Hi Everyone!

Finally, the time came for a forum lurker (myself) to have something to show here - and request your help at the same time

We're working on a game called "Nyrthos", which is an aRPG playable in internet browser and some Android and iOS devices. We're closing to the release of our first technology demo, and are looking for feedback.

In case any nice people would be willing to help us in the eternal quest to find bugs - or to just spend a few minutes testing the gameplay and letting us know their opinion - we would be awesome'd :)

PLEASE NOTE THAT THE TECHNOLOGY REQUIRES THAT YOU HAVE A 3D GRAPHICS CARD; it should work ok with just about any card, but you have to have it, the software rendering mode is just painfully slow. Also, though it does not make a huge difference on most computers, Internet Explorer and FireFox tend to have the best results performance-wise.

The tech demo can be found here: demo.nyrthos.com /// the login is tester/tester.

Also - please, don't share the demo out of these boundaries, we've just begun the first testing phase and we have quite a way to go so we don't want to spread some wrong impressions.

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Nyrthos is being built in Flash/Stage3D/Starling, and looks like this (click to watch our teaser):

More screenshots can be found on our website - www.nyrthos.com

Best of all!
Martin Jelinek

BeerDeer Games

really nice graphics, i had to stop playing because its only running at 8fps on my computer.

Hi Seandime,

that fps count is really abysmal. The problem is that Flash/Stage3D technology basically requires that you have a graphics card with acceleration.. it is unfortunately unsuable in the software rendering mode :(

Sorry that you had to stop playing..

I really like the music, and the backgrounds are beautiful. I love the trees swaying in the wind, too - a great touch; very restless and foreboding.

The movement was painfully slow, though - or at least it felt that way, much more so than, say, Torchlight or Diablo. Maybe the difference has to do with the zoom level? Even using the run function felt like it took a little too long, and with skeletons spawning so frequently and so far away, combat got a bit tedious.

I also don't know how you plan to handle characters obscured by trees and such; with easy enemies like the skeletons I could use the minimap to help, but it might be frustrating with more challenging enemies.

The dialogue can come off a bit weak, especially during the beginning when there's a lot of '...' and lines that break off, and it can be a little hard to follow who's saying what when the characters are close together.

Under bugs, the skip button doesn't seem to skip dialogue - I tried it when I restarted to check a few things. Also, the 'report a bug' button in the upper left leads me to the Nyrthos homepage; I don't know if that's working as intended, or if you wanted it to lead to a specific bug report page. I'm using Chrome version 24.0.1312.57 m.

Hey!

I love the feedback! Thank you very much, it helps a lot. It's hard for us to judge some aspects of the game after developing it for quite a while.

I'll throw in a little reaction of mine to your findings. The point is not to argue in any way, it's to explain some of the thought process/decision making behind the things you mention as you (or someone else) might find it interesting!

- We were actually discussing the movement speed for the demo too. In the actual game, we wanted to make "a room for progression", that is the reason your character starts slow - so he can feel the difference as he levels up (and increases his appropriate stat points), gets new gear, drinks speed potions etc. The truth is - as long as there are no such things in the demo, we might just think about increasing its default value..

- Characters behind the trees - completely agree here. While it's not a problem with "melee" enemies, it becomes a pain in the butt when you're dealing with ranged ones. We'll definitely have to solve this issue somehow.

- Yeah, the dialogue is a little cheesy The reason for the "..." was that trying to avoid longer texts (especially scary "walls of text"). I feel that - especially in the beginning of a game - people nowadays are reluctant to invest any time into reading longer stuff when they see it. Perhaps we went too far.. ?

Anyway, we were thinking about redesigning the cutscene "interface" in the future - I wish to add captions (so it's easy to say who says what) and also character portraits. It should make the characters stand out much more.

- The button is actually not a "skip" button, but a fast forward button. We have to fix this so people are sure how it works.

- Report bug button is clearly a bug in itself Haha! What an awesome fail.

Anyway, thanks again for taking the time to test it and for your awesome "criticism", we really appreciate your input.

Martin

According to the analytics, quite a lot of people from gamedev tried our demo, and we got some nice feedback, so once again, thank you so much!

Just to let you know - we‘ll be wrapping up the list of changes/bugs today, so in case you didn‘t get to send them, go ahead! I‘ll post again as soon as we have the next iteration.

Best of all!