Hey guys, If I could ask everyone to update their reviews, I'd really appreciate it. The game sales tend to suffer after an update because all the reviews are archived. Really appreciate it. I'm working on a big update for Demon's Rise 1 now to add all the great changes made lately. Then working on the next big update to DR2 that will include the Snakeman.
Just did the first draft of campaign level 10 for Temple of Shadows. So 50% of the campaign levels have been built! Still loads to do but moving along at a good pace. Decided on the main bad guys. It will be snakemen / lizardmen led by gorgons. Final boss will be a demon of some kind that they worship. Here's a picture of the giant gorgon who is the boss fight for level 10. temple of shadows wip 5 by Rajpreet Dhillon, on Flickr
Hey guys, I think I have implemented iCloud saves in my test version. I'm not 100% sure if it's working properly but I tested it by deleting my current game off my iPad and then re-installing it and I confirmed that it populated the save game data. I saw some messages in the console about iCloud so I'm guessing it's working? The reason I'm so unsure is that I just implemented some off-the-shelf code made by someone else for this component. Hope it's working properly. Anyway, should be in the next update.
Uploading the next update (1.3) to the store tonight. It's got quite a lot of enhancements: - New Snakeman Rogue character added. He's a stealth, ranged character with throwing knives, poison attacks and so forth. - iCloud Synch Added! Now all game data is synched automatically between your devices. - Some more UI enhancements. The Turn Counter is now much fancier and some attack summary has more information and has been moved to the right of the screen. - Characters in the main menu campsite look much more natural. The huntress carries a Viking long axe in the scene and looks a lot cooler. - Some character balance changes based on feedback. - Some minor bug fixes.
Awesome awesome! Have you fix the issue with selecting your units? i still have the wrestle with that alot. Kinda gotten used to it, but still annoying.
Just finished the game, had a lot of fun. By the end, it was really 2 characters that did everything: 1. Voidcaller, solely for the ability "Target ally gets 5 more attacks until the end of the battle". With a lot of +ActionPoint items he could always cast this on the first turn. He cast this on the huntress. 2. The huntress, in my opinion the best character in the game. Mine had 18 range (she equipped an awesome +10 range arrow) and a lot of crit and damage. Between the two of them, she would just snipe creatures left and right without ever getting into danger. The voidcaller would save up action points until he could cast his spell on her a second or even third time in the battle, by which point she got quite ridiculous with 16 attacks. Hunter's Mark let her take down a single high hp enemy even more quickly. And then of course there's her heal. All her abilities are really good, which isn't something you can say about the other characters. The voidcaller's other abilities were not very useful; summoning a portal can fail, then even if you succeed, the portal itself may not have enough AP to summon anything next turn. Then the portal's attempt to summon a demon may itself fail. And finally, even if you do finally get a demon summoned (and you can only get 3 from a portal), it doesn't really do much damage. This guy just waited to regen action points to cast that +5 more attacks skill again. My other characters in the party were much less useful; raven head guy was completely useless, and I eventually paid 2500 gold to replace him. His one claim to fame was his PBAOE, and that just didn't cut it. Werebear - my third best character, and a good damage sponge, especially as I gave him some +counterattack items. Not as good as he was at the beginning of the game, when his damage-in-a-straight-line ability could mow down lots of enemies. Only 3 attacks. Squidhead mage occasionally could stun an annoying monster (not even guaranteed to succeed). His multi-tile AOE is close range, so quite dangerous to use, and he does piddling damage anyway. Stealing an enemy creature rarely did much more than provide a body for enemies to kill off. By the end of the game he was only using the skill to buff party members within 2 squares, and nothing else. Vampire Knight - more fragile than the werebear and less damage. Her ranged AOE skill was not bad though. Shaman - not at all useful by the end of the game. He had a lot of attacks (although not for all that much damage), but is fragile, and works best if you have other melees close by to benefit from his buffs. Completely outdone by the huntress on healing. I don't think this guy's heal should be able to fail. The final battle was basically a voidcaller-buffed huntress killing everything from the corner of the map, while everyone else just buffed her with abilities and the black dragon tanked all the damage.
I'd agree with most of that. I ran x2 Voidcaller x1 Werebear x1 Overmind x1 Vampire x1 Huntress in my endgame group, and considered dropping the overmind for another Voidcaller (well, actually at endgame I considered dropping the Werebear as well, but I was fond of him from keeping us alive through the midgame). Vampiric Gift stacks on the Huntress for even more attacks and a nice boost to dodge if the enemies live that long. I think I ran higher +AP regen than you did, as there was no "save AP and wait to use Demonic Form again" in my playbook, rather the cooldown was the limiting factor. Portal does have a failure chance, but on t2 or t3 dropping a pair of portals while you're getting your Huntress up and buffed would usually yield some excellent cannon fodder to charge forwards and take hits on your behalf, and you only need to create a little space to allow your machine gun Huntress to destroy everything.
Hey guys .... the next update has been submitted and is sitting with Apple. A big warning to those with different save games on different devices. The iCloud Synch is behind the scenes and automatic. As such, when you install this update ... play it first on the device where you want to keep your saves. The saves on other devices will then be overwritten by the ones on the first device to synch with iCloud. It might be a bit messy at first but long term, the benefits are huge. The next update will focus on balance changes and minor tweaks and bug fixes. I really appreciate the feedback on the end-game. I didn't really think of using the stat buff abilities on a dedicated missile unit. I think I'll need to adjust that because I don't really want the game to be dominated by missile units. Missile units ignore counter attacks and therefore are a much safer strategy than melee. I will take your feedback and make a series of updates: - Boost portals, ice totems, war banners so they regenerate AP faster. This should reduce the delay from the deployment to the point they can use their abilities. - Make buff spells less beneficial to shooting units but still effective. Could possibly have some reduce attack range so a unit that has got demonic possession can't use missile attacks or something. - Make Volcrate a little more effective. - Make healing on the Blood Shaman and Blade Dancer more effective and the Huntress' healing less effective. Let me know more feedback. I want to get to the point where all characters are viable and (almost) equally useful to a team build.
Please add Void Dragon to the list of minions getting AP buffs, both to max and regen. I think for the health of the game you are better off with some missile +attack nerfs. You've already got a +melee attack only option, would seem easier and less prone to wackiness than the range debuff (also, that only makes the +10 range arrows look better, unless it simply rewrites range to 1). I think the Demon Knight could use some buffs, as he's got both failure and divine punishment and it seems a little harsh. I generally hate failure chances, though, while I quite like random "something interesting happens, could be bad or good" chances (wild mage, etc). To make him seem more "chaotic" rather than "sometimes screwed, sometimes normal", I might drop the failure chances and add an equivalent chance to "summon friendly flame demon" = to divine punishment chance on his abilities. So if he (say) uses Demon's Gift he's got a 10% chance of divine punishment, but a 10% chance to summon a flame demon. Because Xom is fickle.
I'm really not a fan of the 15% chance to fail that many skills have. They don't really add anything interesting to the game and in fact detract from the fun factor. I just restart the battle if something fails on the first turn. A skill like "+5 attacks until end of battle" is never going to be balanced, even if it works only on melee characters (it was working great on my werebear before I switched to using the huntress). It's just so much stronger than any other ability in the game, and the longer the battle goes the stronger your party gets, as you get more and more casts out of it. 2-3 buffbots casting this + 2 werebears + 1 other. There are a couple ways you can go with skill balancing; one is to make everything finely balanced with no crazy abilities, but this not a PvP game, and I think the more fun way to go is for everyone to feel very powerful with unique crazy abilities (like Diablo 3). There are, after all, harder difficulty levels if the game is too easy. Right now a lot of character abilities kind of blur together; there are a ton of "allies within 2-3 tiles get some crit/damage/dodge/buff or another". There's also a lot of AOE skills that more or less do damage in a 1 tile radius. Some random suggestions I will throw out, take as you will: Voidcaller portal summoning - these should be exciting and powerful, but right now they are slow, weak, cannon fodder bodies. Instead: For the next 3 turns, the portal summons a random demon to an adjacent square, with each summoned demon stronger than the last. I don't think it's that interesting for the portal to build action points on its own, just have it auto-summon. By the time it summons the third demon, you're already on at least turn 4+, so it should be a pretty strong one. Now you really want your portal to live 3 turns. Shaman - make the heal more interesting. Target ally is healed for X and foes adjacent to that ally take Y damage. Makes him even more of a support-the-melees type of character. Squidhead overlord - his abilities are quite weak, and stealing an enemy unit is unusable past the mid-game (and on harder difficulty levels), as few if any enemies have < 100 hp by then. Maybe merge his mind control spell with his #2 PBAOE spell which already does hardly any damage. "All foes in the PBAOE cone with < X hp are turned. Foes not turned take Y damage. X=100+Level*10." Turning one piddling enemy from range is not all that exciting, but running right into melee range and turning/damaging multiple enemies in a PBAOE cone, is dangerous and exciting. Squidhead also has a party damage buff, but there are so many of these and I don't think it fits with his control aspect. Maybe instead: "The next time each ally within 2 tiles would take damage, that damage is negated and the attacker takes the damage instead." It's a great "turn your magic back on yourself" control ability, especially against those lightning storm casters. Volcrate - Almost everyone does AOE, some from range. For his melee AOE to be interesting, it needs to be really good. Everyone within a *2* tile radius takes X damage. Nobody else can do anything like that!
Back for a bit, with a link to the first Game of the Year thread: http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=298638 DR2 got my 2nd place. Sorry Wavelight, but Planar Conquest just scratches that Master of Magic itch too well
Yeah ... what I'm thinking of doing for the Void Dragon is to have it scale with the level of the Huntress. So as the Huntress gets stronger, the Void Dragon she summons gets stronger. I think it should be fairly easy to do now that I've updated some of the code for summoned units. Hopefully in the next update. Yeah, I'm going to explore a few different options. I may add an attribute that says "Disable Missile Attack" ... that works in the same way as "Disable Ability" and "Disable Movement". Once this is set on a unit, it won't matter what their range is ... they just won't be able to make a missile attack. Yeah, I'm thinking the Demon Knight could do with some minor tweaks. I'll probably either remove or reduce his failure rate. I like the idea of a random buff ... that could be cool. I'm also thinking of making him a slightly better fighter and making his ranged attack something that activates with his first level ability. Similar to how the Ogre can gain the ability to throw rocks when he activates his first ability.
I would prefer not to ditch the Demon Knight's ranged attack, he occupies an interesting hybrid melee/range slot with the Corsair. DK is MELEE/ranged, Corsair is RANGED/melee. It's a narrow niche, but I think it has potential. On the Corsair front, his chest needs many more hit points (or maybe spam multiple chests... it's never lived long enough to be opened in my experience). Other than that, I'm not sure where he'll shake out - he might get much better depending on how the Huntress's heal is weakened. Also - how do you track melee and ranged +attacks currently? What happens now when a Demon Knight triggers Demon's Gift on himself and then starts shooting people at a distance? Can he use up ranged attacks and leave himself with only the bonus melee? You could give all the current ranged only units an identical, range 1 version of their attack for melee, and then the Vampiric Gift and Demonic form could be used to give these units better melee capacity without permanently disabling their range.
So I isolated it a bit more. Looks like enchanted orcish guards of higher quality after save and reload of store covert to a different version of the enchanted orcish guards (pic is different). Level seems to stay the same. Maybe it happens with other items as well. Still have issues with trousers disappearing on some units. Happened 3 times 2x to the same character.
