Wall of text? You mean wall of feedback
2579 is legitmately in the "doing pretty darn good" range.
Congrats!
Minimap: A minimap is coming.
One day.
Keyboard: I'm glad someone appreciates the vi keys, I can't stand them myself.
But, I needed a way for folks on laptops (no numpad, and diagonals are important as you say, so just arrow keys won't cut it) to be able to move, and since vi keys was already a thing, I went ahead and went with that for my solution there.
Raicho: Yeah, less of these at low levels would probably be good. I think the sneaky problem with them is the available demons/abilities just aren't what you need for dealing with them easily: Body/Mind abilities don't exist before T:3 (other than as riders on primarily non-Body/Mind attacks, such as Infectious Bite), so their weaknesses are basically None unless the player went Body and/or Mind. Could also experiment with giving them a weakness other T:1-2 demons could take better advantage of, such as Fire, Ice, or even Pierce. The pack mentality thing is a fun idea too, but a lot more expensive right now, the AI doesn't have any support for that atm.
Random Aside: Wait, Raicho spamming Envenom were *less* deadly to you?
That sounds terrifying to me! (Well, unless you had a Gandayah keeping the poison from building up to ridiculous levels
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Ludoc: Ludoc's a jerk. His summons probably were healing faster than yours: his AI tends to slap Regen on something before he unsummons it, and Regen continues to function even on "inactive" demons: as a result, they heal up at a rapid pace. I apologize that it felt hopeless enough to bail on. I hope the next time goes better!
AI Chasing: I think the "home base" behavior you're reporting may be the "return to my leader" behavior, with the leader functioning as a mobile home base. Ludoc wouldn't exhibit it because he is always the leader of his group. Groups stay together in giant packs because, currently, if any enemy can see an enemy that sees you, it finds out about you (even if the two enemies are NOT in the same group.) So, at least I think I understand what is causing what you're seeing now.
The two fixes I probably need to add to get things behaving a bit more consistently would be to have a step between "lost sight of the player and I checked his last known location and found nothing" and "go back to my leader", and maybe to have groups not communicate with each other so completely effectively? For the record, I appreciate all the attention you've given to writing up details on your impressions of the AI's pursuit behavior: this isn't an area much of the previous feedback I've received has touched on.
Stealth/Invisibility: I thought about this a fair bit early on, and I made the decision to not include these mechanics in Demon, largely because I could not think of reasonable, transparent, and most importantly, fun ways to integrate their management into the party and player party member AI systems. Just as a few examples: how would your allies handle noise considerations? i.e.: When is it okay for your Jinn to go for broke and start throwing very noisy explosive Fireballs? How does the AI calculate the "risk" of using noisy abilities to make such determinations? How does the player keep awareness of the noise level of his entire party and their various abilities? What would affect stealth levels anyway, since there's no equipment (that being another thing I decided not to include, given the idea of trying to management equipment for 9 characters seemed too much of a weight to ask of the player... though I may still go back and do a limited form of player-only equipment, or "1 slot per character" equipment...?) Anyway, I'm not saying there are no ways to answer these and other problems those systems would have presented for Demon, I'm just saying I don't think the benefits to Demon would have been worth the time/effort to explore and implement these solutions. I think I should be able to find some answers for Demon that give reasonable AI wandering/pursuit/return behaviors without them, just might not be there quite yet.
Blue Box: Now I wonder if maybe it isn't showing up on Linux somehow? Can you post a screenshot?
Stairs and Party Positioning: Stairs currently randomly place your party around you when you spawn (potentially "shoving" enemy monsters out of the way to do so). Are you asking for them to appear in the same relative positions they were before you used the stairs? That should be easy to do I think (but offer not valid if those squares are occupied or walls on the new level.
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Allies Blocking Projectiles: Allies have several rules about how they feel about standing in front of you, the major factors are: do you have projectile attacks you could use if I wasn't in the way, do enemies have projectile attacks they could use on you if I wasn't in the way, and how is your health looking? Health + enemy projectiles possible is a big one: if both of these are true, demons will do their best to body block for you even if it means you can't shoot either. That said, demons almost never move if they are already adjacent to an enemy.
Fleeing: Were you using "group movement" when this happened? Group movement should force your party to follow you, no matter what... and almost never ever move in the opposite direction for sure. If this was w/ a group movement command, lemme know and I'll see if I can find the bug. If it wasn't with group movement, then yeah, it probably was trying to cover you: demons pretty much fight to the death unless under very specific orders not to.
Leveled up Supports: If you were on T:7, you're about in the neighborhood where some Gandayah alternatives start showing up: Angels (assuming they don't dislike your party for having undead/demons!), and a bit later, Hobs (who are less picky about your friends, but harder to recruit.) That said, SP doesn't increase with level, you need new abilities (either for him or yourself) or to teach Refresh to other allies if you want more SP flow.
Training Speed: This changed a bit as part of the difficulty increase (it did get a bit slower, in fact.) I'm still trying to decide how I feel about where it is right now. Might be more a problem of allied demons leveling up slower than the level of encountered demons increases, making you feel like you need to upgrade often? (Granted, you *should* be constantly feeding in new blood.. but not necessarily cleaning house every other floor on your entire stable. It's supposed to be feasible to keep a fair number of demons around long-term, constantly feeding them new abilities and getting them to a good place and experiencing that for a bit before finally trading them in for a newer model. But, this balance may have been tiled a little with the level curve changes. I'm an area I'm keeping an eye on.
Monster Differences: I'm hoping to eventually greatly expand the characteristics system (currently only used for things like Undead, Ugly, Demonic, etc. which only determine what demons get along with each other) to include things that will act in the way you're describing: providing differences between demons that aren't just differences in their stats and resistances.
Tactical Spells: Some of the ones you mentioned exist in Demon already, but aren't available early game (Short Jaunt is Demon's answer to Blink (first encounter is T:11 or so I think?), and Slow actually exists by name (around T:13 or so usually, but can show up early on a modifier)). Cloud spells definitely don't though: won't be able to do those until I figure out a good way for the AI to use/handle them intelligently enough that players won't curse at their buddies' use of them.
Summon spells of the DCSS variety on the "someday" list too: at least the AI for using those spells will be a bit simpler I think.
Balancing them may be more of a concern... but no more so than in normal roguelikes. Still some thinking/designing to do on that front.
Play Time: 4.5 hours for T:7 is longer than I thought, but on the other hand, I expect play times probably vary wildly per player anyway.
If it's a fun 4.5 hours, I'm not tooooo worried about it running longer than I expected.
Easy Encounters: There should be some easier encounters in the mix, theoretically: encounter tables have about a 20% chance to "fall down" to a lower table, and additionally the encounters are designed so that some encounters will be easier for some strategies than others. But, as with many things, this may be something that got a little disrupted with the difficulty increase, so I'll keep an eye on it.
Previous Levels: At the moment, I don't do respawning on older levels to try and keep a bit tighter rein on player progression / XP and level gain. I could experiment with limited amounts of it to add flavor, but I don't want to have "free XP" that players feel like they need to go and collect. I might be overthinking this too, not sure if people routinely try to lower level farm in DCSS either. I may pass on this until I have other reasons to go to old levels anyway: at the moment, as you point out, there isn't really any. I do have branch / side-dungeon technology (there is one that currently has a 50% chance to spawn in game, about halfway up the tower or so, mostly as a test case for said tech), just haven't gotten around to adding content with it yet.
Tower Windows:
This is a good one. I will save it for the next dungeon upgrade pass.
Don't worry, I'm thoroughly convinced you think Demon is awesome.
Nobody types up this much stuff for a game they don't like.
I just wish there were 10 of me instead of 1 of me so I could chop through the giant to-do/"this would be nice" lists much faster.
I always feel like I've got a long way to go, but on the other hand, Demon seems to be pretty fun even now.
Thanks again for the awesome feedback!
