New roguelike - Robot Zombie Ninja Wizard

[gamechampionx]

Hi all,

I am a big fan of the roguelike genre and created an experimental game in my free time called Robot Zombie Ninja Wizard. In this game, you play as a character of one of the four mentioned classes and traverse a dungeon, battling enemies, advancing your character and collecting loot.

I'm currently looking for beta testers, and any level of feedback on the game's playability and balance.

More info can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/robotzombieninjawizard/ and the game can be run via the JAR file here: https://github.com/bprollinson/robotzombieninjawizard/

[Gornova]

It's really had to see something and reading strings, because of all these spaces! can you please remove them ?

for example:



it's really hard to read something!

For what I can see there are a lot of skills and possibilities, but without a proper char spacing and some kind of background color on the dungeon (black is fine, like in a terminal), it's hard to play it

[gamechampionx]

Gornova,

Thanks for trying it out.

I can look at reducing the spacing. Right now, the game uses the text grid to do both the menus and the map - I can look at pulling it in a bit tighter - it should still work in both contexts.

Regarding the background, are you trying to get better contrast between a room and the outside area?

[Gornova]

If behind there is a grid, you should try to check a terminal-like approach to display menus and game world, I suggest you to take a look to trystan's ascii panel here and as example Twelve hours here. Check his blog too, is really helpful!

[gamechampionx]

Thanks. I just did an update, creating version 1.0.1 with tighter spacing for a better user experience. I'll be looking into some other UI improvements shortly.

[Samildanach]

I don't know if it's just my display but all the text is partially chopped (see here for an example).

The game has promise but I think the instruction/help text needs a lot of work. Various pages said you should check the skill menu, the spell menu, etc for more info - but nowhere that I saw does it tell you how to access those menus. No game should force you to just press every key until something happens.

[gamechampionx]

Samildanach,

Thanks for the feedback. Is the vertically spacing better in this version? https://github.com/bprollinson/robotzombieninjawizard/blob/v1.0.0/RobotZombieNinjaWizard.jar

I had pulled it in to be tighter, but I might need to expand it a bit more.

Regarding the menus, if you hit 'h' in-game, it brings you to the hotkeys menu. I can look at showing a message related to that on-screen if you think it would make things more intuitive. Also, I can add specific hotkeys to the instructions.

Regarding the menus, did you have trouble figuring out how to use the escape key to get back to the game? I'm curious to know if an on-screen prompt for that would also be useful. I'm looking forward to making the interface a bit more intuitive so that players have a better experience.

[gamechampionx]

I've made another release (https://github.com/bprollinson/robotzombieninjawizard/tree/v1.0.5) that adds some startup instructions for finding the hotkey, instructions and escape menus. The game also tells you which hotkeys to use when discussion menus on individual instructions pages.

Thanks for the feedback.