Thanks. I'm doing pretty well again at this point. Now, I guess it's comments time: I quite enjoy the game, and must say it has grown nicely since last I tried it out. The atmospheric world carries a lot. Most of my comments are nitpicks, only because I find the game to have overall polish and appeal. I'm looking forward to see how the world and the system evolve, so "carry on" is the word of the day.
INTERFACE
* Regarding the compilation process, it was mostly a matter of following the readme, except for hand building the libraries after installing libgtest-dev.
* When I create a character and press "*" for a random option, I'd like to know which option I got to inform further choices (ie. an info line like: "Male giant./ Select your class").
* "w"alk works But maybe a doorway/branching corridor should be a treated as a stopping point? Just a suggestion.
* After a few games, the log files start piling up. Most of them are empty. Maybe they could be autodeleted, or put in a separate directory?
* Backspace doesn't work in prompts. Annoying when I drop a lot of stuff, get "Drop how many?" and accidentaly put in "d".
* To the benefit of newbies: The manual marks several skills as unused. Would it be plausible to disable/"grey out" these skills in the levelup screen?
* I like the skill system, though, and I'm looking forward to seeing more skills implemented. For instance, I tested tanning at 100% and loved how thoughfully it was scaled.
BUGS
* I left Isen Dun and came to an island where there was a crypt. The crypt level contained a central chamber, but when I opened the door, I got Segmentation fault.
* I don't know if it's supposed to be so, but I'm able to skin corpses and make myself a cloak, even without the Tanning skill.
* Standing in a corridor and throwing clay pots so that they are smashed at the tile I'm standing, they don't drop any ivory pieces.
* Found a "staircase leading down" that looked like a sarchofagus "0".
* I am experiencing what must be a weird bug: If I drop anything in the grass in Isen Dun, it has the same effect as dropping it in water (discarding forever). This does not happen if I drop on special places (tiles where something was laying before, beneath trees, et al).
WRITING
* "You sense the presence of other creatures" is a bit void since, well, there's mostly always "other creatures" in a level. Is this for when a special monster spawns? I don't understand.
* "Kew says, «It's important to always have ways to escape bad situations." [missing end quote]
* Siriath described as an "elderly man in his twilight years", which may be a bit tautological.
CONTENT
* Villages: Good stuff. I would love more interaction, though. I wonder if you've considered something like random places of interest (more shrines and crypts, private property, gardens, pyramids/monuments, shops). (Take with a grain of salt.) On a related note, I don't know if various villages' disposition (are planned to) depend on the player's alignment, but I was half hoping that my Sceadugenga worshipper could enter the village of black servants and be greeted as a peer.
I did notice that I can attack people without their fellow villagers reacting, which felt kind of weird. Also, Hrimgar doesn't move if I shoot at him, letting me pepper him with arrows, but proceeds to attack if I move next to him. I didn't test if he drops the boathouse key when killed, but wondered about this.
* Combat: Some of the monsters can feel a bit samey, with much bumping + monitoring hp. That's typical of the genre, but I'd welcome some more variety in monster behavior down the road. It would seem appropriate for Siriath to cast spells, for instance.
I like the mechanic with status ailments, but they don't seem to really come into play so often. Some are poignant, like blinded, mute, exposed. Others, like slow, poisoned, sick, disfigured, I mostly carry on as usual. Is the severity scaled with the attackers level, ie. would a basilisk have more potent poison than an adder? My gut impression is that the ailments need balancing, should perhaps occur more often, or be more severe (but shorter?), or something …
Anyway, I only played this version a handful of times, and haven't gotten very far before, either. Just to test, I took an ogre more or less straight to the dungeon in the extreme north west, maxing out combat and bashing skills on the way. I managed to kill the first wave of monsters, levelling up from the early teens to level 32 before I was overcome by something in the second room. I don't know if this is an actual exploit/strategy/bug to speed start a game at an absurdly high level.
And Mervyn Peake! That's a name I haven't heard in ages. I read "Titus Groan" many, many years ago. Actually, decades, at this point.
I read Titus Groan and Gormenghast about fifteen years ago, and really liked them at the time. Titus Alone is an interesting conclusion, I think, a bit removed from the other books, and almost venturing into some kind of early gothic/fantasy steampunk
As always,
Minotauros
Interface:
- I'll look into providing more feedback for the individual race/class/etc randomizations
- It's been a while since I've updated autowalking, so I'll do that as well. Stopping on terrain features (such as doors) and branching corridors makes sense.
- Logs need a bit of an update. I'll add a setting to control how long to keep them (maybe a week or two), and then have the game auto-delete logs older than that.
- Backspace works for me in prompts, but this is on my Windows build. I don't think there's anything OS-specific there, but there might be some refreshing or something that isn't happening. I'll update my Linux build and take a look.
- Tanning's been very hard to get right. Before, it allowed for some stupidly powerful stuff!
Bugs:
- I think you can still create skins without tanning, but they're not nearly as good (no/fewer resistances)
- Ugh, that crypt bug. Sucks that it's still happening - I've never been able to reproduce it. Do you happen to remember your race/class combo? Not that it should matter. I'll set aside some time to try to reproduce it!
- I'll look into the clay pots thing. They should have a small chance to produce ivory - it's not guaranteed. You may have been unlucky.
- Looks like there was a sarcophagus on the same tile as your down staircase. I don't want to consider this a bug - just a well-hidden staircase.
- I mentioned the grass bug in a previous reply, but do you get the same issue if you use Wine and the Windows release? Is there a particular item that you're dropping? Race/class? I want to narrow this down, as this is an odd one, and I've never heard it reported before.
Writing:
- Yeah, that's the old Detection skill. It needs to be updated to be more useful. It was one of the first things I implemented, many years ago. Thanks for the reminder!
- I'll fix the Kew text, and Siriath's too.
Content:
- Villages are severely under-developed. Severely. Right now they're basically placeholders. They're on my long-term to do list, and I have them there purely as a reminder for me to make them useful at some point. Still an alpha. I want to do so much more with them.
- Immobile creatures need to be reworked. In the early days, I added this to have creatures that would stay in one spot and not move. I've been meaning to update this so that only a very small number of creatures are truly immobile, and the rest move when attack. I'll add that to my list.
- I've also been meaning to add some sort of assisting flag/logic, so that some creatures will assist friendly creatures that are attacked. Sounds like I should do this soon, too!
- I don't think he drops the boathouse key - I think it's loaded as part of the quest code.
- Combat: agree, lots of sameyness, though, that's roguelikes for you. I do have a reminder in my backlog to make more interesting/unique creatures like thieves, gas clouds, etc. I like the idea of adding spells to Siriath. I'll find a couple of appropriate ones and add them.
- They don't scale. That said, I like the idea of poison scaling. I'll add that to my list.
- As for strategies, I welcome any abusive strategies people have! I'm not going to try to nerf everything, and if people can find a way to jump levels quickly, I'm not necessarily opposed to that. I'm not a super-balancer; this isn't DCSS.
Thanks so much for your feedback! It's fantastic, very much appreciated, and I'll definitely look into fixing as many of the issues as possible before the next release.