iPad Dungeon Raid (by Fireflame Games)

here is an idea to think about.

Right now skills are just cool-down based. But what if there was another resource like magic points on the board, and you needed to collect that in order to cast your skills/spells instead?

 

Well I just registered so I could comment on this game. It is a very good game that could be awesome.

Questions for the developer:

1. Is the trigger for tougher enemies the number of turns or the number of icons cleared? Hopefully it's the former.

2. When charisma raises icons from 25->30, etc. what does that mean? It can't be the likelihood of the icon dropping correct? Otherwise you could eventually crowd out skulls.

As for recommendations:

1. There needs to be a greater payoff for setting up large chains as this is the essence of the strategy. The bonus is too minimal. Rather than have static skill countdowns, perhaps make them activate by creating large chains (either filling a meter having to setup an 8 chain, etc.. This is not a change that would throw off the balance by adding more icons to the screen.

2. Is there a skill that increases the chance of the shield to block? There should be. As of right now there is not enough synergy between skills. There is some, but not enough. Also, what is the chance of the shield to block currently?

3. More skills!

 

Game Impressions

I've put a couple hours into the game and I honestly love everything about it. It's a puzzle game (not really a match-3 by definition) with a sense of progression, yet without narrative to slow down the puzzle portion (that said, PuzzleQuest is easily one of my top 5 favorite games of all time).

One thing I'd like to suggest to the developer (and I'm sure others have already suggested it at some point) would be to vary the skulls with other enemies as you progress in levels. Right now the skulls just get stronger, as do you. It would be nice if as you were progressing in levels, stronger enemies took the places of Skulls. If they were unique (some with more HP, more damage, more defense, or even something special like a stun, DoT, whatever) I think the progression and RPG aspect would be even stronger.

Maybe start with rats, work your way to dragons. I know it's cliche, but I think the cliche's actually translate very nicely when you're talking about an RPG abstracted into a puzzle game.

Something else (taking it a bit further yet keeping the randomness) would be loot for killing a special "boss" type piece. While buying loot is a staple of RPG's, finding it is right up there as well. I think it would be awesome if every 100 or so turns a special piece turned up that was rough to kill, but was rewarding (would be neat if they were on a countdown and disappeared if you can't kill them in X turns).

Anyway, fantastic job on the developers part. This will be my new goto "few moments of downtime" game.

 

You're probably right LordGek. I never looked closely at it but that makes sense.

 

my whole day was pretty much wasted playing this game.

well not wasted....but I did have things I was planning on doing before going out later, and it seems that nothing will get done because of this game

 

Thanks for all the great feedback guys, glad you like the game I'll try to answer all the questions but remind me if I've missed anything, sorry about the super long post:

Yeah, a few people have reported this, and it looks like there's an overflow issue when saving & restoring games where your character has very high damage (greater than 255 rolls over, so if you had 260 damage it'd be saved as 5). I'm fixing this now and it'll be in the next update. Congrats on getting to such a high level on normal, by the way

Love the kamikaze bomber idea & the loot dropping boss monsters, I think special monsters with fun mechanics will add a lot more variety to the game, but yeah, I'll add a checkbox to include them or not when you start a new game so you're not forced to play with them if you don't want to.

Also, great idea for new skills, LordGek, the first 3 fit well but I'm a bit wary of Kevlar since right now its only use would be in blocking the Kamikaze blast, which means it'll be very rarely useful and a dead weight if you're actually playing well and killing the Kamikazes before they blow.

Yep, normal & hard difficulties multiply the total score, also leveling up your skills multiplies their score contribution.

This is actually how the game was initially designed but after playtesting this way of replenishing skills seemed to overcomplicate the gameplay and it became very difficult to balance skill power. The cooldowns turned out to be a neater way of managing skills and still allow for a lot of strategy (e.g. ignore the enemies and collect a long line of gold if you know a Teleport's about to activate).

Although having to collect stuff constantly reduced the fun in playtesting, I think doing this occasionally might be a nice way to add strategy, how about a skill that turns all potions into mana potions that reduce cooldown when collected?

Yep, the enemies grow stronger with the number of turns, which leads into the next point...

Perhaps the greatest payoff for collecting long chains vs short ones is that you're more likely to stay ahead of the enemies this way. If you keep plinking away at 3-chains, very soon you'll be lower level or have worse equipment than someone who sets up and collects long chains, and so will be worse off vs the improving monsters.

Setting up chains does also result in more bonus tiles being collected, but maybe extra bonuses for very long chains would be nice, like you say. I'll have a play around with it and see if it makes sense to reward long chains even further.

This is the chance of getting a bonus tile along with the one you collected (this applies to each tile in the chain after the first 3). So if you have a 40% chance of bonus potion and you make a chain of 6 potions, there's 40% chance you'll get 2 potions from potion number 4, 40% chance to get 2 potions from potion 5, etc.

Not sure what you mean, your full armor value is always used to reduce the incoming damage (e.g. 3 damage when you have 2 armor will mean 2 damage blocked, 1 goes through), but the armor has a chance to break while blocking. Initially this is 50% (Armour durability in stats menu), but you can increase this with durability upgrades. This means for each point of damage blocked, 1 armor point has a 50% chance of not breaking. E.g. if you have 80% durability, 3 armor and are hit for 2 damage you will block all damage, and then have an 20% chance of -1 armor, and then another 20% chance of -1 armor. Hope that makes sense?

Yep, the doubles skill & bonus effects stack

 

is there a video somewhere???

 

Hey Fireflame -

Thanks for your response. Not only is this one of the best games I have got form the app store in a while, I really appreciate you interacting with your player base.

Now that I have about 100 games played on hard, I retract the whole mana thing. I thought it would be cool to have another resource type on the board, but that is based on early game more. On hard by turn about 120, another resource type breaking up chains would really make things so hard it might be difficult.

One big request (not really big at all, just a lazy person request), can you have it to it saves your character name and last difficulty level? So we don't have to put them in every time?

One thing that confuses me is the armor choices from the store. Generally if you have 3 pieces of armor available, like a shield, helm and chest they all just provide the same thing +1 def. There is no real reason to pick one over the other, as they all just provide +1 def over their current def. I might consider trying to differentiate the different armor pieces a little, so there is more strategy as to which you upgrade.


Also, can you explain +def per shield? Does this mean if I have 5/5 shields, they actually block 10?

 

I gave up, and ended up buying the game. What are people's high scores so far? The highest I've gotten so far is 13,037.

Also, how many differe "stories" are there, for the beginning of the game? An update could add more as well

 

Another question:

Does length of chain after 4 make a difference in bonus chance? It appears that if you have a 20% chance for say a coin bonus, that is static once the chain is at 4. So having 8 in the chain would still be 20% per coin. Or does that % go up with each coin in the chain?

This makes a big difference as to whether it is worth clearing things between to chains of 4 to make a chain of 8 or not.

Also, is that bonus % on all coins in the chain as long as there are at least 4 in the chain? Or just on those after the first 3?

 

man I like this game so much.

We should start talking and sharing strategy.

One of the first things I figured out was when you have a lot of swords and skulls, to use swords more efficiently is to start your chain on a skull, and try to get as many skulls in the chain before swords and then add swords until they all have X's on them.

I tend to find games where I can get both blunt and spikes going with some good defense work well.

I like counterattack and shatter too. Teleport of course, but I see it so rarely.

I tend to focus on base damage and more shields. I always wish I could take +exp% or +coin % since leveling and being able to buy would be great but on hard, I rarely have time to take advantage of them.

What are your strategies?

 

I don't think so, as I've gotten so many shield at once (combined with the ability that doubles their value) that the meter got filled twice in a row

 

I could be wrong here but I always try to get rid of all the swords when killing skulls. They clog the screens that could otherwise be taken up with coins and shields.

 

One other criticism is that I think the normal game is too slow ramping up in difficulty. It takes quite a while to get to a point where I need even concern myself with skulls doing serious damage that can't be fixed with a quick potion run. I play on hard but it's not as fun since you take the hit on upgrade frequency and therefore can't include that as part of your strategy.