Hey everyone, I've been working on this game off and on for a couple years now. It used to be a tower defense game, but I have recently decided to go ARPG instead. I love games like diablo and path of exile, so I wanted to make a version that didn't take 1000 hours to make a good character.
There is no intro/tutorial yet, but the game is simple enough. Move with WASD and aim with your mouse.
You will start out on an island. There is a single quest to kill the dragon, who is deep underground. You must find the entrance to his lair in the procedurally generated landscape.
Collect items and level up to grow more powerful. When you level up you will get a skill point that you can spend upgrading your spells in different ways. You can choose to upgrade damage, cast speed, or range on most spells (no damage on teleport).
Sorry, ive been uploading some underdev versions recently trying to test performance increases using the webgl-2d plugin. I'm currently sitting at about 20 fps on my phone which is not really what i want, and the webgl-2d plugin made it worse. I dont have very many entities or draws, so its been frustrating for me recently.
The game should auto size, it doesn't auto-rotate however yet. So if you load it landscape, you have to keep it landscape, otherwise it gets a messed up. I'll fix that soon.
It reminded me of one of my favourite games - "Crimson Lands". I always waited for a sequel to come, but it didn't. If you haven't played that, be sure to check it out. Can give some cool ideas about arsenal and mob behaviour.
I used rocket and it felt good. A little bit too smokey maybe. Controls are smooth. Just that, when you enter into the forest it slows down too much. And normally I expect trees to be obstacles and i.e. mud to slow down.
Zombie (right?) motions, tracking, etc.. are good. It feels challenging but not too hard. Very good.
I didn't like the fog of war thing. It effectively hinders the game space, I felt like I'm playing through a lens or something. If you can replace it with dynamic lightning (plugins somewhere in the forum) it could be really nice. Or removing it all together won't hurt, at least not me.
Bug report: When you open the inventory, game doesn't pause - I died :(
I like the mini-map. Is that a plugin or did you develop it yourself just for your game? I want to create one for my game which uses the tiles of the main level and maps each tile as a pixel so that the mini-map is always up to date with my level in case I change it.
stahlmanDesign - Ya I just developed it myself. I use a separate canvas to draw the pixels on when i load each level (saving them as buffers for later), and then just slide that canvas around. I use another canvas on top of that one to draw the "foreground" elements, like screen position and the green dot representing the player. This way I only have to draw 2 rectangles each frame.
Quite nice. I played it like 10-15 minutes. I had some fire hat so that the fire spell was the strongest. Random thoughts that might help you:
- spells don't really differ that much. there's no incentive to use different spells
- graphics are alright, but could need more polish
- I have no clue where to find gems. I found one in a chest. The levels are very open and I have no idea if I'm going in the right direction. As a player, I get a bit anxious whether I'll ever find back with these many zones and I kind of don't want to go back to town, because loading takes too long ;) The game lacks some sort of overview or a basic linearity that guides the player
- spells feel nice
- fire burns on water
- possible path to victory: teleporting all the time though the zones
- I died because 5 days were over. Wut? I didn't know I had 5 days and didn't see a clock
- inventory got full quite quickly. I dropped stuff but I didn't bother to equip other things, because my fire spell was so strong already -> balance
- blue = rare? items should drop less often I guess
- didn't figure out what item goes to which slot at first and I think I dropped a hat or a belt or something by accident
Why did I keep playing for 15 minutes?
Because the spells felt quite snappy and "direct". I like that a lot. You feel in control of the character, although walking through the woods and through water is annoyingly slow. Thank god there's a teleporter spell
Keep up the good work. Maybe find a way to bring some guidance into the game. Diablo is only partly random and you kind of can't get lost. Most open-world games have some artificial boundary at the beginning. Maybe guards that don't let you pass a gate or whatever.
Hey Apiheld, thanks for the review! Some really great comments in there.
To answer a few of your questions:
It saying "5 days" actually is a complete lie, and it just meant you died and were level 5 when you died.
The gem quest is going to be overhauled at some point, but I have it for now to give the player something to do. Chests are the only place to find gems currently.
I like the criticism for not giving the player enough direction, however, I do want to avoid any linear story. I really want to make a game about adventuring that is different each time you play. I dont want to direct the player to go one way or block them out from anywhere. That said, I agree that in the beginning it might not hurt to inform the player that no direction is "wrong" and they will not get lost.
Walking through forest and water is very slow by design. However, I do plan to have some unique items/passive abilities that allow the player to move faster through these terrain types. Think "Elven shoes" or "water flippers" :)
Again, thanks for playing!
P.S. I just added caves that you can come across and click on to enter. They will have random layouts and contain mostly snakes and bats. In the future I want to add bosses to the end of them, as well as castle dungeons that have a different type terrain algorithm.
I played the game for 15 minutes, here are my comments:
* Now I can see a larger area, I think the playability improved.
* I am impressed with what you did with the items and the inventory. Random items similar to Diablo is no small task. Inventory screen needs some polish.
* When I press "salvage all" my gold increases. Are there also merchants?
* Near the place I started, I found 2 chests. Then I traveled across more then a quarter of the map but didn't find any keys. Are there really keys for those chests?
* The game was running in impact-debug plug had the average frame rate was about 15 FPS (Firefox and also safari).
* I just used the ice spell and nothing else.
* I didn't quite understand what happens when I level up.
* I loved the (albeit loose) reference to the Earthsea series.
* Homing projectiles is a really neat idea. I just sticked to one of the staves I found just for the sake of that.
I would suggest you to do smaller maps tho, like legend of zelda a link to the past on the Snes. I had some pretty heavy frame rate drops and I'm using pretty decent PC.
Awesome game Seeders! I know it's about a year, but are you planning on adding multiplayer support / expanding it? I also think the movement is a bit 'glitchy', if you will. It doesn't seem fluid sometimes when moving, the camera also jitter's a tiny bit in some places. Overall, pretty fun game though.
