This has a nice Dungeon Hack look to me, which I like! That was one of my favorite games a loooong time ago, because you could randomize dungeons to your heart's content, which really boosted the replay value. You could also input different parameters when 'creating' the dungeon, so you could tailor them to be big or small, hard or easy, undead or no undead... Finding food was a pain in the neck (unless you were a cleric who could create food), and picking up individual arrows was a not-quite-fun-but-necessary-evil. As someone mentioned above, I'd rather have a cleaner font than a fancier one. I'd also recommend going to a more neutral color behind the character portraits, as the blue really detracts from immersion factor. I'll be keeping an eye out for this one; please keep us posted. Dave
I agree the character art looks out of place. I recommend swapping the blue bacground for either black, or something that fits in better with the rest of the screen. The character art is nice
For the love that is good in this world, don't change the character art because one person prefers something "grim n gritty". That this guy has so much influence right now makes my nutkicking foot twitchy. Stick to your guns, man. Don't try to appease one or two folks because you lack confidence in your work or are "eager to please". And at the very least, if you're going to give in to this dude, give *us* the choice in-game to select the obviously superior artwork to whatever random grim n gritty crap someone else might prefer. Not that I'm being over the top or anything. But seriously. I will kick him in the nuts. Just sayin'.
Game play first The bottom line for me is this. I'm not going to make a choice to play or not play your game based on the character portraits. Yes, one would like to see a polished game with cool art, but if the game play is poor, pretty or gritty artwork is not going to make me buy your game.
Wow, so much discussion over these portraits The portraits won't be changing. The artwork is fantastic and I absolutely love it. The blue background is something I'm going to toy with because it's definitely something that I've pretty much just overlooked. I appreciate everyones opinion though. If someone prefers a grittier (spelling?) look then that's something I'm making a mental note of for possible options in the next game. In fact, I've already spoken to the artist (David Hattori) about some of the requirements for the next game and there will be a large selection of portraits to choose from. To be honest, I didn't expect people to be so concerned about the portraits over the look of the actual game itself, but when I think about myself playing one of these things, then sure - what your characters look like is HUGELY important. Definitely something I'll be paying a lot more attention to in future. By the way, did I mention that the game levels are true 3D environments? Most games of this type "fake" the 3D with 2D tiles. Just trying to throw the focus onto something else
Actually, I was wondering whether the environments would be truly 3D -- glad to hear that they are, as that should make transitions feel smooth (and make the game feel more immersive. It would be nice to hear more about the combat system, skills, etc. As you know, these kinds of forums lend themselves to long discussions about unimportant issues. I wouldn't worry too much about it.
I agree - true 3D really does make a big difference to the immersion of the game environments. It also makes the enemies a bit more believable, and allows me to do some fun things with the items - for example, items in chests are physically IN the chests. I don't want to say too much about the stats systems and the like as I think that opens up too big a can of worms One thing I will point out is that I've made a conscious effort to not over-do the enemy types, skills, and spells that are available. I'm not a fan of modern RPGs which are advertised with lines like: "Over 2,000 spells!", "17,000 different types of enemies!", etc... To me, that's just padding out a game with unnecessary and unrealistic "stuff". It often means the developers are trying to make up for deficiencies in other (more important) areas. In Descend, there are just enough skills, spells, and enemies to make the simple game mechanics shine. I think it works well, but time will tell
How long do you estimate this game will be? One suggestion is to allow players to customize characters by chosing artwork from a collection of images.
So when will this information become available? It obviously wouldn't make a great deal of sense (or be particularly classy) to spring an admittedly controversial system on consumers at the time of purchase, and not before. If you don't have confidence enough in your system to talk about it, perhaps you shouldn't be using it; one of the key features of a site like this is the feedback, both positive and negative. You've already seen that with regard to the artwork, and you're already well aware that you don't have to agree with everybody. If it's a matter of simply not having the time, money or desire at this point to change things even if the feedback ends up being primarily negative, and so you'd rather just avoid starting discussions and raising expectations about things you know you will ultimately be unable or unwilling to change, well, that's certainly your right, and you wouldn't be the first to do so. Your preceding statements have traditionally been a bit of a warning flag, actually. Developers will sometimes state that they're streamlining, designing efficiently, or avoiding bloat, but the honest real-world translation in those cases is usually revealed to be, "We didn't have the resources/time/creativity to implement more than a handful of skills/spells/enemies, but we're trying to spin that as a positive thing." You may not have thousands of enemy types with tiny, pointless differences, but if you ultimately only have ten, that's not necessarily any better. Considering that the figure by its very nature is hardly a terrible secret destined to be nailed into a crate and studied by Top Men, what are we actually looking at right now in terms of the number of skills, spells and enemy types?
Dang, Appletini. Pretty critically blunt, don't you think. Not to start any sort of argument over this, but I think there are a considerable amount of reasons why a dev may be holding out on some info. And one of those reasons way very well be because they plan on changing some things and it's not entirely finished at the moment. It is, after all, still in development. EDIT: be glad he's active in accepting feedback.
Nothing wrong with being blunt as long as you're not simply being insulting, or inventing things to be overly critical about (farewell, Gabrien). A straightforward and honest expression of a point of view with justification is a bit more helpful than just posting "Looks great!" in response to every single app announcement. In this case, Steve mentioned that he didn't want to comment on the stat system because it would open "too big a can of worms". He'd have to already be of the opinion that the stat system would be seen as controversial or divisive to make such a statement, which is what I was commenting on. Core systems are prone to change during the course of development, but at some point they must be revealed, and just when that would be is what I was asking. That their current system would be "a can of worms" isn't the description a developer would usually give, which makes Steve's statement intriguing; if the system simply hadn't been finalised and wasn't yet ready to be revealed, I'd have expected him to say so.
You should have quoted my whole post, it would have put up a better argument against your paragraphs. '>.> EDIT: yay the spam is gone. And I don't mean to sound argumentative because I see where your coming from also. I just see it a bit unfair to judge so highly with very little info and basing alot of criticism on his choice of wording (which was pretty vague). But we both put forward arguabley correct points. So we will have to wait and see how it plays out.
It didn't; quoting the whole thing wouldn't have made any difference to what I just wrote. Stick to the LG3 thread if you want to provoke arguments.
Geez, someone is mad. Sorry. EDIT: /that's what I thought Apparently my humble opinion bothers you deeply to an extent you are forced to drift far off subject to shy away from you being highly critical for hardly a legitimate reason, similarly to what you mentioned in your post. Hypocritical much, maybe. Either way, I won't be discussing things properly with the likes of a rude, improper poster. EDIT2: Geppetto, I apologize for breaking the rhythm of feedback in your upcoming thread! Simply giving feedback of my own was enough to provoke anger. For that, I apologize humbly. Your game looks awesome btw. really diggin the style of art, in general. The colors and lighting really make the graphics stand out!
The first thing I noticed was the character art and I like it. More importantly, the game itself looks quite good. In the current climate of the app store, you spill the beans on your game design 4 to 6 weeks out and someone else ships a crummy version of your game before yours even launches and then you're shipping a clone, lol. Keep up the good work!
I think you're going to entirely the wrong place with this. Perhaps me saying "opening up a can of worms" was the wrong way of putting it. What I meant by that was that a discussion of the stat system, and specific counts on content items ultimately leads to people offering THEIR view on what the stat system should be, and how many types of swords should be available, and etc etc etc. That's fine in theory, but in the end, the game designer has to use the system that suits the game that they are creating, because they can see the big picture. I equate it to something like the Angry Birds developers putting out a release saying "We used XYZ trajectory formula. There are five types of bird; green, red, blue.........." etc. People are likely to respond with "Why use XYZ? You should have used the ABC formula", "Why only five birds. It would be cool if there was an orange one". Ultimately, it would be nice if a game could have EVERYTHING that EVERYONE wants, but in the end, that's just not how it works. The decision to play or not play a game based purely on someone saying "There are 10 types of enemies", or "There are 37 types of enemies", just doesn't make any sense without the context of the game itself. Those things are not THE GAME - they're just the vehicle for presenting the game. Does that make any sense?
I wouldn't say so; you just confirmed the very scenario I put forward regarding your inability or unwillingness to take feedback. Don't misinterpret that, though; I acknowledge that it's your product, your design, and your money going into it. And...? You're not actually identifying a problem here. This is a discussion forum, where discussions are the entire point. You're under absolutely no obligation to take on board suggestions put forward by posters here, no matter how vocal they might be, so using that as an excuse not to give your potential audience information about the features your game is going to include simply doesn't hold water. If people want to talk about what they think would be neat, what of it? If they find your game interesting enough to discuss possibilities and potential, what's the harm? One of the greatest things about the TA forums is seeing all the developers here who are open about their development process and engage with their potential audience/customers. These developers don't necessarily implement everything (or anything) that is suggested - not least of all simply because they can't - but it doesn't mean they refuse to talk about their game because they're afraid somebody might find room for improvement, find something to criticise, or make suggestions about content. Your own website points to this particular thread to discuss the upcoming game. What's the point if you don't actually want to discuss anything of substance about it? People have made that kind of comment. Doesn't mean the developers have lost any sleep trying to figure out where to put that proposed orange bird. That's not at all the issue in question, though; you're making the argument that you can't share this information because you'll feel pressured to find a way to fit in all the suggestions and feedback you will receive, which simply isn't the case. Nobody has said that you need to include the public in your design process or use everything they propose; what is being asked is simply that you provide certain core information about what we can expect in the game. Honestly, I think you're over-reacting to something that hasn't happened, and probably won't. We had a brief discussion earlier about the combat system, where I raised a concern about it being turn-based instead of real-time, and you explained why you're using the system you are. I didn't harp on about it, or insist that you change the game to use a real-time system. You also acknowledged the legitimacy of feedback from another poster regarding the background of artwork you're using, noting that your original choice of colour may not have been the most suitable. I just asked a (presumably) simple question: at this point in development, how many of these things (skills, spells and enemies) are slated to make it into the game? The answer could have been those three numbers, or "we haven't decided yet", or even "we don't want to tell you" (if you're that way inclined), but instead you just provided a paragraph dedicated to evading that question, and that raises a red flag. If there are ten types of enemy, then say there are ten types of enemy, don't BS about context. We have a context: many of us have played Dungeon Master, Eye of the Beholder, Lands of Lore, Ishar, Undercroft, and/or The Quest. We have a good idea of what to expect in a game like this, especially considering that your first post squarely aims Descend at the DM/EotB fanbase. If the game is released and it is revealed that each character only has three abilities, and the bestiary consists of five monsters in total, then no matter the "context", taking jabs at other developers for the amount of content they put in is going to appear rather classless. Now, I should probably soften the preceding post by stating that while I certainly see how all of the above might cause you to believe that I have some kind of issue with you or the game, that's not the case (other than the whole Australian thing, which is pretty much an unforgivable sin ); I simply prefer to be straight with people, and like people to be straight with me. If Descend comes out, and proves to be a fun game, I'll likely pick it up, simple as that. Of course, if I observe things I feel could be improved, I'll also be providing feedback to that effect.
Can you please stop badgering this poor guy? I find it incredibly hard to believe you have nothing better to do than write these long diatribes criticizing what he is or is not saying, or striving to find some hidden meaning in his words. We like developers coming to our forums and sharing details about their games (if they choose to) and we'd like that to continue. It's not going to if they feel like people around here are going to give them the 3rd degree about every little thing. Now for the love of Frank, please stop critiquing every one of his posts.
