Review of the demo

[Kouriozan]

Like:
-all things herborist said
-all kingdom related content (upgrade + preparation), even If we can't do much right now, I already love the system.
-sub dungeon!
-swamp dungeon! I like the dungeon variety.

Dislike:
-same tileset for all dungeon, maybe because it's a demo.

I really enjoyed the demo, huge thanks for that.
Now, time to wait for the beta >.<

[MaximumSquid]

Love the upgrades to some of the old and busted spells

Also very excited about finally having a spell that can damage multiple enemies at once
(Shove the level 8 next to the level 10 boss; pound on both of them, level up when killing the lvl 8, and win)

Finally beat the stage with Anoobis. . . took me 12 pots, a mid fight level up, and I was about to activate my badge of courage when the dude finally bit it (also the mobs on that stage blinking away and draining even more health from you is very evil)

I found the other 2 hard stages to be actually quite easy, but it might just been because of the class I was playing

Best part being no downside to any of the new features that I've seen so far
Can't wait to see more!

[Nandrew]

Indeed. It was a way to say that there not much point commenting that. I do really love the background picture though, and am looking forward seeing it used at its full potential. (Would dungeon area appear as you progress ? Buildings being built when you unlock weird classes ? Building change shapes as you unlock more ? Ah, so much to do...)

Yeah, most of that stuff is planned.

We think what most people are missing from this version (when compared with the freeware, at least) is a sense of goals and progression: unfortunately, that's just the constraints of the demo we're working with. Once the beta goes up, I think the game will gain some much-needed direction to motivate and inspire players more. The kingdom will also be a lot closer to what we intended, unlock heirarchies will be in place and a player's profile will end up with a lot more "personality".

It's great to hear all of the enthusiastic feedback so far, and I'm glad that people are patient enough to put up with temp graphics (particularly the single dungeon tileset -- I really can't wait to get more of those in either ).

[Herborist]

Indeed. It was a way to say that there not much point commenting that. I do really love the background picture though, and am looking forward seeing it used at its full potential. (Would dungeon area appear as you progress ? Buildings being built when you unlock weird classes ? Building change shapes as you unlock more ? Ah, so much to do...)

Yeah, most of that stuff is planned. :P

We think what most people are missing from this version (when compared with the freeware, at least) is a sense of goals and progression: unfortunately, that's just the constraints of the demo we're working with. Once the beta goes up, I think the game will gain some much-needed direction to motivate and inspire players more. The kingdom will also be a lot closer to what we intended, unlock heirarchies will be in place and a player's profile will end up with a lot more "personality".

It's great to hear all of the enthusiastic feedback so far, and I'm glad that people are patient enough to put up with temp graphics (particularly the single dungeon tileset -- I really can't wait to get more of those in either :P ).

What about Gods? Please tell that Gods will be in every dungeon! The demo was so much harder without them; I'm too used to the pactmaker making pacts. ^_^

[zeemeerman2]

Little question. Mouseovers. I didn't know what the potions did until I saw the little i at the bottom right corner giving the tooltip with information. That is because the glyphs do give information, you don't need to hover your mouse to anything. E.g. IMAWAL says "5 mana, petrify". That's enough to know what it does. I didn't know you can get extra information from a tooltip for a long time. It annoyed me since potions didn't give direct info at all like the glyphs did.
SUGGESTION: use a tooltip when you hover over the skill or potion box, not just over the little i in the corner.

- How 'bout prayers and gods?

Little annoyance:
- Do the potions ever backfire? If a potion heals for 40%, don't just say it does mostly. Just say it does 40%. I know you're trying to add humor, but please keep humor and statistics seperate. For the tower shield, a shield that was ironically never been near a tower, I had a good laugh. Since that doesn't say anything about the 10% physical resistance and is just flavour text, I don't mind. But please reword the potions to not confuse players.

- The conversion icon has a hover effect, so it looks like it is clickable, like a button. Yet it doesn't do anything. Other icons don't have hover effects, so there is no reasoning that they are clickable. I know it does something when you drag a glyph to it, but it looks like it can also do something when you just click on it without dragging something to it.
SUGGESTION: Remove the mouse hover effect when not dragging items to the icon.

- Boss drop items. The high value items. It's annoying to me having to destroy items to pick up the high value item, when it has no value in aiding me in the dungeon (it has no bonus stats, it would just fill up precious inventory space). You would only pick it up when you are about to leave the dungeon anyway.
SUGGESTION: Don't let the item count as an inventory item. Have an additional slot for the item or let it just disappear when picked up, letting the game know you have it (in the game code) but not showing up in your inventory. (like boosters also don't show up in your inventory, yet you still have them.) If the game auto-sells stuff from your dungeon, the value of the boss-dropped item will still count with it. If other items are destroyed and that only item is sold (something I can't tell from the demo), you can have the value in gold from that item, while not taking up inventory at the dungeon itself. You know what I mean?

Some annoyances I had there, but told only to make the dungeon experience for future players even better if dealt with.

Otherwise a great experience!

[flap]

@zeemeerman2 : Some characters get 100% from potions. I think that for some others, they actually hurt. So the text is somewhat accurate.

[metroid composite]

I actually beat all three of the hard dungeons first try. It's the Normal Swamp that took three or four tries. (On one of the tries, Ssseth's physical defence somehow got set to 100%. Is this intentional, like "if you try to fireball Ssseth her defence goes up" or is this a bug?)

PISSORF is...actually very good now. If you knock into a wall, it's better damage for the mana than BURNDAYRAZ even without base attack upgrades.

ENDISWALL is...useable but not that great--the best it can do is the kind of thing that CYDSTEPP does in its sleep: give you one free attack (by buffing defence to 100%). But the thing is, CYDSTEPP consistently does this for 10 mana, and doesn't deactivate if you have to attack a level 1 mob while you're regening. ENDISWALL can take anywhere from 8-80 mana for the same effect that CYDSTEPP does for 10.

I didn't pick up WEYTWUT on any of the maps where there were fleeing enemies, so I'm not sure how good it is at that new job. I did use it to set up PISORF chains, however.

And...Elf going from 2 mana per conversion to 1 mana per conversion? I...don't think I like that, to be honest. Math time!

Let's say you're level 8, you're fighting a boss, and you're a class without particular buffs (like Fighter). Your stats are going to be:

HP: 108
Atk: 52
Mana: 13

Assuming a 75 damage-dealing boss, without race bonuses you get 3 attacks and 5 fireballs once you use the 4x potions and 4x mana potions. So that's

156 physical + 160 magical

Dwarf can turn this into 4 attacks, almost 5 attacks (you'll probably regen one square for the extra damage) so about +52 (or +94 with the one square regen). Human can give 20 more damage per attack, so that's 60 damage; and potentially if you get into a regen/attrition war Human will be significantly more valuable (Human is a great race for taking out Super Meat Man). Elf gives...one extra fireball, so that's 40 damage (notably, you can never convert your final glyph as elf, because if you do, you have nothing to spend the mana on). Or, perhaps a better illustration--you get 8 more mana from going Elf--let's use that mana with the HALPMEH glyph to give 48-72 in healing. That's still less than the extra health you get to play with by being Dwarf. Of course, an additional thorn in Elf's side is that let's say the first glyph you pick up is one you want to just convert from ground (more of a freeware thing, sure but...). You...can't actually make use of this extra mana you just gained until you find your second glyph.


And...one final note--I'm...not actually that fond of the new art. Now, I'm a mathematician not an artist, so don't take me as an art critic worth listening to but...I think what's bugging me is that in the freeware I could at least pretend that several of the classes were female. Classes like Sorceror and Assassin and Tinker and Crusader had no obvious gender hints, and only a few classes were explicit in their gender (Gorgon female, Transmuter, Wizard, and Bloodmage male). The class portraits in the demo are of...well...ugly males. Don't take this the wrong way: they're very well-drawn ugly males. But...they're just not as appealing to me.

[Herborist]

Little question. Mouseovers. I didn't know what the potions did until I saw the little i at the bottom right corner giving the tooltip with information. That is because the glyphs do give information, you don't need to hover your mouse to anything. E.g. IMAWAL says "5 mana, petrify". That's enough to know what it does. I didn't know you can get extra information from a tooltip for a long time. It annoyed me since potions didn't give direct info at all like the glyphs did.
SUGGESTION: use a tooltip when you hover over the skill or potion box, not just over the little i in the corner.

- How 'bout prayers and gods?

Little annoyance:
- Do the potions ever backfire? If a potion heals for 40%, don't just say it does mostly. Just say it does 40%. I know you're trying to add humor, but please keep humor and statistics seperate. For the tower shield, a shield that was ironically never been near a tower, I had a good laugh. Since that doesn't say anything about the 10% physical resistance and is just flavour text, I don't mind. But please reword the potions to not confuse players.

- The conversion icon has a hover effect, so it looks like it is clickable, like a button. Yet it doesn't do anything. Other icons don't have hover effects, so there is no reasoning that they are clickable. I know it does something when you drag a glyph to it, but it looks like it can also do something when you just click on it without dragging something to it.
SUGGESTION: Remove the mouse hover effect when not dragging items to the icon.

- Boss drop items. The high value items. It's annoying to me having to destroy items to pick up the high value item, when it has no value in aiding me in the dungeon (it has no bonus stats, it would just fill up precious inventory space). You would only pick it up when you are about to leave the dungeon anyway.
SUGGESTION: Don't let the item count as an inventory item. Have an additional slot for the item or let it just disappear when picked up, letting the game know you have it (in the game code) but not showing up in your inventory. (like boosters also don't show up in your inventory, yet you still have them.) If the game auto-sells stuff from your dungeon, the value of the boss-dropped item will still count with it. If other items are destroyed and that only item is sold (something I can't tell from the demo), you can have the value in gold from that item, while not taking up inventory at the dungeon itself. You know what I mean?

Some annoyances I had there, but told only to make the dungeon experience for future players even better if dealt with.

Otherwise a great experience!

Seems like you're nitpicking at things that aren't necessary. I like the humor interspersed throughout the game and I hope they keep doing it. Anyone miffed by the description of the potions is thinking too hard about it.

Furthermore, your ideas on boss drops are entirely without merit. You can take the boss item drops out of the dungeon and sell them; you CAN'T take potions or glyphs out of the dungeon. Assuming you somehow finished a dungeon with an abundance of un-converted glyphs and potions, there is no downside to spending all of 20 sec converting them away and grabbing the boss item. Also, you don't have boosters in your inventory, you don't even actually pick them up - you walk over them and your stats are boosted.

I do agree that the tooltip system isn't great, though.

EDIT: Perhaps one of the devs can answer this - will we be able to convert glyphs without picking them up in the new version? We're not able to do so in the demo.

[Hammerfan]

EDIT: Perhaps one of the devs can answer this - will we be able to convert glyphs without picking them up in the new version? We're not able to do so in the demo.

We are actually able to do that in the demo. Just stand over the item and click the ? glyph shaped button on the conversion bar.

[metroid composite]

Furthermore, your ideas on boss drops are entirely without merit. You can take the boss item drops out of the dungeon and sell them; you CAN'T take potions or glyphs out of the dungeon. Assuming you somehow finished a dungeon with an abundance of un-converted glyphs and potions, there is no downside to spending all of 20 sec converting them away and grabbing the boss item.

Yeah, but it's just dumb clicks. Honestly, I'd prefer that as soon as you beat the dungeon you get a message something like...

"mission complete--you got rare item x. [Leave Dungeon] [Continue Exploring]"

I'd prefer not to click a bunch of extra times doing completely trivial actions with no interesting decisions. (I'll agree it's really not a big deal, to be fair. But it would be preferable).

- some of the classes are still too similar; wizard and sorcerer are too similar, same basic goals: stack MP, burn them down with fireball; sorcerers do auto-attack more, but that's a simple logic switch to make, not really a separate class in my mind

Except that Wizard and Sorceror are...really not similar? You're comparing a class that has -25% attack, six glyphs, and -1 mana cost on glyphs (which changes the cost evaluation--2-3 mana glyphs become crazy mana-efficient) to a class with effectively +20% attack, and bonus healing that is stupidly powerful at low levels (any spell is double the mana efficiency of Halpmeh at level 1), but only five glyphs. You're pretty much comparing a mage (Wizard) to a physical powerhouse (Sorceror).

If you're spamming fireballs with Wizard, you're not using them optimally (you should be using low-mana spells like PISSORF).

If you're just stacking fireballs with Sorceror you're...also not using them optimally (you should be attacking first, casting spells once you've taken damage--probably HALPMEH or CYDSTEPP because your high attack makes them more mana-efficient, but fireballs are fine if you don't have something better).