Okay so I would say this is pretty much the general concensus so far.

-the screens are too dark:
technically they are supposed to be dark (since a goal is to light the place) but perhaps my monitor calibration is off, or maybe it is just too dark, so I will make the lighting brighter.

-things seem too perfect:
I am going to fix that with some better tile sets, with edge overlays.



Any more feedback?

I would like some ideas on how to make the life/mana indicators better/different since I personally do not like them.

que de parlez-vous ?
"of what do you speak?"


lol, any other comments preferably in english :-D

P.S. 'bad' english is okay too.

Very diablo-esque, and rather nice looking.

However, I'd like to hear the reasoning behind the choice of colors for the two statistic bars (one red, one blue).

As for why they are red and blue,

tradition, red-life, blue-mana


we are investegating some alternative ways for displaying these, right now scripting is taking precidence though...

and i must say, my 8 hours of day-job game programming and my 6 hours of MW game programming are starting to catch up with me *yawn* we've been grinding away like madmen(and women) since dec 18th, doing aproximately 64 hours of work a week on it, (6 hours 5 days a week, 18 hours sat and 16 hours sun)

so, as i write this, im about ready to drop, lol.

thanks for the input, keep it coming :-)

first - those pics are awesome, keep it up. and now for some random commentary ...

Quote:-the screens are too dark:
technically they are supposed to be dark (since a goal is to light the place) but perhaps my monitor calibration is off, or maybe it is just too dark, so I will make the lighting brighter.

it's not that they're too dark, so much as that it's a depressing monotone - there's little/no/not enough contrast between areas of light and dark. the example i'm thinking of is a streetlight - a large cone of bright light with a multitude of vibrant colors within, but just utter blackness outside. think Gandalf in Moria.

and i'm in agreement that the life/mana bars would (might...) be better on the bottom. for some reason it's giving me the illusion i'm boxed in on the screen, but perhaps it's just because i'd like an unobstructed view of the terrain. as for the color, have you tried green for the mana ? a little Star-Warsish, i admit, but it seems like a viable color.

as for everything being to perfect - i can see that. i can't quite pin it down, but everything is so symmetrical. i called in some backup and had my little sister (12) stare at them, and she came up with (verbatim)
- "it's too "copy-cat"
- "too dark, need more color"
- "too bland"
- "you need to do more with them"
- "include some guillotines (dunno ... probably some random stuff)"
- "stuff needs to seem older (i told it's medieval); it looks like no one has
ever been there"
taking the last it'd be nice if, for instance, on the floor you can't tell where each and every tile is - maybe by including random cracks and smoothing the edges so they don't stand out. and maybe placing items in a non-symmetrical formation would help.

anyway, i understand you aren't using a 3d API, so most of that probably isn't worth the effort. at any rate, it looks good.

The lighting is my biggest gripe. You need more lights, for starters. These scenes are far too bland. Colored lights would be great, and smooth lighting would be fantastic. If your engine supports OpenGL or Direct3D, interpolation will be free.

Ray-casting is computationally expensive. Perhaps you should look into lightmaps instead. Pre-process as much as you can, and only modify the lightmap when the local lighting change. (For the character light, you can probably XOR a smaller map on top of your existing lightmap.) Have you considered shadow maps to add depth to the scene? They wouldn't necessarily have to be dynamic to look good.

Less regularity in the graphics would help. Look at Diablo II: there's very little repetition, and none of it is apparent. Granted, the game is huge, but it looks beautiful.

Looking good, Raymond.

Not much to add, I'd just like to reiterate the points previous posters made about the repetition of the graphics. IMO, that's one of the most important things needing to be taken care of. Little piles of dirt, grime-smeared stones, cracks and fissures and peeling paint can make all the difference in transforming a 'clean room' into something a little more true to life. Erode the edges of your wall stones, crack your floorstones, splatter a little blood and dirt and leaf mold and gunk across the ground. Go crazy with it. [grin] Granted, it can be hard to do well in a tile based game. That was one of the hardest things for me with Golem. But it is well worth the effort.