xcvzxc 2018-12-04 21:01
Nice roguelike guys! Music is maybe a bit repetitive, but gameplay is quite pleasant
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD43 → Cultist's Quest
By james-dunlap, Anthony Dunlap and Cameron Dunlap
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 871 | 2.96 | 30 | |
| Fun | 978 | 2.44 | 30 | |
| Innovation | 993 | 2.36 | 31 | |
| Theme | 720 | 3.15 | 31 | |
| Graphics | 783 | 2.96 | 31 | |
| Audio | 623 | 2.40 | 29 | |
| Mood | 791 | 2.92 | 28 |
Nice roguelike guys! Music is maybe a bit repetitive, but gameplay is quite pleasant
@XCVZXC Yeah, it was originally meant to only be the menu music, but we ran out of time for more music since there was a lot more graphics required this time around than we have done in the past.
Those dungeons floor felt pretty big XD I only got to like floor 4 or 5 before a rat killed me when I wasn't paying attention. It feels a bit weird, that unlike other games with keys, a specific key unlocks a specific door (it does make more sense though^^).
Love the Roguelike of your game! sacrifices increasing the player is great !
@zugal89 Thanks for playing. Yes, they are pretty big. It was a balance between room size, number of rooms, and size of dungeon. Plus, for some reason that I wasn't able to figure out, when the dungeon got below a certain size, it failed to generate. We wanted smaller, but couldn't get it to work in the time constraint. The keys were a decision that our entire team did not agree on, but it does seem more logical, although, again, it adds a layer of sophistication as you have to try to make sure that the key is reachable from where the player starts, even if it requires getting another (reachable) key first. The game tries, but, sometimes, you just have to bash the door because a key is behind it. During playtesting, my son once got locked in the start room and was unable to bash the door before dying. Such is the madness of creating a roguelike...
@ehwalt-johann Thanks for the feedback. We wanted to connect to the theme in a way that was essential to gameplay rather than just layering it on top of another idea. I hope we succeeded, but the players will be the best judge of that.
Nice roguelike :) So many memories...
I liked the idea of carrying around and having to not accidentally trample a sacrifice :) I wish there wasn't a speed limit - ended up feeling pretty slow and bland. Also a lot of controls to remember at the beginning - might have been good to keep them displayed on-screen. Cheers
Maybe I'm a bit too young to have any nostalgic connection to these kind of games, but I found the controls really annoying. Graphics were nice though ^^
I really liked the way the dungeon looks! (you seem to have a lot of varied tiles and it feels very polished) It really adds to the mood, and I was very immersed in traversing the dungeons.
A few things that bothered me though:
1) The player movement was *very* slow, especially compared to how big the dungeons are. Sometimes getting from a key back to a locked door would take a very long time and could get pretty frustrating.
2) I think it would feel a lot less janky if the player movement was continuous instead of jumping from tile to tile (you can still have players snap to a tile when they let go, but it would just make the animation look more fluid when you're moving around).
3) Controls were not very intuitive, so would be nice to have a way to get a reminder after you start the game. I played for a while and completely forgot there's a key for "sacrifice", and saw it only after I restarted the game again.
Anyway, great entry, thank you for making the game!
I believe your game has a very nice mood and I like the managing system (hunger, life, sacrifice, etc..) it works very well ! I enjoyed exploring the levels but I must say it feels a bit empty, Maybe puting a few more mobs could be nice. Overall I liked your game and I must say that, walking with your sacrifices behind you, waiting to be slaughtered only to make you more powerful is very funny X) Good job
Great mood and full of nostalgia. Sadly I was never very good at those either. Art is really well done.
I think there is too much wandering around in empty spaces, maybe smaller floors and more monsters would be ideal. The controls are very roguelike-y (duh), which is not a good thing (specially for the small amount of features).
Other than that you did a good job.
@wegpast @wyatt @nehvis @matank @slipultura @vimlark @cassio-eduardo Thanks for giving the game a try. Yes, I agree that they are very empty. That was a result of running out of time to properly balance. We had many more mobs during development, but died easily. This was before we had a leveling system, but did not have time to properly balance after adding leveling, which was one of the last additions.
As far as controls, we chose this on purpose because if we develop it further, we would likely add a lot of other features which might require more, but it could also be reworked if not very easily. We felt it would be easier to remove than to add. Thanks for the feedback!
Lots of work in here to get the game to work and to have active AI creatures and the wide variety of potions. I thought the maps were too large (lots of time walking down really long halls), and it would be more fun were there more to do. I accidentally trampled most of my sacrifice people, which was unexpected, but led me to think that a combination of rogue and snake might be sort of cool. Good work.
@dob Thanks for playing and thanks for the great feedback. With the AI creatures, it was incredibly interesting to find a fair way for them to find the player without needing a complex pathfinding algorithm like A*. Instead, we used wave propagation with the noise created by the items that the player is carrying and checked line of sight to move the AI. It was fun to write!
Very cool and loved the graphics :D a full version would be amazing :) please rate mine too if you want :D <3
The game the art and the music are all not bad.
First I was like "a roguelike? Oh jolly" but you guys put a twist into it. I saw myself playing and thinking "just one more room, then I'll exit" and boy I've seen a lot of rooms after repeating this thought again and again. Iam a huge fan of pixelart too and you hit the spot. Good Job for a jam. Thanks for that.
So now I'm actually kinda pissed off. I spent a good hour and a half wandering around these desolate caverns just to suddenly die for some unknown reason. It was probably at least floor six or seven, the starting room had a rat and a goblin which I dispatched even though they took a surprisingly huge amount of hits to kill compared to anything else seen before. Oh the game actually seems to keep track of the action log from the previous run...
cq37.png
Well that's a lot of damage compared to all those single digit hits seen before. And I guess that goblin was one of those "hey I'm hiding under a door, so I guess lore wise I'm hitting you through a keyhole or something cause I give zero fucks" type of monsters.
So suck it Rodney, your amulet can rot in that cursed dungeon...
So I think you way over scoped your project and fell flat in your ambitiousness. You spread yourself so thin that you ended up with quite a lot of different functionalities (which still aren't enough for a classic roguelike) and none of them are very tight. Quite frankly, it ended up being quite boring. The floors were way way waaay too huge and empty. I mean I at least had nowhere near enough memory to remember even a 10th of these identical looking rooms and corridors. That's the beauty in classic roguelikes having the whole map visible at once, it's impossible to get lost. And even the bit more modern remakes of Nethack with graphics that can't fit the map to screen at once have a minimap. Did you even beat the game without using the zoomed out Unity editor as a makeshift map?
The rooms and corridors were unnecessarily big too. The rooms had no reason at all to be bigger than 5x5 and those 50+ tile corridors were a slog (with no repeat key functionality). Quite a few times ran into these "cool" minute long corridors that just ended up in a dead end which resulted in me trampling over half of my 10+ sacfifices because of the frequent visits there.
cqkey.png
This key/door system you had was quite dumb. The classic way of any key opening any locked door would have been way better. Sure, I forgot that there is a bash door key which made it 100 times worse but can you really blame be, you drop quite a big list of keys for a player who doesn't know anything about your game and expect them to remember everything (without any contextual information about the actual game). That's another beauty in classic roguelikes, even though they had tons of different keys and ascii graphics, only thing you really had to remember was the ? key. So I did try K after getting frustrated about the lock & key system but you had gone the complete other route of making it be bash and not kick and also binding the key to something unexpected. I wouldn't have remembered the sacrifice button either if I wouldn't tried to search at one of these...
cqsearch.png
What's the point of those? Didn't see much value in the whole sacrifice/spell thing either. The spell wasn't really that much more useful than melee because there was no way to figure out whether a monster is a real threat or not. And up to my cruel end, I didn't even know the monsters could pose a threat at all since everything I had met that far was just tickling me and I had health potions galore in my inventory.
Oh, it seems these comment posts actually have a character limit. To be continued in the post below... :sunglasses:
The inventory system had its flaws too. First of all, what the deal with the horizontal scroll there? There wasn't even a need for a vertical one either. The inventory could only hold 10 items and you managed to fit five lines to that action log box that was like a quarter of the screen. At first the identify mechanic seemed completely pointless as well. I identified herb, bread and water and came up with herb, bread and water... what a surprise. Few floors later (and these and non door kicking floors so it was ages), I discovered my first spoiled food and thought that maybe identifying them is necessary indeed just to realize afterwards that even if you identify one as bad, you can't discard them and they will clutter up your inventory forever if you don't eat it anyway. Even the potions (except for the full heal one) I ignored completely after a while. Not sure if it was the case but I quite sure I quaffed same color potion twice in a row for inverse effects. So I deemed them more hassle for what their potential effects were worth.
The graphics were fine I guess even though I prefer my roguelikes ASCII. The music got repetitive quite fast.
Did you do the dungeon generation algorithm yourself from scratch? It seemed to take quite a long time to generate and you mentioned something about it requiring threading which resulted in no web version too. Shouldn't really be that demanding and for sure shouldn't require threads. There are also plenty of readily available made generators for dungeons just like these (and other kinds too) in various different languages (and even porting should still be faster than making one from scratch).
At least it sometimes presented me with a precious gift like this...
cqyay.png
Anyways, I'll end my #stillbitter ramblings here. Good job!
@abso @poodle-in-need @meldrian Thanks for playing and the feedback.
@antti-haavikko Wow! Thank you for the extremely detailed feedback. I don't think I have ever seen LD feedback that took two posts before. I hope you got A LOT of "coolness" points for that!
I can respond to some of your points, but I am likely to miss some. Please understand that we value everything that you said, though.
For the generation algorithm, you are correct that it should not take long to generate the dungeon. The issue becomes in the placement of some objects, especially keys. With the decision to handle keys the way we did, it became extremely important to ensure that the keys are reachable from the player's start point. This requires a lot of pathfinding with the way that I did it. And, yes, I did write the algorithm from scratch. I completely understand that there are many libraries out there that do it for you, but I wanted to write my own as this is why we do Ludum Dare is to stretch ourselves in certain areas. Mine is often an algorithm which I have not used or written before. We have done A* on a hex map, A* on a rectangular grid, and now dungeon generation. It is just what our goal is to learn. Admittedly, that did lead to issues such as the second image up. This was not intended, but I will call it a feature as we could use it to add secret passages easily!
The inventory scrolling issue is actually due to a Unity issue. I had several issues with Unity during that weekend, despite having used Unity to do similar things for several years. First, I was getting A LOT of crashes and frozen editors. I downgraded to older versions twice to fix some of these issues, but one that we could not get to work correctly was the UI scaling. The inventory system is supposed to automatically scale based upon resolution, but it was not working correctly and was cutting off the buttons. Therefore, we added the horizontal scrollbars. Admittedly, they are not needed on larger resolutions, but for some reason, Unity still displayed them even when they were set to automatically disappear. (This is one of the reasons I like to write my own algorithms and systems so I can fix it when something is wrong!) We intended the effects of not dropping items and meant it as a part of the sacrifices you make. Again, not the best choice when it came to the food, but should have worked for the potions. Which brings us to the potion issue! You mentioned changing potions, which is not supposed to happen. My sons reported this during development, but when I played, I could not replicate the issue, so it is still on our bug list. In hindsight, given this, we should have added a drop button to alleviate this, but we didn't. It would have been easy as the code is there. I would have just needed a graphic.
Sorry for the goblin, but sometimes they do get lucky when dealing with a random system. You and the monsters level together, and I would imagine that you just got a bad roll while the goblin got a good one.
Finally, I would like to correct one incorrect statement. There _is_ repeat key functionality. Some think it is too slow, but in our testing, it worked well for us. We have talked about it since, though, and decided that it should have been a configurable parameter for the player to tweak to his/her liking.
Again, thank you very much for the honest feedback.
I don't think you understood what I meant with repeat functionality. I meant NetHack like numpad 5 and then direction to go that way until something unexpected (encountering a monster, reaching the end of the corridor) happens.
It felt strange that the potions of the same colour would have different effects. I found three of the same colour potion in one room (which is strange in itself) and found that each of the identical potions did different things. There was no way to tell what effect I was getting, or even if it is good or bad. I would have made it so that a specific colour always has the same effect, but don't tell the player what that effect is. Force them to learn.
Rooms feel incredibly bland, probably because they're huge. Could have scaled the whole thing down. Some of the text was also hard to read due to colouring, particularly some purple text against the gray background. Also felt strange having dead ends. Otherwise, the game was interesting for a while, but quickly became repetitive. Good luck with future projects :thumbsup:
@antti-haavikko Ah, I get it. Thanks!
@justcamh Thanks for playing and the feedback. The potions were supposed to work that way, but for some reason, don't. Just haven't had a chance to track that bug down since Ludum Dare.
I love the graphics, personally - the title screen and sprite art was very cute. The music had some kinda mood to it and good looping, but otherwise fell a little flat and as others have said, repetitive. I know that part of my boredom was due to both the rng of the map generation and my own brain chemistry's rng of what paths to take, but I agree that the whole thing coulda been scaled down a bit or at least look less same-y so that you can tell where you've been before without having to check on open doors and memorize the locations of the doors in relation to the rooms - I think, had I not stopped on floor 2, then I would have been just as lost returning with the amulet as I am looking for the way down. The text colors were a bit too bright, I think - in-game, the purple/green/yellow were generally fine, though the purple was ab it harder to read since it was actually less bright; but the menu's bright red was quite a bit painful to look at. A button to see the controls again in-game would have been nice as well - the only things I managed to memorize were S for sacrifice, G for grab, I for inventory & U/D for Up Stairs and Down Stairs. A way to identify what effect potions might have in order to make educated guesses on drinking them would have been nice. Personally, I wasn't able to tell what items did what, other than obvious food = hunger, so I can't say for sure if I had the duplicate effect bug since I pretty much ignored potions as inventory space-wasters. Congratulations on learning to write a dungeon generation algorithm, though - especially the "making sure keys are accessible to the player's starting point" part! That's something I want to learn in the future, too. So even if the game was a bit boring to play, I'm glad you were able to learn what you set out to learn. Good luck next jam!