Spoiler For that level 9a target, check the door just around the corner - behind you and too the right. The target doesn't raise the floor in that area. It opens the door.
I've never played a game like this before, but I've been craving a deeper, more long term experience from my iphone. I have to admit that my biggest concern are games in this genre being too hard or unapproachable. Is this the game for a newbie to enter the genre through? Are there any games like this one that are strongly recommended?
Thanks. The door revealed a single section of corridor blocked off by a vertical grate and a tapestry with nothing behind it. You get a tantalising glimpse of what lies beyond but I still have no idea on how to raise the floor in front of the target. I have started using graph paper to map the dungeons to add in the features such as colour wheels, switches, traps, altars, spinning electric statues, water pools etc. but its a bit laborious. I am hoping the update will provide better mapping information
Great game so far! Haven't seen anything like it in a good while. Having a few crashing issues while fishing expeditions, so to speak. I will sit at a fishing hole to either get the treasure there or collect fish for rations and I get a lot of crashes.
I think something weird happens sometimes if you touch a fish in mid-air while it's falling. Will try to find that bug for v1.3.
Being an old time D&Der, from pen and paper in the 70s, to Wizardry, Might and Magic, Eye of the Beholder, I am done with mapping! And then I read a post from a player blasting out graph paper with this game?! The issues with the mapping makes this a "no buy" until I see the developer will at least address the mapping issues. To his credit, the developer has been awesome in this forum in addressing some of the issues with this game. I don't recall seeing ANY post of his that mentions improving the mapping. Til then, no buy for me. I know, I'm showing my age.
That sounds about the right time when I crash. Mid air fish grabbing. Will there be a use for old/unusable equipment? Like selling to the vendor on floor 1 or something?
I have been playing it for a while now. I have had no crashes at all. I have updated to 1.1 and that has solved the double touch issue that was a bit painful. Nice knowing how much health a monster has when fighting. I am a bit stuck now. I get the occasional monster spawn but I now wandering around a bit lost now. I spend some time fishing but am not sure what to do next. I need a key for level 11 and I still don't know how to raise the floor in 9a to continue there. I think I will give myself a break and wait for update 1.2. Hopefully the mapping will be improved (a lot). Also a hint system to help when gets stuck would be good. I have played the Room and The Room 2. They both had a good clue system that did not get in the way of playing and one did not have to use it if one did not want to.
I am stuck on level 11 as well. I teleported out in the middle of that big puzzle area and now apparently I need a silver key to continue. I have a feeling this is a bug. I have seen some other bugs with doors. I'm pretty sure the door to the gold area on 7a closed on it's own and the lock for it now is unusable (no pop-up to choose a character with a key and I even have a gold key from a lower level). Also, taking the stairs from 7a to 8a... On 8a there is a wall lever that toggles the two doors which was closed from 8a. Is there a way to teleport into 8a? If not, then the doors were toggled backwards. I was able to use Retreat to get back there though. There is an infinite XP bug on 7a. The floor lever closest to the stairs down to 8a -- just flip it back and forth for 150 XP. What floor tiles on 9a? If you mean the ones by the target, I do not believe they raise. The game is getting tiresome for as well. There is still that area with ration in it in the NE section of 7a that eludes me and the lower levels are getting tiresome -- either there are some convoluted level puzzles or an additional type of hidden button (maybe a floor one in addition to the wall button)? I have to say may patience with the utter lack of information is starting to really wear thin. Especially given that for all I know I am running up against bugs instead off really hard puzzles. The game needs more feedback. And the whole starving thing sucks and adds *no* value to the game. Maybe if we could sell gear for gold it would not be so bad, but it was not until level 10 before I finally had enough gold to buy the tackle. This is just terrible game design -- players have no way to know when starting the game that they need to save up for the fishing tackle. Resting a lot and using altar while starving was on one hand really wearing thin, even with Restore, but then just turned annoying but a bit comical once I had Regenerate. I was basically dungeon crawling for several levels without ever eating, just Restoring and then Regenerating. It is a terrible game mechanic. I would say get rid of it and have beds restore just mana (and maybe a very small amount of health). Also, once a gold lock has been unlocked, have the door raise when someone travels to the level -- that would get past the problem of accidentally sealing the area back off. Another example of poor game/level design. Anyway, decent attempt at a game, but it's not quite there yet. And for the record, when it is your poor level design that allows gold rooms to be resealed, blowing players off by telling them the gold areas are optional is just plain insulting. Started off really enjoying the game, but it is becoming too tiresome to continue playing.
Thanks - I've added the "bug reporting" parts of your post to my list of items to investigated/change for v1.3. I may just remove the internal switches on Gold Key areas completely, as that seems to be a sore point with several players. If you are asking for help with location 11, please let me know if you're talking about 11a or 11b. Not sure what Silver Key you're referring to. What floor tiles on 9a? If you mean the ones by the target, I do not believe they raise. Spoiler Yes that's correct, those floor tiles don't raise - they are simply pits. There are many pits like this in the game.
I liked the internal switches in the gold areas. It made me feel safe when resting knowing that no dungeon denizens would make meal of me while I slept. Is sleeping the only way of restoring manna? If so, it would be nice to introduce some additional mechanism to restore this. Looks like me raising the floor in 9a in front of the target is an exercise in futility. It seems that I am stuck for want of knowing what to do next. Wandering around listlessly trying to find a button to press, chain to pull, statue to move to try and make some progress is getting frustrating. A mechanism to help those who are stuck is long overdue. In my wanderings I did find a new button to press but this only turned off some floor flames and led to a chest with an item of little value. I found another use for the gold key rooms. I use these to dump all my less valuable finds so my party is not weighed down. It would be good if some of these could be sold for gold. Found a bug. If the caster uses the dismiss spell when not under attack, the games crashes. If under attack, the enemy is teleported away. With restoring manna, levelling up also restores manna. It would be nice to have an additional mechanism.
That's why I added those switches to the Gold Key rooms - for the warmth and comfort of it It's rare that you use one of those rooms with monsters still wandering around outside though, so it isn't REALLY necessary to ever shut the door. It's more a "comforts of home" touch. I have a note for v1.3 to experiment with slow mana regeneration on magic users throughout the game. I never had any issues with the flow of using mana, recovering mana, rinse-repeat, during my play-tests, but understandably every player is different. I'll play around with it and see. So you're stuck in 9a? Have you completed the area with the blocks?
They require too much work to have them taken away so easily by accident or possibly a bug. 11b. More details, another bug, etc. follow. Spoiler The wall lever to enter the big puzzle room is down, the tiles are lowred, the spider that was in there is dead (so there is nothing to activate the pressure plate on the other side), and opposite the lever is a silver lock. But there is no way to get a silver key, since I cannot get back into the puzzle room, and the only other thing nearby is a room with an altar in it (and a mound, but no silver key in it). No hidden buttons that I can see. I made it through the first U-turn corridor back into the room when I had to teleport out due to damage. I'm missing out up above as well. Cannot remember if it is 8acd, 9a, or 10, but one has a yellow door that I cannot open (I think I have found 2 of the rotating color wheels). Any help on that level would be great. Another bug for you: The first Coldfire Golem room with a mound in it -- I did not recieve an item or see any text saying nothing was found there. As a side note, you set it up early that the golems are uber powerful and because of that I clearly (based on loot) waited too long before attacking them. You need to tone the warning down or once the caster gets Stun introduce a conversation about giving an attack on one a try. Thanks for the answers!!
Regarding mana, the real question is does it add any value? And the answer is it is just a bunch of busy work. Same for starvation. I would suggest you get rid of starvation and have the rations/fish restore a small amount of health and mana. The draw of these types of games is exploring the dungeon -- solving puzzles, finding secret areas, fighting monsters, and some kind of narrative (even if it is weak). Forcing the player to teleport around to heal/rest up does not add anything of value to the gameplay. Going back to the starvation thing. You said it forces the player to make a choice -- sleep but become more hungry. But that is a bunch of BS. I explored multiple levels with everyone starving the entire time. All I did was cast Restore till I was getting low on mana, and then rested up. And later on Regenerate allowed me to explore for longer periods of time. I'm sorry, but there was no thinking to be done. Not to mention that there is nothing to explain that sleeping makes characters hungrier. Not much to think about when the game mechanics are so hidden.... And now that I have the fishing tackle, it's an even more of an unnecessary annoyance. I'm sorry, but it is not adding anything to the gameplay. This is the same reason people keep harping on mana regeneration -- all you are doing is forcing players to teleport and fish more often even though it does not add anything of value to the game. Think about this -- if you had taken starvation out, there would be no game crashing because people tapped on the fish while it was dropping in. So basically, starvation has lost you points in reviews and introduced a game crashing bug. And throw mana in, and we have to teleport around much more often to rest up. WITH ONLY ONE AUTOSAVE. A corrupt save game file is a big concern, so the fewer unnecessary saves the better. The first crash I had was in 1.0, right after traveling and I was really sweating afterwards but luckily it loaded up just fine (or appeared to, anyway). But I still cringe at the unnecessary saving.
Woah, this forum is lively, I have to read a lot of pages to catch up. Unfortunately I've not yet started playing the game, because I have some unfinished games and little time to play, but reading that the game could be changed mechanically with the next updates, I'll take my time. Don't worry, I've already purchased it. Also, it's good to know that I'm not the only one who thinks that the "character feeding" systems are just unnecessary chores in RPGs... The only food system I've actually enjoyed was in Tales of Phantasia, but it was the other way around. The party had a food bag, and when there were food in it, they regained health during walking. Of course it depleted fast, so we had to buy food in towns, but if it was empty, the party was simply stayed on low health after battles. Although this method does not make sense realistically, but it was playable and enjoyable. The "losing health if there's no food" method is always takes away from enjoying a game. I'm not saying that it makes the games unplayable, but it's definetly not fun at all, and games should be full of fun.
Previous post says it all as far as a game should be FUN to play. From a lot of these posts this sounds like a freaking chore to play. Sucks to drop 5 bucks on a game and then feel like you HAVE to play it because....well, you dropped 5 bucks on it. In all honesty, that's what it sounds like from a lot of these posts IMHO. Jesus, if one wants to worry about food, we've got a kid screaming for food at 4 am. I don't want it in my "escape" world. Also a false (and cheap) way of extending a game needlessly.
It's a pretty good game with a few glaring design decisions holding it back. Steve needs to jettison starvation, provide some mana-regen, significantly improve auto-mapping (or at least let us annotate the map), and provide some hints for the harder puzzles. If it was terrible, I would not be spending so much time writing posts about it in the forums! @stevejarman: I meant to ask this sooner. Can you zoom way out for an overhead view of an entire level rendered via Unity, then save that as an image, and and then use that image as the starting point for your auto-mapping? That would hopefully cover furniture, barrels, beds, fishing holes, etc. (maybe turn the brightness up), and then you could add markers for up/down, portals, doors, etc.
I haven't gotten around to this either for the same reasons, but thus far I think I've tried all of these classic styled dungeon crawlers. I remember the Tales food system I think, it had a pretty robust cooking system, and it was a neat twist. I'll get into this eventually, and if the starve mechanic is like the Eye of Beholder games, I'll be alright with it. Once you got the feast spell you dropped all your chicken legs lol "I'm freeeee"
