Review: Dance of Death

As is every so often when I come across a game that looks interesting, this is a review of "Dance of Death", a flash game that was mentioned on RGRD. It's a "tech demo" at this point. As a flash game, it's very difficult to have issues getting the game to run, point your browser at the link and go.

The first thing one comes across when they start the game is in the title screen, and then the character creation screen. I like the tabbed panels with shading, which makes it somewhat obvious when one is done. One issue I came across is that one can tab over a panel without spending its points and type a name to finish. Doing this will create a massively underpowered character, and being able to do so is most likely a bug.

Since this game follows the standard practice of asking for name/race/stats/skills before the game starts, please don't consider it a criticism of it in particular. Games that do this ask the new player to answer questions they most likely don't have answers to yet. If I've never played before, how do I know what stat distribution I should use. Without playing the game, I have no idea of the usefulness of various skills, and so figuring out a skill distribution is difficult. I'm planning on the future of posting an entry entry on this point, so I digress.

Beyond that, the character creation does a decent job at explaining what skills do as I distributed stat and skill points, so I created a melee fighter.

The game has the feel of nethack in terms of room layout and color scheme (mostly white on black). Starting off on floor 0 was a bit humorous, as all real programmers number arrays that way (but maybe it should be floor 1). Controls seemed easy and expected. There was no diagonal movement, bump to attack was obvious and expected. Bump to open doors also worked as expected.

Field of view, monsters with pathfinding, and equipment all are there. Each "slot" of equipment seems to have a single item type, and I'm unsure it does anything at this point. It seems that inventory "Examine" is broken, but beside that everything works as expected.

The map generator seems to generate reasonable rooms with doors and stairs. Monsters were a bit sparse for my taste. 

There is a "Skills" pane that show your skills and attributes, along with an exp pool. It appears to be just stubbed out for now, and shows some of my stats as negative, which is amusing. 

For the first "tech demo" of this game that I've heard of, consider me pretty impressed. Development can be followed at the development blog here. I'm looking forward for further development, fleshing out what this game has to offer beyond infrastructure.