Demon: A monster collection roguelike 3/31!

[Ferret]

PC and Mac Builds (new link, switched back to Google Drive): https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B-sx_4eW-B5hWnhNZlRPclZLeUU&usp=drive_web

Bleh. Working on new player help is a little brain-numbing, but I managed to push through it over the last week or so and get in what I hope are some useful new player aids: banners that fill in empty party display slots with suggestions on how to fill them ('s' to summon if you have someone healthy enough to fight in your stash, or 'a' to recruit if you don't have anyone else and there's a recruitable enemy visible.) Also did the glowing buttons previously discussed. I doubt either feature is perfect yet, but hopefully they will help new players figure out the summoning system basics. Pretty much no chance of surviving if people don't pick up on those, so I'm willing to bludgeon it slightly for now. If I figure out better ways to handle it, I will.

Here's a screenshot showing these features in action:
 


Next up will probably be an item pass. I've got plenty of "bail you out" consumables, but no items that feel like real rewards to find, stuff you can use right away that just does something awesome. So, that'll be next up on the update list.

I also switched from Google Drive to Dropbox for build hosting because Google Drive's interface is kind of horrible. Though, Dropbox + Chrome sometimes don't get along themselves... I'll keep an ear out for any issues there.

Edit: Added screenshot.
Edit 2: Switched back to Google Drive, grumble.

[koiwai]

I played the game with Wine on Linux, so my experience may be different from native Windows execution.

The program probably could not make the window large enough, so the window turned out to be somewhat compressed vertically, and all the graphics, including the font were compressed too, see the screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/Q5biXqE.png

I liked the nice font in your screenshots actually, but I can live with the messed up font, not a big deal. I played a bit, collected some monsters, got to the second tower.

Then, I decided to switch to the fullscreen mode (by pressing F11), and after switching to the fullscreen mode the program could not get the right resolution, and switched to the worst possible, 640x480. Even after I recovered the game to the windows mode, it still tries to run in a 640x480 window, which is really not enough to play comfortably (screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/mXd2KaA.png)

Could you look at the code that handles the size of the window? My screen (1366x768) is quite standard for a laptop, and it seems to be too small for the program. Of course, I run it in emulation, but wine is pretty good usually, so maybe the native Windows computers would behave similarly in this case.

If it is possible, it would be great to do output without hard-coding the dimensions of the window, so it adjusts to the window size the player choose?

Anyway, apart form this trouble with the screen resolution, the game looks interesting. I'd like to play it more and try the fancy features like breeding. For now, I cannot really comment on the most of it, since I did only basic things. The interface is pretty intuitive. What is strange is that you don't use mouse for the controls at all, but you actually do use it for showing information when hovering over something. It's not that important now, but maybe later when you will be polishing the game, you may consider adding full mouse controls too.

[Ferret]

Hey. Thanks for trying Demon out.

Sorry you ran into trouble with the resolution. At the moment, Demon only supports 1152x864, so the 768 vs. 864 there is the problem. I will look into trying to get it to behave better when it doesn't have enough resolution available on the system running it. With regard to the 640x480 resolution lock, none of my own computers are below the target resolution, so I'd never seen the behavior where it locks into a worse resolution after trying full screen mode.

Adjustable window size rather than fixed would solve things pretty nicely, I admit. I'll see if I can figure out what it'll take to get that working. It won't be able to go but so small though, with pixel perfect I can't adjust the size of the tiles/UI, only where and how many are on the screen: go too small and I won't have enough room to show everything without cramming. My first goal on this front will probably be seeing if I can trim down to 768 on the Y axis so I can include standard laptops: not as good as free resize, but probably much quicker to get implemented.

Mouse support's a weird one. I actually have more of it available than is currently used, but commented it out because it seems that the more of it you turn on, the more disruptive the parts still not mouse-controlled become to players. The biggest example of this was when I made the ability buttons respond to clicks: it suddenly became a very big issue that you couldn't also do that in targeting. Full mouse control is a fairly high priority item, but since it's pretty much going to be all or nothing, I'm trying to hold off for a little while I try to get the gameplay to a happy spot.

I'm glad you found it interesting and were able to get to Tower:2 despite the problems. I admit I'm kinda newb when it comes to UI / resolution related things, but even if it doesn't happen super fast I will address the issues with running on less resolution than it'd prefer and more mouse controls. Thank you for the feedback.

[koiwai]

Yes, I think that keeping the graphics pixel perfect, but just showing a smaller region of the map would be the best solution for smaller screens, unfortunately it may require special attention to UI elements positioning (the abilities, messages, etc), and it can get tricky very quickly So, whatever you come up with is fine, there is no pressing concerns now at this stage, I think. It may become more important when you will be reaching a wider audience

[Samildanach]

The mouse issue is a good one to raise.

So far it hasn't really bothered me in Demon but one of my pet peeves with some roguelikes is hybrid keyboard/mouse interfaces. If I'm moving around using my right hand on the keys (whether arrows or numpad) don't make me use the mouse for anything. Having to move my hand over to the mouse and then reposition it back on the keys again a couple of times a minute is deeply irritating.

Again, Demon doesn't do it enough to bother me so far, but I've played altogether too many games that do. I think putting careful thought into what you're forcing the player to do with their hands is a sorely underrated practice in roguelike development.

[Ferret]

I posted a new pair of builds (PC and Mac*) that should fix the resolution problems on standard laptops. Now Demon checks out what resolution your system can handle and picks the best one it supports to use, either 1080x720 or its original 1152x864. It attempts to account for a certain amount of OS-level nonsense (Windows Start bar, OSX dock, window title bars, etc.) as well, so you won't get the 1152x864 setting unless you're actually running something like 1280x1024 for example. Unity doesn't allow me to detect the presence of such things unfortunately, so I just have to kind of guess, bleh.

As a bonus, this work seems to have also fixed the issues I was having w/ Retina displays causing graphical glitches/artifacts (probably because I found and fixed a small bug in my sprite code that was invisible at 1152x864 but quite visible at any other resolution.)

Only sad news is that in doing this, I confirmed that free resize will probably be a Major Pain: I had to make a seperate set of UI positions/sizes for 1080x720, there didn't seem to be a way to adjust them procedurally that got good results. I'm going to hope that these two resolutions are enough to cover most users and let it rest there for awhile at least.

* Koiwai, I could actually try a Linux build if you're interested, but I don't have any sort of direct access, even through friends, to a Linux system, so it's pretty much completely untried.

[koiwai]

Runs great, adjusted to my resolution (I'm runnig it on Linux with wine). I can test a Linux build too it you make one.

I got to the level 3 (or 4), where the game got a bit tougher, and the party got killed by three red snakes and two (?)fire demons.

Some monsters, if you want then to join you, ask you to kill other monsters (zombies, for example, or that strange brownish debuffing orb - I don't remember the name), and so one encounter may immediately lead to the next.The thing is that the game is now more complex than a simple chain of independent fights, that's pretty cool.

Also, I like that you make the game look really polished.

[Ferret]

Awesome. Glad to hear it's running better for you now. Sounds like you got the hang of things enough to make a little progress too. Ilomba (red snakes) and Ukobach (fire demons) are both among the nastier early game encounters, and both can be tough to recruit. I've lost a few characters to both of them myself. If they both showed up together, that's definitely going to be trouble.

Thanks for the compliments and the offer to try a Linux build. I'll make a Linux build next time I do builds (probably when I finish my current item push, going from 12 items to 35!) and we'll see how that goes.

[Ferret]

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.

[Ferret]

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. )

[koiwai]

Happy to hear that you have made good progress with the game and there is a new release.

The Linux build works fine. Also, what's good is that the native Linux build runs with very small CPU load (compared to running the Windows build with wine  ).

[Ferret]

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.

[Worthless_Bums]

This looks verrrrry curious and I just got back into MtG. Will have to try this out later.

[jim]

SMT + RL = AWESOME. Will play.

[Ferret]

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.