You mean in hours? I think that game started at level 12. Maybe 25 battles per level, so that would be 200 enemies? Maybe a battle takes 2-3 minutes on average, plus some time between battles? So maybe 10 hours? The battles do take longer as you get farther into the game.
Just wanted to add that for the current game: I had testers who beat it with 2 classes, I did it with the warriors. For each class is (well was soon with 1.15 in the pipeline) there more than one way to do it or not? I'd say there's got to be but the difficulty is on the high end. In my 1.15 testing I specifically did not do some super slanted builds for my adjustments to enemy abilities to avoid having the current situation repeating itself. The warrior remains the easiest one to play which I'm fine with since it's the default class but I did manage a personal kill with the Mage and Rogue as well. The other classes will keep going in a more involved playing direction as well. I am confident that the majority of players will be pleased on the overall result but do not pretend to be flawless and will adjust swiftly if I did it wrong. I really do like the idea of having harder modes as followups for the more hardcores where I could push the envelope further in complexity/difficulty and this will definitely make it into the game. The way I setted up the abilities and all make it very easy for me to set this up and will add even further replay value to the game.
Well, as I've said above, this seems like questionable thinking to me. The nature of a game is that some choices are better than others (if every choice is equally good then you might as well not have any choices). It would be nice for different builds to have different strengths and weaknesses (particularly against different enemies), but to say that you just want players to build at random, or in some sort of default, balanced way, makes me wonder, then why have build choices at all?
I know you're wary to the changes I've done but give it a fighting chance before dismissing it. I had to react with the data I had in hand and players showing signs of understandable frustrations. You just can't build your characters randomly and expect to perform well either - I did builds that seemed optimal to me. I did not do 1-1-1-1-1 .. and also I did not say that there wasn't a stat that wasn't maxed out/nearly maxed out But I haven't done a "3-2" distribution either.
To my mind, the way to deal with balance issues is to "nerf" abilities that are stronger, while "buffing" abilities that are weaker. E.g., I never use Berserk as it is, so why would I spend points to recharge it faster? The payoff for points in HP is too low to be worth much, so why not make it better, by increasing the yield and/or boosting heart recovery based on HP (something I suggested a while ago and I still think would make that aspect a lot more attractive). I'd balance the options before I would just try to ensure that people can win even with suboptimal allocations to the options. But of course it's your game. I'd rather explore 1.14 more before upgrading to 1.15, personally. Especially if it's going to make the game easier. But we'll see.
Maybe I expressed myself wrongly - here goes: I had to revise enemy stats as the result of adding enemy abilities. I don't want to spoil things but let's just take the fear ability that I leaked earlier. If I add this ability to a monster it changes it's difficulty. What I did was building a character of each class, the way I thought it was optimal, and go at it. If the fight did not felt right I tweaked the creature harder or easier. I also did adjustments to the classes in the process buffing the mages and rogues stun chances, and nerfed the shield skill with diminishing returns when the character has high defense. I also improved the berserk skill to lower the defense penalty down to 10% when skilled up as I had lots of feedback saying it was useless as is. I believe this goes kinda in line with what you said. 1.15 notes will be updated when I'm back home.
OK, this seems different from what you said before. What I thought you said before is that you deliberately restricted yourself to "balanced" builds, i.e. spread the points around just to do so. Even with tweaks, I think the "optimal" builds are not going to be "balanced", because that's just the nature of the game. Anyway, I will refrain from forming more opinions until I see it. Are the changes (to the character skills) all documented within the game?
Yes the skill on level up mentions it has diminishing returns at high defense. Rogues and Mages stun chances were already described properly so I just tweaked the inner formulas. Berserk help has been updated. I also standardized the words used to describe defense as sometimes I referred it as shields so it could get confusing. Now shield is the symbol, defense is the stat everywhere in the game - if you spot an area (in 1.15) that I missed let me know.
Is there any reason spin can't be placed on the bottom/bottom right? After playing king cashing and, well, just general playing it gets very uncomfortable very quickly having the spin button there. It would be infinitely easier to have it lower. And as I previously had this on my iPad, I didn't notice until playing it on my phone, but please allow us to mute the sounds AND music. This is yet another game I can't play on my phone because the sounds come on when I am listening to podcasts or music, and I assume many people play this, and many other games, this way. Maybe it wasn't intentional but allow us to turn off the sound too. Please. As fast as you can? Thanks
I'll have the mute sound in next version Spin button inversion option is on the to do list. Thanks for the feedback!
I'd love to see a bit more graphical variety in the dungeons. Maybe some bookcases/chairs/cells/chains/etc. More "flavor tiles" to give the dungeons a feel of a cohesive space. Even better if the character could examine those tiles to get a description! I've only made it to level 4 with a character, so it's possible some of this sort of thing is in later dungeons.
The only difference in later dungeons is that the level 5, 10, 15, 20 dungeons are "boss dungeons" that have special characters with unique stats and names and more loot.
I'd like it if you could tell the level of the dungeon from the overworld map screen. I've been told there's one dungeon for each character level but I have to go into each one and check the enemies to find the appropriate level for my character. Playing the lower level dungeons is a waste of time due to low/non-existent XP and loot. I suppose I could alternatively memorize which dungeon is what level since they seem to always appear in the same locations. Just saying it'd be a nice feature to have.
It's usually pretty obvious, if you just "follow the path" then you encounter the dungeons (and quest givers, and overworld enemies) in order. There's also one store in each level (except for a few extras), although all of the stores are the same so the store doesn't really have a "level".
BTW, a minor exploit, if the store doesn't have the particular item you want to buy, the stock changes as you defeat enemies. If you want to restock the store without risk, you can go back to some much lower level and kill enemies there. You don't get any XP for that, and generally they don't have loot, but you do change the store inventory.
One problem I have with this game is that once you learn the mechanics, its pretty easy. I mean, my Rogue is only level 6, but it actually takes a long time to get to that, and I'm confident I could do that pretty much every time. Probably it gets harder later, but the "I could die at any time" aspect of roguelikes is not present right now. I have two life scrolls, but as long as I'm careful I dont get remotely close to needing to use one. The other problem I have is that if your patient enough you can farm all the gold you might need, but that its really boring to do so. For example, Rogue with good gear above level 4 can often accumulate 200+ shields in a single battle by focusing on shields and poison. At that point, or well before it, you focus on NOT doing damage and collecting gold, and battles can go a long time. I prefer not to have such options in games. I understand you dont need to do this kind of farming to advance, but if the option is there I feel like I should. Rogue seems very good so far, just as easy as Warrior through level 6 anyway.
You could certainly farm almost as much money as you want (not necessarily an infinite amount, because eventually you will kill any foe just with random matches). It doesn't bother me that people have the option. I think most people will find it not interesting enough. Spending your time to farm gold at low levels is especially unproductive because you don't need better equipment at that stage, anything you buy then is going to be obsolete later, and the rate you can accumulate gold is small compared to what you will need later. If you want to accrue more gold, a better way (more interesting at least) is to just not spend on equipment if you can win the battles relatively easily. Save your gold for later.
^ This. There are always those people who seemingly have some form of OCD that leaves them unable to min-max everything, to use every exploit and/or bug to the point of destroying their fun, but not only do I not see watching out for these people a game designer's job, in this game it's remarkably unproductive anyhow. Things move slowly enough that I can't imagine what sort of sadomasochist is going to farm the bejesus out of enemies this way so that they'll have even more gold than they need. I've just been killing stuff as fast as I can without risking my own lives and any time I make it to a new shop, I can buy pretty much what I want. Why exactly would I spend time farming gold just because the mechanics allow it? My deaths are because like, in any good rogue, my luck ran out, not because I didn't have enough gold to grab that cloak at the last shop I visited.
Eventually, this won't be true, because equipment prices accelerate later in the game (i.e., the "level 20" armor costs much more than 4 times as much as "level 5" armor).
Funny that you mention that because I discussed it with the artist last week. Dungeons are just too clean atm - this will not remain so Just prioritizing some other stuff first though but it'll change in the future. The coins yield is lower on lower level mobs and I even lowered it further in 1.15 to counter the increase that I had put in 1.14. Still you can do it but you'll get a much higher gold/minute off even-leveled creatures. It does get harder. First levels are quite more easy than the later ones and are more lenient on folks who don't prioritize poison enough for example to not discourage people right off the bat. If you pull a marathon (level 1 start) run to Nicodemus on a rogue I'll be surprised Fixed in 1.16 - thanks for reporting. Done, will be in 1.16. Can't wait for 1.15 to be approved after playing it for a while again yesterday while reworking some inner structures to allow the new quest types inclusion. Abilities are worked slowly at first but ramp up later on and, with the diminishing returns on defense skill, fights are less based on turtling it out. I also should have some interesting stuff to share later today btw - including a preview of the first new class.
