So, the new release has been on the interwebs for a few days now. I figured a post with thoughts and future plans was in order.
- Some people had issues getting things to run. All of them involved needing either the MSVC 2010 C runtime, or the required mac frameworks. I didn't have them listed on the release page, which has been fixed. In the far future, and installer for magecrawl would be nice to take care of stuff like this.
- Very little feedback so far. Maybe the summer and quick release since the last tech demo have something to do with that...
- No crashes or savegame corruption reports so far. If people got the game working, it seems to be working fine.
Now that it is out the door, the next question is "now what?". Here are my current thoughts:
- Spend the next week collecting game play ideas. My wife pointed out this means I can play video games and call it "research". Magecrawl has matured past the point that calling it a tech demo is becoming a stretch, yet the gameplay is kinda bland. I want to come up with interesting mechanics to make combat more than "jam damage spell, unless I can hit more than one with a bigger spell".
- Iteration 10 - Yes, one more. I have a ton of things I need to do, refactors, cleanup, and minor feature polish.
- Slice 1- Once I get the base in good shape, I need to come up with a "theme" for my slice. I plan on picking one skill tree, and one/a few map types, and create a lot of content. For example, maybe the arcane tree and ruins maps, or the fire tree and interesting caves. I'll jam it out to be a "full length" game, seriously this time. It might be shallow, but it'll be complete.
7 comments:
Well, I already got Triangle Wizard into your head way back when, so you might give it another go as I'm sure it has packed on another couple versions under the belt since then.
Otherwise, ToME 4 seems to be coming along rather nicely on the Magic scale...and MageGuild is probably just as robust as I remember it being from the early days before their recent big-hit of 2.0.
Well, to be honest, I did download and load up the game, but I was turned off by the hard-to-read text on the character background selection menu... I think either the font was too small or the spacing between characters was too large or something... I do admit I had the latter problem with my 7DRL "Smash Arena" though... but Smash Arena didn't have quite as much text to read all at once!
My 2 cents about gameplay:
- delay on the "skill confirmation" window is annoying
- Ranged weapons are useless, you can shoot 1 time and then the monster is already near you. Kiting is useless because of high monster speed, low range on player weapons and high mana cost of "Slow". Also,for some reason slowed monsters are moving with the same speed as my character.
- Scholars are decent with current mana regeneration rates, their tactical options are often limited by low mana pool.
- Templars with Light Magic(Regen+Word Of Hope) seem like a best choice for current version, they have high survivability and can blast dangerous monsters like healers with wands.
- Dungeon Levels need to be a little more compact, sometimes it's boring to go in 1 branch, then return to center, go to 2nd branch, return to center again, repeat n times.
Overall, Magecrawl is a solid project and i wish you luck with upcoming features(Wanna try Ice Scholar and Earth Templar).
XV - The delay on confirm also happens when you try to quit. Would it annoy you less if it was shorter? Do you not want it at all?
The effect of slow is only 30%, and since most monsters are ~10% faster than monsters, you'd only notice if you move > 5 tiles away w\ monster slow.
Dungeon generator currently sucking is known. A rewrite or something is needed.
Thanks for the feedback.
Oh, also... I can't seem to move about with the numpad - I have to use arrows and some bizarre mapping of insert and delete and the like... makes the game rather hard to play! :(
Ed - Open up preferences.xml and change the top line. It is noted on the help screen :)
Oh, thanks - dunno how I missed that! :)
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