By the way: I thought about the bug that you keep XP and items, when you start over on an existing savegame: How about turning that into an optional feature? You don't start from scratch when you try a new party. If you are willing to sacrifice the dungeon and gold progress of your current party on that saveslot, XP and items transfer over to the new heroes. Gold and dungeon progress don't carry over. This could be a nice incentive to try out different parties. And it would keep getting stuck in the dungeon because of not so good party composition from being a threat. Sure, you have to replay the stages you already did. But starting out with a more powerful party will make this a lot easier and faster. The first 5 stages or so are the hardest for new party. Once you have a few level-ups under your belt, and equipment starts rolling in at a more steady rate, things become a lot smoother. With XP and items carrying over, the beginning would be a lot less rough than it is now.
Looks like the crashes from Unity are still there. I've put in a workaround on my version that seems to help. Only had one crash so far since putting in that workaround. Unity also released a patch yesterday that might help. It's funny ... The Android version is really stable. It's never crashed on me. Can you do me a favor regarding the dwarf party? Can you try to do nothing with your characters and see if it still crashes on that spider level? I'm trying to understand why it would crash with some characters and not others. I think an all melee party is going to have a hard time. There are always going to be tight spots where your melee guys in the back are going to be doing nothing. A shooter or mage can occupy those slots and still be useful. When I add more spells and abilities to more AI units, having a well rounded party will be even more important. Your all girl party might really struggle if they face enemy wizards or exploding goblins that have attacks that ignore dodge completely. I'm hoping I can start on those updates this week.
I think I'd rather not do that. Would probably confuse people. I think I'll make the first quest easier and then crank up the difficulty on subsequent quests. I'll keep patrol missions generally easier so players can use those to build up their party as they need to.
Tested the spider level with the Dwarves: When I do nothing first turn, the game hangs after the Ratkin Priest (screenshot) moved and shot. I also made it successfully past turn 1, after moving and using all Dwarf Fighters' second skill. One of them died on turn 3, so I'll have to start over. But I think I'll drop that playthrough. I have the impression that I hit the wall with how far those guys can get without suffering severe casualties each stage.
That's unusual .. I haven't had the game hang at all before. Not sure what would be causing that. It might be that writing over an existing save is also saving some weird values that are causing issues in the new build. I have a bit of hope regarding the Unity 5 crash bugs. Someone seems to have finally reported a proper bug report on the issue that I believe my game is suffering from and unlike me, he's been able to build a simple project that reproduces it. He also seems to have actually narrowed down what was causing the issue in the first place. I think it has to do with code that destroys objects that are being animated. For some reason, that is causing a crash on Unity's iOS 64 bit games. Anyway, until Unity put in a fix on their end, I'm going to try and adjust the code so I'm not destroying objects until I've stopped playing the animation on them. Hopefully that will eliminate that issue. Will keep you guys posted on that. Also, I think I might have come up with a clever way to have allied units in the game without re-writing the AI completely. I think I can set up some units as an enemy faction and then on the beginning of turn 1, switch them to the player faction. I believe this will work cleanly and won't require lots of recoding. Also, this will allow me to add levels where players can use a special unit or hero for a few levels and get a bit of variety.
Good luck with the Unity bug, hope they provide a fix soon. Can easily take a month or more, though. And that the switching units to the player side works out without too much hassle. Do you have a "neutral" faction that you can put them in? I can imagine that moving units away from the enemy side might cause all kinds of unpleasant shenanigans. By the way, how many stages does Demonhunters have? I just started Day 4 with the Girlscouts, but have no clue how far into the game I am.
Unity have been good about bug fixes lately. They're releasing a patch release every Wednesday. There are 5 days in the initial release version. So a total of 25 levels. I'm going to add another 25 levels or so as updates after release. Also, I'm going to add 10-15 patrol levels.
I took a look at Unity's queue once, and they had several thousand bugs and improvements in the publicly visible part only. Working in a software development company myself, I see firsthand how long it can take to fix even a simple-looking problem. Knowing that a fix might be coming somewhere down the line already helps a lot. 25 more levels? Sounds good Will those come on top of the current ones, aka day 6-10? Or will it be a new campaign (hope so) ? In any case, I hope you can make those an IAP add-on pack. Always feels wrong to me to get lots of additional content for free. Take it easy with the Patrol levels Having 1-3 for starters feels good enough to me. You can always add more later.
Also, with around 10 more levels to go, I'm pretty sure I won't be able to equip everyone fully; not to mention with all end-game items. Will see where I end up, but I guess money rewards need to be adjusted upwards a lot. The highest tier items I saw so far were all around 50k gold. 6 heroes with what, 10?, slots each require a few million gold at that pricetag. And unless you really cranked up the rewards on Day 4 & 5, I don't even see me getting even half a million. Sure, you could just treat equipment as rare bonus. But things usually don't work that way. Players see all those slots, and all the nice and different gear you can - or rather not, currently - play around with. A more "standard tactics game" distribution would be something like: - Mid of Day 2, you have everyone almost fully in low-tier equipment. - End of Day 3 is all mid-tier, with some low-tier leftovers. - Day 4 & 5 you replace everything with end-tier and high-tier stuff. - With Patrols added, and some to moderate (not a lot, mind you) grinding, you should be able to have everyone in end-tier items by end of Day 4 at the latest. - This would even work with the earlier days: Some grinding gets you to all low-tier end of Day 1, mid-tier Day 2, and high-tier Day 4. Not sure what a good story/grind ratio is. Personally, I'd say no more than 25% of the total game time should be spent grinding. Warhammer Quest and e.g. X-COM I found way too grindy if you wanted to deck everyone out in endgame kits. The Final Fantasy games are grind cranked up to 11, if you want to take on the bonus bosses. On the other hand, Spiderweb's games (Avadon, Avernum), Baldur's Gate 1&2 and Icewind Dale did it right: You have a constant improvent in equipment, with a pretty good distribution curve. The progression feels natural. And when you reach the endgame, you have everyone in appropriate kit; and all with natural story progression, completely without grinding.
They do seem to be prioritizing bugs related to IL2CPP, which is their new component that converts C# to C++ for iOS 64 bit builds. They know it's full of bugs and so are trying to fix those as soon as possible. Right now, I'm planning to just increase the price as I add extra levels. I'm hoping to encourage early purchases since players will get the best value at that point. The extra levels won't actually be in-app purchases or anything ... just come as free updates. I'm trying to break into iOS so I don't have overly ambitious goals to be honest. I think the road to profitability will be a long one and will probably require a few games of this type. The additional 25 levels will be the conclusion of this story / campaign. It will see the dwarfs through to reclaiming this ruined city and a final battle with a massive dragon (or not .. I'm not entirely sure how the story will end).
Those are some really good points and honesty, it's an area I haven't given too much thought to yet. I'll add the grinding levels and do a few play throughs. I will definitely need to increase the gold rewards ... especially from gold pickups. Right now, I would say think of day 4 and 5 as around half way through the game and not really the end. As such, players shouldn't have end-tier equipment at that point or even be able to perform all abilities at that point.
Dwarves try to kill Dragon, Dragon gets royally pissed, nukes everything, Game Over I went with the current state of the game. If day 5 is halfway ultimately, then things look a lot better. Never easy to get something like this right. A lot depends on which approach you want to take, e.g.: Baldur's Gate, Avernum: At the start, you can get basic armor and weapon for everyone. A necessity, because without it you won't get anywhere. All others slots (like boots, rings, cloaks) are empty, and slowly fill up over the course of the game. No grinding needed, and also not really possible as the games aren't designed for that. Warhammer Quest: You start out with nothing. But don't really need anything for the first few stages, as your characters are strong enough without equipment. Later on you will need it, though, and have to grind for it at least somewhat. If you want everyone in high-tier stuff for the endgame, you need to grind a lot. At any point in the game, you can do grind sessions to get the best equipment currently on offer.
I tried to do some proof reading of characters and their abilities but only got through 2 characters after which I got too tired because it was very cumbersome to do it without keeping a catalog of photos or having a script in front of me. Most are typos with incorrect spelling, maybe one or two suggested wording changes. Anyway this is as far as I could get until I figure out a better way of handling it. Typos Half Giant - Cleave description “The Half Giant makes a single, devestating strike on his foe that can sever limbs entirely.” Change to devastating Half Giant - Leaping Stirke - “Leaving no room for evasion and parrying, the Half Giant throws himself into his enemies and crushes all before him with his own weight.” Change to: or parries Half Giant - Seismic Strike - embew - Change to imbue Half Giant - Rage - Change unthinking to blind Half Giant - War Cry - 2nd paragraph - “The Half Giant and friendly units within 2 tile radius” change to “The Half Giant and friendly units within a 2 tile radius” or “friendly units within 2 tiles” Ranger - Herb Lore - change bodies to body Ranger - Poison Shot - venemous - Change to venomous Ranger - Flock of Ravens - “Mericless, the Ravens….” Ravens should be in lowercase. Ranger - Nature’s Rebirth - Ranger - Feral Strength - 2nd paragraph. Either should be “units within a 7 tile radius” or “units with 7 tiles” Ranger - Summon Treefolk - Treefolk Warrior not capitalized in the first paragraph. precense - change to presence
@Wavelight: By the way, do you need the iOS crash reports? I got a nice bunch piled up by now, but your homepage doesn't list your email address. Oh, and what happened to "Gun Frenzy"? Saw it on your homepage, and that it looks very similar to Demon Hunters, so I wanted give it a twirl too. But could not find it on the Appstore, did you remove it?
Thanks for the analysis. I haven't gotten to the text clean up yet but this will be helpful when I get there. I also want to try and make language consistent for similar terms. I would suggest not going further though in this analysis because it's very hard for you to do it whereas I can copy and paste the text straight into Word and use the spell check and grammar check functionality. It'll be much easier for me to make the corrections than it would be for you. I'd be much happier for you to play the game and give me feedback on ease-of-use, GUI design, game balance, etc. Those are things I really can't figure out on my own.
Yeah, I did ... it's because I changed license from Unity 4 Professional to Unity 5 Personal. Unity refunded me the $4000+ dollars I paid for Unity 4 Pro and so I thought it would be best to stop selling Gun Frenzy until I rebuild it in Unity 5 Personal edition. At some point, I'll upgrade the engine and if all goes smoothly, I'll re-release Gun Frenzy. It's a fun game and the lessons learned have been incorporated into Demon Hunters Saga ... but it's a juvenile mini-game in comparison. Regarding crash reports, if you have any that correspond to the crash that happens during a battle, that would be great. I'm pretty sure I know why it crashes when loading from one level to another but I'm not sure why it sometimes crashes in the middle of a battle. I have a theory and have implemented a fix in my latest version but it happens so rarely that I don't know if I've really fixed it or not.
I'll be honest, I really haven't decided where to take the plot lines in the conclusion. I have several ideas but I'm not sure which way to go. After release, I may actually poll the players on this forum and see which "Ending" storyline they like best and go with that. For example, I'm not sure if I want a dragon to be the end boss battle or perhaps a Demon Lord ... or perhaps a Dragon possessed by a Demon Lord. I want to throw in a Drow-like race of spider worshipping, evil elves too but not sure if that'll be in this game or in some other expansion or a sequel. If I go with Dwarfs enter ruins to reclaim it from a dragon, kill said dragon and then get attacked by Dark Elves ... I'm basically ripping off the plotline of Salvatore's Dark Elf books. Probably not a smart way to go...
Need some input on Pinning. I'm finding that making units unable to move is causing some bugs in the AI. I'm also not entirely happy with how it works because it leads to confusion from players. As we discussed above, some players should feel that a unit should be unpinned if the enemy are killed. Lastly, I'm not sure it makes that much sense because if a wizard is engaged in melee ... he or she would just focus on defending themselves and getting out of melee. The way pinning works right now prevents them from leaving melee but allows them to cast spells without any problems. This feels wrong. Essentially, I want to penalize players (or the AI) for getting their softer ranged and magic users into melee. However, I'm thinking it makes sense to penalize the wizards in a manner that makes most sense. Rather than stopping them from moving, I think it would make more sense to penalize their action points that turn and also perhaps reduce hit chance. A unit that is swarmed by enemies is going to a) focus on defending themselves rather than attacking and b) is not going to be able to cast spells or perform special abilities freely. So I'm thinking of changing the Pinned penalties to: a) -15% hit chance on melee and missile attacks that turn. b) - X amount of AP OR disable Abilities for that turn. I'm leaving towards a massive AP penalty as it might be less prone to bugs. Units could still move out of the way but would just be less effective that turn. Aggressive / fast melee units could keep pushing into undefended ranged / magic users to prevent them from casting spells and using abilities effectively. What do you guys think? If so, I need another word rather than "Pinned" ... what do you guys could be an alternate? Perhaps "Distracted" or "Swarmed"?
As I'm thinking through ... the only problem might be that melee fighters that want to be in melee could be adversely affected. That could be solved easily by just giving them a high Pin Evasion stat to begin with. It almost feels like a measure of courage / cool-headidness. Fighters that are brave and expect to be fight up close against monsters aren't going to be worried about doing so whereas a mage or archer in the same situation would panic. They wouldn't be able to fight effectively and probably wouldn't even be able to perform a spell or something to defend themselves. Perhaps Pin Evasion can be called "Nerve" or "Courage" and a unit that fails the test could be marked as "Panicked" or something to that effect? Going further, I could adjust the calculation to not just take into account how many enemies are present but also their scariness. So undead or a big Demon might have a bigger courage modifier than a goblin. Makes sense and would be really easy change to make. Let me know your thoughts ... very eager to hear feedback on this change.
Also, another benefit is that I can assign intimidation (the % chance to make other units panic once in melee) a stat line that could be improved via abilities. So the Illusionist, for example, could add an ability would make a herself or an ally unit look really scary and thus increase the chance of enemies in melee being panicking. That would be a bit more involved but not a huge task.
