Ultima Ratio Regum - the 'strategy roguelike' ( Now at v 0.1.3)

[UltimaRatioRegum]

Well, the time has come. After 15 months of one-man development, URR 0.1.0 (or rather, now 0.1.2b) has been released!

A lot more info can be found at

http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/2012/07/09/alpha-0-1-0/

but you can generate a world, wander around, fight, and jump into a volcano. What more could you want? I'd love any feedback on anything from the UI to the world generation, or anything else. Combat is going to undergo a major shift for 0.2.0, but I'd still like to know what people think about its current status.

[getter77]

Excellent work on making the first release----keep at it on all the hot fixin' excitement and come end of July you should have a sizable expectant audience awaiting 0.2.0.   

So much moreso when you slay your cross-platform demons successfully as that'll be a major hurdle cleared.

[george]

I'm digging it so far. One thing I couldn't figure out was how to look at the health/injuries of my guy (army?), during and after combat.

[jocke the beast]

It crashed two times for me. Both times was when the game loaded a new map-portion...
Seems cool though 

[UltimaRatioRegum]

Excellent work on making the first release----keep at it on all the hot fixin' excitement and come end of July you should have a sizable expectant audience awaiting 0.2.0.   

So much moreso when you slay your cross-platform demons successfully as that'll be a major hurdle cleared.

Haha, thanks - trying to! See bottom of this message for details on that. As for cross-platform, I'm going to give OSX compiling a shot tonight on a Mac, but I'm not sure about Linux... a solution is needed!

I'm digging it so far. One thing I couldn't figure out was how to look at the health/injuries of my guy (army?), during and after combat.

Thanks - you want to use 'l' for 'Look' and examine your character.

It crashed two times for me. Both times was when the game loaded a new map-portion...
Seems cool though 

Ah - a  lot of people are getting that but I can't recreate it, which is making it tricky to hunt down. Did you get an error log? And does it still happen in:

0.1.2c, http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/downloads/, which is the final bug-fix for a while (I hope!)

[UltimaRatioRegum]

Finally, version 0.1.3 released; a stable build with a lot of changes in to keep things moving until 0.2.0 in a couple of months. Do shout with any feedback, otherwise, see you in a few months for 0.2.0, and some very complicated skill trees…

http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/2012/07/16/aftermath/

[jim]

I can't imagine that any of my feedback could be anything more than redundant, but I downloaded and played your game. Locational damage is awesome and I think your priorities will really differentiate URR from other new Roguelikes. I'm very eager to see where it heads. So please quit your job, abandon school, let your personal life atrophy, and develop this full-time. September is a long ways away.

[getter77]

Congrats on the grand fix release, here's hoping no further showstoppers emerge and you can take a well deserved sojourn to the land of everything-other-than-URR.   

[UltimaRatioRegum]

I can't imagine that any of my feedback could be anything more than redundant, but I downloaded and played your game. Locational damage is awesome and I think your priorities will really differentiate URR from other new Roguelikes. I'm very eager to see where it heads. So please quit your job, abandon school, let your personal life atrophy, and develop this full-time. September is a long ways away.

Haha, thanks a lot for the kind words . Mythical creatures are going to be a very small (and entirely optional) part of the game, since I very much want to focus on making something akin to a strategy/4x game in ASCII, as well as a roguelike. My current intention is to take about a month and a bit with only minimal development (it won't stop, but I need about 20k words of thesis written in the next month and a half) and then blitz 0.2.0 in September. 0.3.0 is going to be much smaller (just mechanics like sleeping, food, drink, morale, etc) so that should be much earlier after.

Congrats on the grand fix release, here's hoping no further showstoppers emerge and you can take a well deserved sojourn to the land of everything-other-than-URR.   

Cheers getter! Typically, there was still one thing left, so I've just put out 0.1.3b. But that is genuinely the last until 0.2.0...

[getter77]

For the rebalance of skills into some sort of streamlined tree or crazy web-thing like in Path of Exile, I would offer a partial suggestion:  Keep many of the crazier or more esoteric skills, but keep them off the "tree" as it were proper.  Instead, let them be the purview of random, secret scattered hermits/gurus and whatnot that would perhaps impart them to you via a personal quest and/or some  varying but possibly significant factor of time spent learning them to a master level that could prove a future edge for your character but would essentially take them "out of the world" for the time it took do to so----thus adding some degree of risk for unforeseen consequences as things develop without your input or even awareness.

[UltimaRatioRegum]

For the rebalance of skills into some sort of streamlined tree or crazy web-thing like in Path of Exile, I would offer a partial suggestion:  Keep many of the crazier or more esoteric skills, but keep them off the "tree" as it were proper.  Instead, let them be the purview of random, secret scattered hermits/gurus and whatnot that would perhaps impart them to you via a personal quest and/or some  varying but possibly significant factor of time spent learning them to a master level that could prove a future edge for your character but would essentially take them "out of the world" for the time it took do to so----thus adding some degree of risk for unforeseen consequences as things develop without your input or even awareness.

I've been wondering whether I'm going to have skills of the sort you're implying, and if so, how I'm going to put them in. I'm currently leaning towards not including them - while I want skill trees to give a character to develop, I think that kind of skill could really take away from the large-scale elements I'm more interested in exploring. We'll have to see, really, but I wager not much like that may exist. I might do something like have it proc gen some unique skills you can get each game, and then generate ways to acquire them, but that's some way in the future...