, so it does need to be covered in training.

In fact, there's a whole unlockable minigame entirely based around combo-jumps. You'd probably hate it.

34

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Afterlife 3: Legends of Rickard Bronson (a freeware roguelike platformer)

« on: January 22, 2013, 12:20:53 AM »

Thanks. 

35

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Afterlife 3: Legends of Rickard Bronson (freeware roguelike platformer) v1.12.2

« on: January 20, 2013, 01:34:41 PM »

I actually released this towards the end of last year, but never got around to posting about it here, despite being an occasional lurker. It's a game I've worked on for around two years, based on ideas I'd had for a long time beforehand.

Afterlife 3: Legends of Rickard Bronson is a heavily roguelike action platformer (or a heavily action-oriented platform roguelike?), and ostensibly the third game in my Afterlife series, though as it's a prequel, it's very much designed to be playable regardless of experience with the other games (although, that having been said, experience with the first game in particular might be of some small advantage in quickly getting used to the physics and controls...)

The game is a score-driven arcade-style treasure-collecting roguelike (much like the original Rogue), with fully procedurally-generated levels and quests, and quite a lot of weapons, items, skills and upgrades to experiment with along the way (there are over a hundred learnable skills in the most recent update). There are also unlockable advantages and minigames, and online high-score charts.

I should also mention that, being primarily a roguelike, it's really quite brutal for a platformer; and as a very 90s-inspired platformer, it's very skill/action-oriented for a roguelike; a combination which almost certainly makes it offputting to the widest possible number of people.

Anyway...

More about the game here: www.rjbsoftware.uk/afterlife3
Download here: www.rjbsoftware.uk/afterlife3/download
Scoreboards here: www.rjbsoftware.uk/afterlife3/scores
Changelog here: www.rjbsoftware.uk/afterlife3/history
Forum here: www.rjbsoftware.uk/forum


Final note: I continue to be open to suggestions for the game, and will likely be (every so often, at least) releasing occasional updates with new content, so do let me know if you have any ideas you'd like to put forward.

Ryan