Back to work - FF XIV currently a bust...

As some of my previous posts mentioned, I was blasted excited about Final Fantasy XIV and planned a month or two of ignoring Magecrawl around it. The short answer is that isn't happening anymore. The game has major balance and lag issues that currently make it not fun to play. If you were interested in it, I'd give it a few months to see if they can shake out the bugs and make it fun to play.

And so, I'm back to normal development again. My plan is as follows:

• Finish up my crawl tiles license project, which just involves a boring night or two in front of changelists.
• Get Magecrawl for SL up and running. My previous post had my TODO list.
• Start work on the backlog of bugs/features. Right now, for each one that involves UI changes, I'm planning on doing it twice if reasonable.

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.

Review: Triangle Wizard

Since this is Thanksgiving weekend, I didn't have to program. At the recommendation of someone in a comment thread, I decided to check out Triangle Wizard. Here's my mini-review:

Name: Triangle Wizard
Type: Roguelike, real time, modified
Website: http://www.trianglewizard.webs.com/

I had never heard of this game before yesterday. It's a freeware real-time roguelike, which only runs under Windows. It came with an installer and installed/ran with no issues.

The title screen reminded me of Diablo, it was well polished. One this it could use would be mouse support, it took me 15 seconds to figure out what was going on. I selected tutorial since I knew nothing so far.

The tutorial is one of those "learn as you do" training rooms. I had some trouble figuring out which icon was your mouse cursor and which was the player. Once I passed that, I figured out that it was a hybrid mouse and keyboard game. The keyboard moves the character and selects spells. The mouse handles targeting and casting. I love this control scheme. It makes "run-and-gun" strafing easy and smooth. If magecrawl was going to be real-time, I would seriously steal it. Another feature that I love is the "persistent casting". You can set it, and any enchantments you have cast will recast when they expire. The tutorial had a few bugs, which I sent to the maintainer, but it effectively taught me the basics.

The character selection screen was a bit confusing. The "right arrow" seemed to randomize selected items. It took me a few minutes to figure out how to set my name. Once I figured it out, I selected a human pyromancer.


Within ten seconds of starting, I was swarmed by half a dozen brigands. After fending them off, I got a chance to explore. There seemed to be a huge number of spells you could buy early, maybe too many. It was a bit overwhelming. Beyond that, I explored awhile until I ran into a "summoned phoenix". It was immune to my fire spells, and killed me.

I'm obviously not very good at the game, since I've played a few times and keep getting killed on the opening level. However, it has peaked my interest, and I'll try it some more. If you have a Windows machine, it worth a try.