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Messages - eclectocrat

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76
Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Mysterious Castle
« on: July 24, 2011, 11:59:35 PM »
Those are classic David Gervais 54x54 isometric tiles from Dungeon Odyssey, now free for use with attribution. That Mr. D. Gervais is a swell guy! Golly!

77
Hello!

NEW! 1.8 is out for Mac and Windows at www.mysteriouscastle.com Also available for iOS! Tons of changes!

Hi there roguelike fans! I have an announcement and a question. The announcement is for Mysterious Castle Beta 1.3, my graphical party based roguelike. It's a game heavily inspired by Tactics Ogre and the Avernum Series. In this version I've added a randomly generated town, much improved AI, new spell, storyline features, and larger world.

Here's a battle taking place with a party of angry Kobolds.


My question surrounds the often discussed 'what is a roguelike?' It's been asked to death so I'm reframing it as 'what is NOT a roguelike?' I like my game, I think it's a roguelike, but how far can I go before it's no longer in that category?

Right now the features that my game posses that make it a roguelike are few:
-Randomly generated terrain
-Randomly generated/placed monsters/npc's
-Turn based (of course)
-Line of sight/field of vision
-Permadeath
-High challenge level with death being the reward for reckless play
-...?

Is this a roguelike? I don't see too many party based roguelikes out there, I've already blasphemed with the graphics vs ascii and mouse interface bits, so... whatcha think?

PS: Gameplay Video

78
Hey! Sorry bout my terrible netiquete, I already promoted my game Mysterious Castle on the early dev board before introducing myself.

Hi! I go by eclectocrat. I currently live in Taiwan, but have been mobile throughout east asia for the last 5 years. originally from Toronto Canada. I've been hanging around the TIGSource boards for almost a year and working on my game www.mysteriouscastle.com, which is a graphical party based roguelike. I spend most of my time making games and not much playing them, but when I do play I like DF and Zangband. I often dig in other peoples source code to find inspiration and I love the whole concept of procedurally generated worlds, I want to make a game that I will have fun playing!

Hello y'all!

79
Early Dev / Re: Mysterious Castle
« on: June 27, 2011, 02:41:26 AM »
Thanks for trying my game!

I found the combat-UI somewhat unintuitive at first.  Each time I want to attack I need to click on the enemy and select attack from the context-menu.  Then after the attack I can't do anything but I still need to click on the "wait" hourglass or press space to advance to the next party member.  After playing for a bit all this clicking gets a bit cumbersome.

Well, you CAN still move after an attack, which is why you don't automatically end your round. So hit and run strategies are possible. The reason everything requires a confirmation click is that I hate games that let you do really stupid things by accident. You know, accidentally moving your mage into the middle of a huge melee, or targetting an ally with a magic missile or something. I also hate it when you can't do something that you want to. So for instance if a party member has been bitten by a werewolf, you may really want to target them with a hostile spell. I try to keep the click count down as low as possible (no submenus) but I figure that if starcraft needs a hundred a minute then I can get away with twenty a minute.

Some oddities I came across:
* if I double-click on a different party member it selects them but the previous selected party member moves which is unexpected

Yeah, the follow code is not entirely smooth right now. I'm working on that!

* if my party is killed, I see the death message but then I'm controlling the monster!

I think that's a fun way to explore the game! If you get killed by a demon lord you start out with some crazy items and 4 or 5 'blast' spells memorized. It's fun to smash your enemies!

* Are there any major differences between the different races apart from stats?

The races are really unbalanced now and will get an overhaul soon. Halfogre is overpowered and humans are nerfed.

* How often can I cast spells?  Is it mana or memorization based?

Oh man! You missed one of the best parts of the game! If you press the right arrow key -> outside of battle then a spellbook will show up. For non spellcasters it will be empty. For characters with a spell you'll see it's icon/name. When you click the spell icon once a description will show up, and if you look closely at the mushroom bar then you'll see the cost to memorize it. If you have the necessary mushrooms then a second click will memorize it. In battle the spellcaster can press the 'cast' icon or a SHIFT key to show the memorized spells that are available to cast (if you have moved too far then you won't have enough time to cast a spell and the spells won't show, now that I think about it that's bad interface design, they should still show but be greyed out... another TODO!).

* Is this game primarily targeted for the iPad?

Yes. Hence all the clicking. I've kept key bindings to a minimum but some more will seep
into the design as I progress.

Overall it started without any problems on my MacBook Pro and has some really interesting concepts.  Thanks for sharing and I'll definitely track this game!

Awesome! I'm glad you had some fun with it! Right now I'm doing some serious work on the AI. Races now have enemies that they hate more than you. So if you're getting slammed by a party of elves and manage to stumble upon a party of orcs while making your escape... you can watch while the parties rip each other apart!

80
Early Dev / Mysterious Castle
« on: June 22, 2011, 01:26:34 PM »
Hey!

I've developed a graphical roguelike-like with a twist. It's party based! All kinds of tactical fun! If you've got an intel mac then you can try it out now.

www.mysteriouscastle.com

Hope you like it!

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