Intro and first impressions of beta.

[DoomHammer]

Hi fellow DD-ers.

I've played the alpha on and off since early 2011. I felt DD's strengths were in the minimalistic, old school look and feel where your imagination filled in the blanks and enhanced the overall play. The game was good as you could play a quick 15 second couple of clicks between ALT+TABing Word and Excel spreadsheets at work. It was obviously rewarding because you had to suppress the "HELL YEAH" from your co-workers when killing the boss (in the dungeon, not the company) whilst on 1 HP. That level of emotional investment in a game means you're onto a winner, usually!

It seems as if I've joined the beta-bandwagon at a bad time. Luckily I can play the game on my work machine, because my home PC will not run the game at all Chrome, Firefox even IE make no difference on the Unity player. Oh well, I'm sure it'll come good. Its never a good sign when you search for "Unity" on the forum and the search doesnt run because the word is too common!

My first impressions of the beta were mixed. I'm not a big fan of the portrait art in the new game, but I'm sure other people are - obviously, the mechanics of the game are still there, and thats the most important thing. I also found the text box popups really jarring initially. The image of the kingdom at the rear of the interface really clashes with the textboxes too. I'm not sure what the plans are for release, but surely there is a prettier and more streamlined way to simply organise and choose information when not in dungeons. The character portraits appear in the centre of the buttons too, which seem out of place.

OK, so before it sounds like a bunch of complaints, the game is solid. The sound effects are meaty and good. The fireball cursor is a nice touch. Obviously, its just a beta and will be polished. Given the devs seem fairly interactive on this forum, I guess I'd like to flag my concerns about the out-of-dungeon/main gameplay interface and also the initial starting section of the game at this point. Are these common concerns amongst players? Will the interface stay "as is" for release or are changes in the works? Are you open to suggestions via photochop etc?

I'd like to contribute as much as possible and get behind, what I think will be, an excellent game upon completion.

See you in the dungeons
DoomHammer

[Darvin]

The devs have noted that the Kingdom is getting an overhaul, and will be one of the last things to get into the beta. So don't worry, this is just the beta interface. If you follow the news posts, the devs sometimes drop hints on what the final Kingdom will look like, but we haven't seen it yet.

Anyways, welcome to the froums DoomHammer

[Nandrew]

Thanks for the commentary! Though it's what Darvin said: we're still overhauling the Kingdom interface (it's definitely going to be a biggie to get in before full release -- we know that first impressions count ). Right now, we've got a lot of work piled onto one artist so that may still take a bit.

I appreciate the commentary about streamlining the starting sections of the game, as well. I'm wondering in particular if the story isn't way too heavy for the beginning (wall-o-text and all that). Still feel that it's a mistake too many devs make, making it top-heavy before people have played enough to care about the game world yet.