iPad Dungeon Raid (by Fireflame Games)

I just keep coming back to this game over and over. I love it. My only real criticisms are:

1) The you are dead screen has so many compression artifacts (I see this screen alot.

2) It isn't super clear what some of the stats/upgrades do. I guess finding out that's part of the fun.

 

These are great, I'll add a few in the update after next, and I've got ideas for a bunch of other cool ones

Hah, those aren't compression artifacts, although still a valid criticism. There's noise around the "You Were Killed" text but this is intentional, although perhaps not desirable? iOS uses PNGs, which although compressed don't have the obvious macroblock compression artifacts you'd see in a JPEG image - at worst a heavily compressed PNG would have slightly shifted colours from the ones that were originally saved.

 

Same for me. There are tons of games to play while being idle, yet Dungeon Raid is the one i usually choose to waste some time with.

Here are some suggestions for an update:

- Character Classes:

Would be cool to be able to play a Mage (maybe including Teleport from the start to chicken out of fights. Yeah i admit, i love the ability, haha.) or Warrior etc. Each Char could have their own starting advantages. This needs to be balanced out right though.

- Battle Chest:

Players could be allowed to store several items they find on their trail in the Battle Chest, allowing them to be reused by players on a new game. If this is too difficult to balance out, show us at least all the weapons we found throughout our journey. There sure are some hilarious ones. The "aweful beater" springs to mind.

- Rare Items:

The ability to find rare loot in the game. Those items could be shown on an own Collectors Stats page. You could even combine abilities with some of the items. Gotta catch em all?

- Teleport:

As far as i´ve seen Teleport does always teleport the player to a safe location. Why not change it so that you could also make ur situation worse by teleporting into a room full of skulls sometimes. Bad luck, anyone?

- Detailed Stats Page:

As of now my i can only see tiny icons in the High Score List. To be honest, those don´t look very tasty. Why not create a whole page, showing all the items i gathered throughout my journey?

- Name the Dungeon Levels:

Just a minor suggestion. The Name of the current Dungeon Level could be presented to the player. For example: "Entrance Hall" -> "Surturs Secret Halls" -> "Deeper Underground" etc.

 

What I want is colored text on the item shop screen telling me if the item is better or worse in the upgrade area. It is exhausting to check every item for if it costs you an important upgrade.

Just broke the top 40 on normal!

 

That one might be tough as often items have a mix of both, especially ones that give you +2 Def or Dmg, but take away .25 XP/UP (which I tend to shy away from...)

Seems that I tend to upgrade my helmet more often than most items, is it because its upgrades tend to be better, or have I just played too much Hook Champ?

 

I got up to 30k in my next "Hard" game. Using Teleport, Enchant, Boost Damage, and Skill Elixir. Got most of my healing from 25% Life Leech and Regeneration, used Skill Elixir pretty consistently every 8 turns to rack up lots of XP. Teleport to get out of trouble or just generate new chains. Eventually got into trouble when a lot of enemies showed up at once with no swords, and died one turn before my Teleport could recharge. I'm tempted to try a combo with Dazzle in it, next time, and maybe skip the Enchant. Too bad that Skill Elixir lets me build my base damage and HP, but doesn't really do anything to increase regeneration or weapon damage.

 

Wish there were better score boards offline. Every time I get a new score, one gets kicked out regardless of difficulty. Maybe a scoreboard for each difficulty?

 

That's my point, put the things it's giving you better than what you have in green, what it's giving you worse than what you have in red, and what stays the same in the current color. That would save me a lot of time figuring out what the item is.

 

I agree, this would be excellent. It really is a pain going through sometimes to see what is better or worse. Additionally, it would be nice to have a buy nothing option! In the last game I played, all three item choices resulted in a downgrade in an area I didn't want to downgrade, regardless of the upgrade elsewhere. I had to pick the choice I hated less. It's very rare to have a downgrade on all three items, but when it does, it would be good to just say, "no thanks!"

 

How would you indicate whether 1 luck is worth more or less than 1 strength? (for when things are added and removed...)

 

I'd rather just have a "delta" display. Don't even display the old item for comparison, after each new item just display the "delta" from the old item. And show this simultaneously for all three available choices. So an item might be followed by something like this: "(+1 defense, +1 str, -1 luck)".

 

Is "vampirism" the same as "life leech"?

(-10% life leech, -10% piercing, +2 poison)

That doesn't seem any harder.

 

If you want to be more compact, you can also just display all of the information in the description of the new item itself.

E.g., if your current weapon is "26 damage, 10% piercing, 25% life leech", then your new weapon could be displayed as "28 damage, +1 str, 23% life leech, 0% piercing".

This just makes the descriptions slightly longer than the present descriptions, because you might have mention abilities that the new item doesn't have but the old one did.

 

Oh I see. I guess most of the graphics are very clean cut so for me I thought it was unintentional. It's not stopping me from playing the game ;-)

And thanks for putting in the option for smooth animation in the update!

 

So I've played this game nonstop for the past week, and still don't know what repair does. Can someone explain to me?

Edit: I mean the upgrade, not the skill

 

I think it just increases the armor points that get restored by each Shield symbol you pick up. This has always seemed the least useful statistic to me, it typically only takes one or two Shields to fill up your armor bar and the rest are converted to upgrade points anyway. But maybe I'm missing something.

 

New Update is out with framerate toggle and some other changes.

I would like to make a suggestion here. Instead of displaying all the existing stats, The upgrade window could only show what stat has changed and how compared with the existing equipment with ↑ or ↓ marked next to it.

Example: Current weapon is "27 damage, 10% Leech, 10% Piercing" And if new weapon has "25 Damage, 15% Leech, 10% Piercing" It would only be displayed as "Damage 2↓, Leech 5%↑" and there wouldn't be a need to mention that Piercing had changed atall, this way you could quickly see what option to choose as you can see by how much the stats have changed exactly.

In your method, we can surely see what stats have changed, but you'd still have to see the old stats to find out by how much it has changed.
The remaining stats could be checked in the stats menu instead.

And unlike your example, i have never seen so many stats changing~ I haven't seen more than 2 stats change. But i haven't been above 20k anyway . Its pointless imo to see the stats it already has, unless you want to feel proud of how epic your weapon has become

 

That's fine too, although every little change in this direction makes the game a bit less immersive, as if you're just playing a game of statistics (which you are!) instead of actual weapons. But I'd be fine with it.

It does (slightly) matter what the actual stats are, though, not just the changes. Knowing what stats an item has helps you decide how likely it is you're going to be offered to replace it with something different later on, and accept. It's not a huge effect, but it does exist. I find it a bit annoying sometimes that the "Upgrade" screen only shows the changes, much as you describe, and not the actual stats. But it does help the game play faster, so I don't mind it.