Messages

91

Early Dev / Re: Demon: A monster collection roguelike

« on: January 22, 2015, 02:46:44 AM »

Though I agree with you that this may be suggesting things are a bit too easy right now, congrats on Win #3 regardless. Easy or not, no one has managed that before as far as I know, even though there have been a few who have beaten the content non-consecutively several times. If posted in the Forum of Near Solitude, you'd have the #1 score of all time.

The Mind thing might be coming down to playstyle, at least a little: If you've fallen in love with the AE buffs, Mind's going to start on shaky ground, since it tends to ask you to choose between "cheap, high success, Presence-based" effects and "very expensive, moderate success" effects.

...but, I will say not helping matters is Mind is relatively under-represented in low level Demons at the moment, and that needs to change. I mean, Stone Soup is willing to throw Confuse at you on D:2, not sure why I soft-pedal and wait until Atua on T:7 or 8. This is something I hope to address in the build after this one, which will pretty much entirely be content. Fire, Ice, Elec, and Body (not counting physical attacks/passives that happen to inflict Body effects), and Dark suffer from this issue too: it takes a long time to find new, interesting abilities in these elements, often you only get access to basic stuff early on.

I definitely want to add some more ways to place the player in high risk / high reward situations. The suggestions you've made for that (DCSS portals, increased penalties recruitment going wrong, encounter modifiers, treasure/trap objects) are all strong ideas for this.

I've been looking at the auto-hit abilities, both from the auto-hit direction and the "maybe normal attacks miss too much" direction. The auto-hits are usually cheap because they have cooldowns + target restrictions... but I may be giving these restrictions too much of a 'refund' and/or undervaluing how nice free target and auto hit are. Most of these are the sort of thing it's hard to mathulus out a correct cost for, just takes iteration and feedback. Going to try out some tweaks in either the next build and/or the following content push build.

I did want to ask for more info on this one bit:

P.S. One thing that I love about SMT is that you really get to know your team. You appreciate their strengths and weaknesses, you know who does what, and you know what to do in a given scenario. I don't feel this yet from Demon. It feels like it moves too fast for that, and your demons are very disposable. In general, my strategy is "strong guys first, and if one is about to die, replace it with the next best guy." If that were my strategy with SMT: Strange Journey, I'd be all kinds of dead.

Can you give me any info on how the game feels too fast in this regard?


Thanks again for the awesome feedback. I'm pretty jazzed that you've had enough fun to play it 15 hours. It's early yet and I definitely still have a ton of work to do to get Demon where it should be, but it's encouraging to see folks can find a fair bit of fun in it even now.

92

Early Dev / Re: Demon: A monster collection roguelike

« on: January 17, 2015, 01:58:53 AM »

Alright you. Now I'm shifting from purely "awesome, someone loves Demon!" to a hopefully healthy mix of that and "cartoon villain fist shaking and vowing to come back stronger than ever"

I have a devblog and a forum. http://demon.ferretdev.org and http://forum.ferretdev.org/ respectively.

I'll confess, the forum is a bit.. lightly attended. Whoever said "if you build it, they will come" never made an internet forum. I do have about 3 other semi-regular users, but it's one of those things: not many people post there because not many people post there. Would love to have another person using it! Notably, it does have a high score thread, and you'd currently have #1 for this version. Post the screenshot in that thread and take the bragging rights! (The highest score ever was 14152 on the previous version, that was a 3rd cycle death.. you'd be #2 on overall high scores.)

BTW: In terms of content, the current build could be compared to the trip to (not to and through!) the Lair in DCSS. Fairly similar to DCSS, the Tower is intended to have 30 floors, plus a hefty amount of 'side' content you investigate as you climb up (you may have seen a teeeny bit of that side content already perhaps if the RNG has favored you, but what's there now is mostly just a "dungeon branches, do they even work?" sort of thing) This is definitely not intended to be as evil/deep as it gets. Be ready for future builds to get a bit meaner past the current "end game".

93

Early Dev / Re: Demon: A monster collection roguelike

« on: January 16, 2015, 03:53:41 AM »

Thanks for writing up this feedback. This is a big help. BTW: 6600+ would put you in first place for this version so far. 2nd was 6100 or so.

I agree the large fights are probably when things get the most interesting. It's been tempting to try and stack the deck a bit more towards those, but I worry about that becoming overly taxing.

I've been pretty pleased with how the enemy summoners turned out. It's funny how just wanting them to behave like a human-controlled summoner (i.e.: not letting minions die) ended up leading to the other features you noticed (having to fight and being able to recruit survivors.)

Now wait a minute. What's wrong with Mind? Well, I don't expect everyone to like every build or anything. Mind's actually one of my favorites though: early access to Sleep makes a lot of things easier to deal with (a lot of chase captures become trivial when you can naptime what you're chasing. ) Ego Theft is iffy at first, but it shuts down other Mind-users, and once it can power something stronger than Hypnotic Gaze (like Madness or Alluring, or one of the area-effect versions), it gets pretty nice. It isn't flashy though.. it's probably one of the lowest damage starts. If you want to give Mind another chance at some point,I recommend Mind/Elec, Mind/Debuff, or Mind/Heal.

Speaking of Melee/Healing, I do have an odd issue with melee balance I'm thinking on at the moment though: players tend to think melee is weak/too risky for themselves, but tend to love it for their pets. A lot of the issue is definitely the fact that the player's death == game over. In theory, the AI doesn't aim for the player more than his allies (it's based largely on a combination of "how scary you are to me" and "how quickly I think I could kill you"), but right now, the player has a hard time getting on the good side of that second half of the equation. This will probably be addressable once I add Demon's equivalent of the "race" choice from DCSS: choosing your relic. The gauntlet characters wear now is basically the "human" option, but there will definitely be relics that favor melee in various ways and hopefully make it more viable. For the other side of it, a lot of people win with melee pets, but I'm not as sure that's a problem yet... keeping an eye on it though.

Stair-dancing probably needs more nerfing.. I've been nerfing it in steps, but I don't think it's where I want it yet. I've got a few ideas in store, one of the bigger ones being Demon's version of DCSS' timed portals. No timer, but if you leave a floor of the tower by the main tower stairways, any of these portals present close, even if you haven't seen them yet. That *might* be enough to discourage it... might even be too harsh? Dunno, but not quite ready to tackle that anyway so I've got some time to noodle.

The Speed buff spell was recently buffed to have more effect but being shorter duration. It is supposed to be pretty good, Haste usually is in any roguelike. But, I'll keep an eye on it.

Stamina + ranged/magic is something else I'm still wrestling with. On the one hand, being able to potentially get 4-5 free attacks on a melee is powerful and feels like it needs to have a decently high cost. On the other hand, the practical result is you maybe kill 1 or 2 melees than are out of stamina once the remaining ones get in your face... and some melees deny you the 4-5 hits anyway by charging into combat with you via Pounce or Bull Rush. I haven't taken a stand on this yet, but it's definitely on my mind.

Recruiting as a "diversion" tactic will definitely have a penalty at some point, some ideas I'm tossing around in my head:
* Distrust Spread: Failing a capture attempt horribly (ex: you start a chase capture and don't even follow it, something where it's obvious you just wanted it out of the way and never intended to capture it) may cause Distrust to spread throughout every character who saw it happen, not just your original target.
* Reputation: The negotiation mechanic already uses this in a very, very rough (and sadly nearly invisible) fashion... a high number of recentish failed captures might count against you, making future attempts you really want to succeed more difficult or even impossible.
* Bitter Enemy: Failed capture targets may attempt to escape the level and, if successful, show up later via ambush with nasty (and fully Distrustful) friends. In essence, some captures already have this sort of "dire consequences for failure" clause, for example, Chachapuma, which remain Heroic even after a failed attempt.
* Limits on Capture Attempts: Not as big a fan of this atm, but I've considered this too.

Re: the suggestions.

1) 100% agree. Expanding the monster list is definitely a high priority. I have to split my time between it and systems for now, but I plan to have a much, much larger roster.
2) I do want to expand the control options a *little* for monsters, but not too much. I definitely don't want it to turn into something where you feel like you have to micro them or need to micro them.
3) Thanks. I have more types planned too.
4 and 5) I understand completely! Don't worry, I don't plan to stop anytime remotely soon. Demon will be much, much bigger before I'm done with it.

Thanks again for playing and writing up the feedback. The current build is mostly responses to prior feedback (largely in UI areas) and dungeon art improvements, but next build will be a content push. So hopefully there won't be a super crazy long wait for a tower containing some new challenges for you to tackle if you're up for it. Cheers!

94

Early Dev / Re: Demon: A monster collection roguelike

« on: January 15, 2015, 02:32:51 AM »

Holy crap, a win! Well, a win of all the current content. And by someone I didn't know before I started working on the game! Big congrats!

Did you get a screenshot of the score by any chance? I'd love to add you to the high score thread in the forum.

Holy crap! I'm still dancing around over here, and I'm not even the guy who won.

There's probably a hundred things I'd love to ask you but I'm going to try and force myself to be reasonable and stick to just a few.

1) Was the game fun? If it had any particular low fun or high fun points, what were they?
2) How did you find the challenge level of the game throughout?
3) How many tries did it take you to win?
4) What was your strategy/approach for winning?
5) Finally, any other suggestions, thoughts, or comments?

Ugh... must... not...bury... winners... in questions. I said I'd stop at a few and I meant it!

Congrats again, especially since you didn't have access to the Ferret Tip Line most other players have been able to use.

95

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: [DUNGON BASH] squad-based tactical roguelike major new alpha release

« on: January 15, 2015, 01:35:53 AM »

Oh, I see, I misunderstood then, so it's just the 3 monsters. And you allow more or less complete player control of the monsters too, that's another interesting difference. I can see how that makes sense with a focus on tactics though.

3 randomly selected guys is definitely a different style of play than having a stable of monsters you recruit into and swap in and out as you go, but I think both will turn out pretty fun. Reminds me a bit of the differences between sealed deck and constructed in Magic: the Gathering. That analogy isn't perfect, but it captures a fair bit of the differences I think.

96

Early Dev / Re: Demon: A monster collection roguelike

« on: January 14, 2015, 06:25:11 AM »

I don't mind a bit. Art's definitely my weak point, even if it is getting better.

Yeah, I figured out how to do snakes some time after I did Haietlik: I'm completely happy with Ilomba and Dipsas (not sure if you'd have seen those yet on T:10 unless they decided to put in an early appearance.) You make a good point about something I'd wondered about: even I'd noticed I seemed to have an easier time drawing the monstrous creatures than the humans. And yes, I was, at least loosely, making a checklist in my head for humanoids rather than just drawing them like I did the other critters. That was a really good insight. I will try the color and shape based approach you mentioned as I work on my new dungeon art for this build, and next build on the new characters.

Definitely a little guilty of the one-pixel thing, especially for eyes. I feel like it sometimes works, if there's heavy contrast in the color (goblins' yellow eyes on brownish orange skin, for example), but lately when doing things I used to do with one-pixel, I often go a little further instead (see the 'new' malingee in the previous post, with the slight orange halo around its eyes.) I still do this in some cases I probably shouldn't though (I think the player avatar still has white single pixel eyes for all the good that does. )

The ogre and goblin you tweaked there are definitely improved. I feel like their faces have a bit more character to them (especially the goblin, which went from a largely blank stare to having a hint of actual malice or cunning in its look... never thought I'd say that sort of thing about a 32x32 character sprite's 10x10 or so head), and I also think the ogre's simplified and smoothed out clothing makes it easier to see its girth.

I'll take a look at the tutorials you linked. Art was originally something I was doing only because there was no other way to do the weird monsters I wanted to do, and I expected to be terrible at it and not enjoy it. Somewhat to my surprise, it's one of the parts I enjoy most now and I'm starting to get better at it. Hopefully with help like this, I'll improve even faster.

Thank you for taking the time to write all this up, I really appreciate this.

97

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: [DUNGON BASH] squad-based tactical roguelike major new alpha release

« on: January 14, 2015, 04:55:32 AM »

The first floor can be a bit rough. I'm still trying to tweak the early balance a bit. I want Demon to be a challenge even early on since with permadeath you'll be seeing it often: I'd rather it be a bit too rough the first 3 or 4 games than be boring and easy the next 30 or 40 after. But, I'm still polishing this up, sometimes T:1 is slightly too mean right now.

Ability count is definitely high in Demon, but on the other hand, abilities also stand in for equipment for me in the form of passive/reactive abilities. Demon doesn't just have the main character + 3 monsters, it also has the 5 extra monsters you can have in your stable to swap in and out. I was worried asking the player to manage 9 sets of abilities + 9 different equipment sets would be too much. I could see equipment being much more feasible if it was 4 characters though. I may still go back and add 1 equipment slot each (trinket or something) for each monster, that might work out okay. Haven't decided yet on that. How many equipment slots can your monsters have in DB? I remember reading some don't have any, but is it always 0 or 1, or do some allies have multiple slots sort of like the usual RPG character (i.e. helmet, weapon, armor, two hands, ring, etc?)

Re: Dungeon Art, it hasn't been an early priority, but I do want the dungeons to become interesting places to explore. I've mostly been dodging it for now because I was more worried getting the more unique parts working and feeling right: recruiting monsters, permadeath combat with a group of AIs the player has to depend on to act properly, the various mechanics for customizing the main character and his monster allies. Once I feel completely solid on those fronts, I'll move on to trying to get my dungeons a bit more interesting. If nothing else, I'd like something to break up the cycle of combat and progression management just a little... some other sort of encounter. Maybe various objects that ask you to make some sort of choice? For example, a statue that lets you interact with it in various ways (ignore it, pray to it, remove a gem from its forehead, or sacrifice a monster to it, all with different potential results), or a ritual circle that's holding some powerful demon trapped... do you free it and try to recruit it, or leave what others locked away alone? This sort of thing would only be a small % of the encounters though, combat is the meat of Demon for sure, but I feel like if these are done right, they would be interesting and exciting to find and spice things up a little more.

The primary gameplay for Demon? I'd say it is fighting your way through the dungeon, recruiting new monster allies and new abilities, incorporating the ones you like into your strategy, then moving further in to face greater challenges and more new, more powerful allies and abilities. Combat is definitely a big part of it, but that process of recruiting new monsters and abilities and customizing them is important too. People I've watched play often spend a surprising amount of time planning out which monsters to try and recruit and what abilities to pass around. One of my favorite types of feedback is when people have sent me screenshots of crazy monsters they've made over the course of the game. I feel like people wanting to do that tells me the customization and progression elements are fun.

Oh, hey, there was something else I wanted to ask: how much direct control do you give players over the monster allies behavior in Dungeon Bash? Is it almost totally AI-driven like Demon, or do you offer more options/ability to directly control your monster teammates?

98

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: [DUNGON BASH] squad-based tactical roguelike major new alpha release

« on: January 13, 2015, 11:50:30 PM »

I suppose it would have been helpful to mention that detail. My game is Demon, a monster-collection roguelike. Like in Dungeon Bash, you run around with a party of monsters helping you out. That's already a pretty major and relatively rare feature our games have in common. I'm more than a little curious about what we do differently and what we do similarly.

If you want to check it out, I've got a thread here in the Early Dev section (http://forums.roguetemple.com/index.php?topic=4328.0) and I also have a website of my own (demon.ferretdev.org). The website's got downloadable builds for PC, Mac, and Linux if you want to give it a try.

Definitely let me know if you make a PC build, I'd be first in line for trying it out. Reading about what we do alike and differently isn't nearly as nice as actually seeing it. (Not to mention I love monster collection / monster party type games to begin with and would love playing another even if I wasn't making my own. )

99

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: [DUNGON BASH] squad-based tactical roguelike major new alpha release

« on: January 13, 2015, 09:46:37 PM »

I can't speak for anyone else, but I'd definitely try this out if it had a PC version. I've been curious about it for awhile since it sounds similar in nature to my own game, but my phone is prehistoric so mobile games are a no-go for me.

100

Early Dev / Re: Demon: A monster collection roguelike

« on: January 13, 2015, 01:09:37 AM »

Getting to Tower:10 is pretty awesome. I don't get many reports of people making it that high. Congrats.

The early game is a little rough, and it's somewhat by design. One of the thoughts running around in my head when I started on this was how much I didn't like the "long yawn to Lair" I felt like the start of DCSS had turned into for me. Barring very very early badness (like player ghosts on D:3 with Lightning Bolt, Ijyb w/ a Wand of something terrible, Sigmund w/ a Haste Potion, etc.), the first several floors of DCSS seemed trivial to me unless I was playing a challenge character of some kind. This bothered me because, in a permadeath game (particularly one with DCSS' strong variety in possible builds), you're gonna see that beginning often. If it's easy enough to become boring once you get the hang of it, that's a lot of boredom you're going to be asking people to repeat. So for that reason, I've tried to make even the early game a little nasty-tempered at times. I'll acknowledge there's a risk it could turn off new players who get impatient with it, but I'm hoping that like you they'll view it as a challenge and work to find a way through it.

This sort of sentiment is also what brings in the relatively high challenge level intended for the encounters that you noticed. There isn't much point to easy encounters other than giving the player a chance to feel and see how powerful they've become and to let the tension drain off a little so the hard ones still feel exciting. Those things are important, but you don't need many easy encounters to check that box so to speak: the game is weighted to only give a couple of easy fights per floor. The rest are "at level"... or worse!

I'm happy you were able to dig into some of the depth in the early monsters. The starter monsters all have a lot to offer the player and each other, depending on what you're going for. As you discovered, Gandayah can be *very* helpful to a caster build like your Electric/Dark one. Not only do they funnel Stamina to you, but the passive they have and eventually teach you raises your maximum SP. With the help of one monster, you go from having just your own 100 SP to having access to 250 SP (its 125 + your 125) This is one of the ways to get spammy with big magic even early on.

Re: Discarding demons. The UI/documentation isn't so good on this yet, but should be able to right-click any demon in a list like that to see its character sheet. This also works directly on the game map too. The build I'm working on now will be adding an "examine" hotkey button and hotkey so that this functionality is much more visible (right now it's buried in the manual to the point of probably being invisible. )

The tileset is all programmer art done by me, so I'm not surprised it is a little iffy in spots (I had never done any art at all before this.) It sounds like I'm at least getting better at it as I go though, if the higher floors tend to be better. It used to be worse though, lemme show you my favorite before and after.

First, the malingee of today: A serviceable, if odd-looking fellow... but then, what is a humanoid that has been partially turned to stone supposed to look like anyway?



Now, the malingee of long long ago... ugh it hurts me to even look at this again.



The current art for the haietlik is probably the only art that bothers me as much as this guy's original art did, but snakes are a pain to do right, so I haven't gotten to him yet. Were there any others that stood out as terrible?

Re: terrain/environment. I'm still thinking about this sort of stuff, but don't have a lot of ideas I'm 100% happy with yet. The closest I come to that are with cloud spells (spells that create persistent effects in an area) and "summoning" spells (the ability to summon temporary minions... for example a Dark spell might allow you to summon a horde of temporary skeletons.) Ideally, cloud spells would work better in halls (not much room to freely move around/escape them) and summon spells would work better in open areas (much more room for the extra bodies to surround targets): if it works out that way, those could give incentive to change the venue depending on which of those spells the player and/or the enemy has. Terrain-level stuff like water, 'difficult terrain' ala D&D, etc. is possible too.. just still on the back-burner mentally for now.

Thanks for the playing and for the in-depth feedback. I'm glad you're having fun. If you do run out of content soon, don't worry, I've promised everyone the build after this one is a content push.

101

Early Dev / Re: Demon: A monster collection roguelike

« on: January 11, 2015, 02:52:46 AM »

Awesome, and thank you. I'm glad you liked what you saw, but I definitely still have a fairly long way to go yet. Many (not quite all) of the basic systems are in, but usually only with just enough content to get the point across. I can't wait until I finish everything else up and go deep diving into content creation.

By the by, Headless does make a pretty good buddy. Maybe next game?

102

Early Dev / Re: Demon: A monster collection roguelike

« on: January 10, 2015, 06:51:07 PM »

SMT + RL = AWESOME. Will play.

That's the hope anyway. I actually started on this thing back when Atlus/Index's fate was looking really uncertain over in Japan and wasn't sure they'd be making anymore of my favorite game series. I'm glad it seems like things worked out for them, but I still want to make Demon.

The next build is mostly a feedback response build (had a lot of it build up while I was working on the item revamp, mostly covering some UI cleanup and alternate controls for doing important things), but I'm also trying out isometric dungeon art and I think I like it better than before. Here's a little before and after.




I still need to do variant tiles for the new isometric look (i.e.: torches, partially damaged walls, eyes peeking out of missing bricks, etc.) to mix it up a bit, but even with just the basic form I think I like it.

103

Early Dev / Re: Demon: A monster collection roguelike

« on: January 05, 2015, 11:34:40 PM »

Awesome. I'm glad the Linux build works, it's always a little spooky making builds I don't have the ability to test myself. Thanks for testing that out for me.

104

Early Dev / Re: Demon: A monster collection roguelike

« on: January 05, 2015, 04:01:14 AM »

PC, Mac, and (new!) Linux builds download link: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B-sx_4eW-B5hWnhNZlRPclZLeUU&usp=drive_web

Development website: http://demon.ferretdev.org/

Hey there. Been quiet for a bit during the holidays, but the 1/4 build with tons of new items to find as well as balance adjustments and bug fixes is ready to go.

The new items run the gamut from being useful tools for surviving nasty situations (everything from briefly charming an enemy to dropping a fiery meteor into a horde's midst) to powerful treasures that give access to unique mechanics, such as demon fusion, the process of sacrificing one demon to modify and power up another.

Here's a collection of screenshots of the demon fusion process:

First, you choose the demon to sacrifice. This determines what modifier will be applied to the demon you choose to power up. Modifiers (which before only appeared at random on demons you encountered) adjust a demon's resistances and stats, as well adding new abilities.



Next, choose the target to receive the modifier. Usually you can only modify non-unique demons... but is there a way to modify uniques?



Then you'll be shown a preview of what the combination you selected will result in. This makes it easy to determine what pairings will result in demons useful for your chosen strategy:




Confirm the sacrifice, and congrats, you are now the proud owner of a significantly upgraded ally!



Enjoy the new build, and happy new year. Next up: a revamp of the dungeon art, and some UI changes based on feedback from players.

(Edit: Today I learned which button is Post and which button is Preview. Oops. )

105

Early Dev / Re: Demon: A monster collection roguelike

« on: December 06, 2014, 08:19:15 PM »

Whew. Other games are distracting. Curse you (and love you) Persona Q!

Still working on adding the new items, which has included a fair bit of interface work, such as support for scrollable lists (needed now than you can have over 30 types of items potentially instead of just 12):

 

This build's taking a little longer than I'd like, but it should be worth the wait. The new items can do some exciting things, including three items that introduce some basic 'breeding' mechanics where you sacrifice one demon to make significant changes/improvements to another.