Author Topic: The Forgettable Dungeon: Early Access Release  (Read 422164 times)

Yeah I keep dying. I know I could be doing much better but in particular the skeletons seem to be extremely fast and dangerous.

Yeah and on this, when we were playing on the server...we defeated the ice boss within about three seconds.

Yeah, this is definitely a problem.

I'm not sure how to balance out the bosses in terms of health with multiple players.

Though hopefully this is just due to me normalizing some of the players damage output and giving monsters less invul time when hit.

Later tonight or tomorrow I'll send out a hotfix giving them more health.

Yeah I keep dying. I know I could be doing much better but in particular the skeletons seem to be extremely fast and dangerous.

In the hot fix I'll also be removing the skeletons from floor 1 to allow players to build up some health before they get to them.

Though personally I don't find skeletons particularly bad, you can bait them then go for a hit when they recover or go for a hit then dodge.



This is going to be the video featured in tomorrows kickstarter update but here it is if you guys want to check it out:

https://vid.me/x3c7

Hooray for Ice Blob Bob!


On a side note, I know you removed the health bars, but wouldn't it be a good idea to add them back as an option since some people might prefer it?


The way skeletons fight really doesn't seem to present an obvious strategy to get the better of them for most people. They react really quickly and the bait and hit tactic seems too fast paced to expect from someone in the first level. Honestly seems like an enemy tactic you would see in the much later levels, when fighting strategies should be getting much harder to employ.


As for the boss health, seems like you could just do a curved scale based on the number of players in the dungeon. bosshealth = 100 + (playercount * 75) + (playercount * playercount * 5) would be something I would think could work for a boss. Gains at least 75 more hp per person, plus an exponential factor to compensate for the fact that they will get beaten from all angles at a higher number of players.

The way skeletons fight really doesn't seem to present an obvious strategy to get the better of them for most people. They react really quickly and the bait and hit tactic seems too fast paced to expect from someone in the first level. Honestly seems like an enemy tactic you would see in the much later levels, when fighting strategies should be getting much harder to employ.


As for the boss health, seems like you could just do a curved scale based on the number of players in the dungeon. bosshealth = 100 + (playercount * 75) + (playercount * playercount * 5) would be something I would think could work for a boss. Gains at least 75 more hp per person, plus an exponential factor to compensate for the fact that they will get beaten from all angles at a higher number of players.

Yeah, they seem obvious to me but that's most likely because I've played a lot of video games... and also designed them.

I'm going to work on a new enemy for a future update that has a more telegraphed move set to get players acquainted with things.

As for the bosses, it was less a case of purely giving them more health and more they had a few error states where they would just sit and take damage without retaliating.

I just put out an update with fixes to them so now they should be decently tougher, without just being damage sponges.

To put things into perspective I literally left in a thing that made it so whenever you attacked the ice boss he just cancelled his next action if you attacked within the next 500 ms.  Woops... :panda:

Anyway, hopefully the hotfix improves things for you guys.

Good work, Rotondo! Glad to see a crowdfunded game getting frequent updates.

just to clarify, the ice boss in the session i hosted that died in 3 seconds was hit by a poison potion and some magical staff. Wasn't able to check what staff though.

Its a little hard distinguishing yourself in the middle of the room - maybe have a floating healthbar above your player so you can see where you are at all times? or just have camera lock onto the player and not the room (as an option). it can get really chaotic with 6+ people and more than a few times i was confused as to where i actually was in the middle of all the fighting lol

Another thing to consider is to have the generator make a larger/longer/more labyrinthine level with more players - part of the chaos is when you have 6+ people in a room. i was actually experimenting with generating dungeon designs using java late december in the hopes of maybe making something possibly useful for this game, but scrapped the idea since I didn't structure it correctly to handle walls that have thickness (it uses a grid system)

https://vid.me/x3c7
The music change between the two Ice Blob Bob clips is jarring.

You definitely balanced the game. I found myself having to think my actions through more than I could swing randomly and hope for the best. Monsters spawning only when you enter a room is a must too.

I have the same complaint about skeletons; they ended 3/4 of my runs before I could beat Ice Blob Bob. I haven't played with other people, so I can tell you that Bob isn't too easy in singleplayer.


just to clarify, the ice boss in the session i hosted that died in 3 seconds was hit by a poison potion and some magical staff. Wasn't able to check what staff though.

Its a little hard distinguishing yourself in the middle of the room - maybe have a floating healthbar above your player so you can see where you are at all times? or just have camera lock onto the player and not the room (as an option). it can get really chaotic with 6+ people and more than a few times i was confused as to where i actually was in the middle of all the fighting lol

Another thing to consider is to have the generator make a larger/longer/more labyrinthine level with more players - part of the chaos is when you have 6+ people in a room. i was actually experimenting with generating dungeon designs using java late december in the hopes of maybe making something possibly useful for this game, but scrapped the idea since I didn't structure it correctly to handle walls that have thickness (it uses a grid system)


That makes more sense, however upon revisiting them I did fix some glaring bugs with them lol, so it all works out. Most likely he got hit by the meat staff or polymorph, I need to add special checks for bosses to make them behave a bit different.

I'll definitely add that as an option in the next update, going to be messing around a lot with the camera soon to try and find a good balance.

I'm definitely going to be adding support for larger rooms at some point in the future, I was planning on keeping the current size for 4 or less players and then having slightly bigger for more players.

Thankfully the system is pretty flexible, eventually I want to add odd sized or double sized rooms to the dungeon similar to binding of isaac. This would break up gameplay pretty well I think.

The music change between the two Ice Blob Bob clips is jarring.

You definitely balanced the game. I found myself having to think my actions through more than I could swing randomly and hope for the best. Monsters spawning only when you enter a room is a must too.

I have the same complaint about skeletons; they ended 3/4 of my runs before I could beat Ice Blob Bob. I haven't played with other people, so I can tell you that Bob isn't too easy in singleplayer.

Yeah that was just some extra funny content that coincidentally got recorded with fitting music.

I'm happy you enjoy the new version, I put a lot of work into making things feel fair while having some difficulty. It's got a long ways to go though, many more ideas to test.

Yeah more and more it's looking like the skeletons are going to have to be a later floor enemy, or limited to just their slow spinning attack as a lot of people have been having trouble with them.



This staff is still OP.

Yeah this is high priority for next update, thanks for reminding me. I can't believe I forgot to rebalance that for bosses lol...



Just posted the update to kickstarter, it's mostly the same stuff you've seen here just explained more.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rotondo/forgettabledungeon/posts/1483692

Two important things I want to mention for you guys though,

The beta is now being distributed through the humble widget if any of you were unable to pay through paypal.

http://www.odnotor.com/kickstarterpaypal

I also added a poll on how you guys would prefer to get updates,

http://stickpoll.me/v/8f65928eb0d212c



Edit: also if someone could post a link to the kickstarter update to the forgettable dungeon reddit I'd appreicate it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/theforgettabledungeon

I'm hesitant due to their over zealous self promotion policies.
« Last Edit: February 05, 2016, 04:27:09 PM by Rotondo »

Edit: also if someone could post a link to the kickstarter update to the forgettable dungeon reddit I'd appreicate it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/theforgettabledungeon

I'm hesitant due to their over zealous self promotion policies.
Done. https://www.reddit.com/r/TheForgettableDungeon/comments/44d0jz/ice_world_beta_update_backer_reward_mac_port_plan/

I remember that we couldnt pick up living players
i guess you removed that
maybe add that to server options though? that can be fun with people you trust

I remember that we couldnt pick up living players
i guess you removed that
maybe add that to server options though? that can be fun with people you trust
oh man it was great when you could do that
i still remember getting rotondo stuck on top of the level by making a stack of like 5 players

I remember that we couldnt pick up living players
i guess you removed that
maybe add that to server options though? that can be fun with people you trust

Another change must be conflicting with it. I never intended to remove the ability to pick up other players, especially after I added all the safeguards to jumping off easily.

I'll fix that in the next update.

Edit:

Look guys anti-aliasing!.... almost sort of kind of...



Probably not going to be able to get this method working, not sure how well supported it is anyway.
« Last Edit: February 06, 2016, 01:22:17 AM by Rotondo »

Bump, messed around with implementing a more conventional lighting system.



On a personal note, why do I keep using this color that annoys the gif software lol...