Quote:Original post by taby
The artwork is amazing!

Seconded!

Hey Visage,

Nice to see a tech demo. I have followed the project for some time now and was really interested to try this out. So here is a little feedback -- hope it helps.

Aesthetically the game is really well done. The movement was smooth and the colors vibrant. I assume when you have more art staff (assumption based on in-game dialogue) that you will incorporate more animations into the battle mode. This will help out a lot. Also, since you are having difficulty producing all of the required art assets, I thought I'd point you to Lost Garden. Some really nice graphics that might blend in well with your pre-existing style if you would like to add more environments until you can acquire further original artwork.

Now to gameplay:

First thing, without reading the manual, it would be nice to just jump in and play. But figuring out that 'F' is accept and 'S' is menu took a lot of keyboard smashing. Allowing the use of 'Enter' or 'Space' in conjunction with 'F' would be nice. Also, 'Esc' and 'I' would be nice to access the inventory->main menu. These are my personal preferences, but I feel they are pretty common. Note-- if the input is customizable ignore my oversight.

The game ran fine for me in 1024x768 in windowed mode (XP) but crashed when I tried to change it to full screen mode. It seemed like the game was constantly trying to change to full screen, failed back to windowed and kept trying. I had to hard exit out.

I didn't explore the entire cave, because the random battles happened really frequently. I did manage to talk to most of the NPCs (beautiful dialogue system by the way), but didn't have the patience to keep exploring.
In the tech demo it might be nice to let people walk around and explore and talk to NPCs and just get used to the game, while maintaining another area where they can go and fight. Just a thought, could just be my personal preference again.

The area specific targeting is a nice touch. I imagine that in the full version that there will be great gameplay consequences with this system?

And finally, here are a couple of picky things:
In battle, the HP number drops, but the graphical bar doesn't change. Coordinating these two would be a nice/practical touch.

Removing dead monsters from the battle scene is better than graying them out.


Overall I really enjoyed the demo though. It was very similar to how I imagined it and I think it has a lot of potential. I hope that you find an apt programmer and more artists to help you out with future releases (*wishes I wasn't so busy with my project/life*). Keep us updated, this is a really good project.

Coby

[Edited by - shadowcomplex on October 3, 2006 8:57:24 PM]

Quote:Original post by Steuernol
You can turn off the random battles by hitting the 'a' key.

Ahh. I see. Thanks. Looks like its HofA time again then!

I thought that I set the random encounters to only happen every 14-20 tile steps or so? If they are happening more frequently than 10 steps, we might have an older version of one of the data files still laying around in one of the releases...


And you press 'f' to talk to NPCs, but you have to be facing them and you have to be close.

I loaded the game quite a few times. On average I could make it pretty far before the first random battle, but after the first battle, I would encounter another battle in only a few steps. Needless to say, I died a lot.

You are probably right about the data file, but it isn't a huge deal. I was just trying to talk to everyone but those damned snake/skeleton/slime groups kept kicking my ass.

Out of curiousity, what library do you use to load PNG files? I recently discovered a wrapper for Paintlib that is really efficient. I don't have the URL at hand, but I can post it later.

Again, excellent work.