Not being sarcastic to you, but isn't this only an issue if someone chooses to spend hours and hours farming enough money, and then chooses to spend a lot of time back and forth shopping to min/max their equipment choices so their characters are ahead of the game curve?
How did you farm that much money? It doesn't seem like the amount per quest or scouting gets you that much money that I could get too far ahead of where I am level wise? You must have spent close to a million gold to get that sort of level items. Does the gold per level go up that quickly?
Agreed ... I think I do need to modify the magic items to tone down some of the insane stat bonuses they can give. Otherwise, I can't create balanced levels because I have no way of judging how powerful certain heroes are at a specific level. These two would be easy to implement. Just adjusting stats of the 300 or so base items and then adding a few lines in the shop code to cap the kind of items that can be created. Probably makes sense if the most powerful items need to be found rather than bought. Would be a bit tricky to code given the current system. I think I'll avoid this one for now. Kind of there already .... the boss levels should be giving out better equipment. Again ... this would be a fair bit of coding effort and testing / debugging. I think if I can get it reasonably balanced by doing the easy stuff, then I can probably leave this one out. Glad to hear it ... the next patch improves camera controls significantly more in my opinion and also add on-screen buttons for rotation / zoom. Nope .... you can of course just field a bunch of fighters and no wizards or archers. Minotaur, duelist, half giant, dwarf iron guard, dwarf dragon hunter and knight. Probably not a good combination though as you probably won't have room for them all to fight.
About the onscreen buttons for rotation/zoom: Those take up screen estate. Will it only be the buttons then? Or will finger-rotate/zoom still work too? If the latter, can you add a menu option to hide the buttons? I played around a bit, and found rotation/zoom to work ok for me in the latest version.
@blujay2012: I tried an all-melee team (even with healing, used the Dwarves) during beta. And it did not go well. What Wavelight says: Oftentimes, you don't have enough space to bring them all to bear. The levels feature enough bottlenecks, obstacles, narrow corridors, etc. to frequently only allow a few (or even only one!) of your melee fighters into the fray. Anyways, I'm curious how far you'll get. Good luck!
Well, there are probably hundreds of thousands of variants of items .... but there are around 200 base items and then the system modifies the stats of those items according to a combination of item level and item quality (epic, legendary, broken, etc.). I'm going to add more base items with the updates. The only thing really holding me back is a technical issue related to the size of the texture atlas that holds the icons for the items.
Perhaps, if possible, have each mission/act unlock item levels/rarity ie Act 1 drops item levels 1-10, Act 2 11-20, and so on. And have the shop offer item levels dependent on Act. Maybe even prevent the shop from refreshing inventory on exit. Let it refresh after a battle or patrol is loaded.
There is something like that already but it's luck based. So in the early levels, its much more like to have lower level and lower quality items be found. As you progress, it's more likely to find higher quality / level stuff. There's still a chance of finding something awesome early on or something terrible later though.
Thought of a clever way to play reaction animations when a unit is attacked but the attack misses. If I don't have a specific dodge / parry animation, I'll just play a melee attack animation to represent a melee exchange where no one hit anyone. Just a line or two of code so I'll try and see how it goes.
Hey guys ... I've added code now that has the target of a melee attack perform an attack animation if they are attacked and the attack misses. Looks really cool actually and really makes the fighting look like a real melee rather than one side just hitting the other. I'll go through and add some specific dodge animations to some units that have those animations available but if no such animation is available, the "fight back" animation will play and that looks really cool to me. I'll try to post a video of it and the new moving camera some time today.
Only refreshing the shop after a battle is a bad idea. Trying to work around an issue by just making it more difficult is never a great idea. It's just frustrating for players that they can still do it but now you've added extra barriers. It doesn't solve the problem. It's a lazy. Adding better quality (epic/leg) from drops is probably a better idea. Don't forget, this is someone's conscious choice to play this way. If they want to make it easy and no challenge, that's up to them.
Agreed ... wasn't planning to do that. In fact, during beta ... there was a request to make it easier to refresh the shop inventory. I've gone through the items and restricted the extra attack bonuses to just weapons. That means that most characters will only be able to have one item that grants extra attacks. I think that an extra item should (at most) give 3 attacks at the legendary / epic levels ... this should prevent a very high # of attacks. Instead, the non-weapon items that used to give extra attacks now give some other stat bonus. I suspect this might be enough to do it, to be honest. Let's give that a shot and see how it goes. During play testing, I never went into the shop too heavily and never actively tried to pump up attacks. In that way, quests 3 onwards become pretty challenging and require regular patrols to level up in order to complete ... which is what I want. Let's give it a shot and see if improves the game or not. On other news ... I'm still waiting for my earlier patch to be approved by Apple. It's really frustrating.
Hey guys, One of the things I want to have in the new quest levels is the occasional choice for the player. The choice would have the story branch off into one of two paths and would affect the overall plot and the immediate next battle the player fights. Not a lot of them .... maybe one per quest or so. Here's my first draft of the "choice screen", which would load before the quest level and based on your actions would load one of two possible encounters as the next quest. Once you've made the choice, it is final for that play through and cannot be made again to explore the alternate path: Screen Shot 2015-08-28 at 2.11.47 PM by Rajpreet Dhillon, on Flickr Let me know what you think about the above design.
I like the idea of branching quest lines and the UI looks good. As if trying out different class combos wasn't enough reason to replay, seeing different parts of the story is even more reason to lol. I agree thinking that limiting +Attack to weapons is a good start, and did you say you would be bumping the chance to hit up a little? That should make the loss of my machine gun wizards a little easier to bear lol
Definitely in favour of branching paths. And the UI looks good as well. About limiting attacks: On the one hand, I approve of the idea. On the other, I harbour the doubt that it will put even more emphasis on skill use in favour of regular attacks. Guess we'll just have to see how it plays out.
Thanks. I probably will bump up the odds a little bit ... maybe 5% or something. At the moment, you can already do that by just setting the difficulty to easy. Quick note to anyone using the Tree Giant. His Tree Fist ability has a bug that causes the game to crash when used. I have fixed it on my end. It'll be in the next patch after this one.
I seriously love dynamic shadows in the game now. Thanks to those who pushed for it ... it's a seriously impressive change and the game still plays smooth as silk on my iPad Air 1. The dynamic shadows so much depth to the scene ... especially when combined with the bloom / post effect option. Take a look at this screen shot: Screen Shot 2015-08-28 at 3.34.18 PM by Rajpreet Dhillon, on Flickr The above is in-game graphics with no photoshop trickery or anything done afterwards. I'm really loving it. Just wish Apple would hurry up and approve the patch that adds it. Okay guys ... happy weekend. Quick reminder, if you haven't left a review .. please take 5 minutes to do so. Also, we really need your support so if you haven't already, please share some news about this game on Facebook, twitter and any other social media site out there. All the best,
