So I can't choose to start with the Wizard?  Boo.

You CAN, just not when you first start the game. It tells you you can only use the warrior at first.

Well, I tried the warrior, but I still have no clue what's going on other than that I'm rolling a dice and getting some random results.  It says to find a weapon, but .. I can't even seem to get to the village to buy one. D:

Reading the interface shows all of the stats you need. If you did the first level, it should have given you a tutorial. Basically - roll the dice, move, draw a card. Repeat. Unless there's combat.

Udderdude, you have to click the blue arrow at the top right to start the game. Once you choose a character, and a map, that is. The default are the warrior and the first one.

Man, I totally missed that tiny post about alpha testing. I sent in an email in case it's not too late.

Okay, we're set for January. We've gotten over a dozen requests. If anyone would like to contact me anyways, I can still put you in February, March, etc.

Just saw the post in the topic about PyGame's relevance. It's a little different, but the overarching idea kind of reminds me a bit of King of Dragon Pass, and that idea makes me more than a bit excited to see what the game actually plays like.

Man, I am really liking the retro look of this.

Man, I forgot to comment on this. Watching the map generator at work is pretty cool, and the gameplay looks interesting.

It's kinda hard to tell. 20% ? 
We're working very iterative on it currently, so the game still changes a lot.
We have a playable prototype which is not yet ready for public testing, but we're pretty happy already with the core gameplay. From a pure feature perspective we almost have everything in what we want.

Awesome. I'll be watching for when that is ready.

Could you elaborate a little on the differences between the characters, other than staples of each character, like Nikola Tesla having a Tesla cannon? Or would you rather wait on that?

This looks pretty cool. I like the mix of settings. How far along is it so far?

Here are some situations I thought the filters did something interesting, like shape out a face or building. They're really just for novelty, or if the game is in 4x (pixels stretched out 4 times) some people may find the smoothing effect more welcome

Okay, the portraits do look really nice. The text gets a bit hard to read and thin in places, though.

I didn't show it in that particular video, but all enemies' and bosses' stats/abilities are viewable by toggling a data mode during combat. I realized this might slow the pace of action, and although I wanted all the data to be available to the player, looking at their abilities mid-combat should be a last resort. Therefore all the townspeople, and occasionally mid-combat events, should hand the players the info they need to win in a more pace-friendly way. For players who want to head straight into battle and try their luck, most of these things are also skippable

Ahhh, I gotcha. Yeah, that sounds really good. I can think of a few examples of games that did the hints thing through townspeople and it was pretty interesting, what with the gossip being both relevant and useful.

The data mode looks really helpful, but it does look a bit like it slows down combat. Despite that, it is a necessary option, and people that don't want to use it don't have to.

Due to the difficulty and puzzle-like nature of each battle, I found it appropriate to allow players to try again from the start if they die- even on a boss. I think giving up should warrant a save file load, as the player will be unable to progress without defeating each encounter

I wondered if that was what you meant. That's really useful. Just the whole act of reloading a save and restarting the fight through the whole interaction that brought the fight up always felt a bit...I can't find the right word, just something with a negative connotation.

They are off by default, but in some scenes I think they produce interesting effects.

Can I get an example of one such scene, per chance?

Sorry, I had cropped most of that combat for the video.

Ahhh, gotcha. Yeah, given the enemies don't have health bars, per most old RPGs, it was a bit hard to tell.

Encounters will go anywhere from 2 to 7 minutes per attempt, depending on the difficulty. Most of the time, defeating the enemies in a single attempt would be a major accomplishment

I'm assuming that means I'll be reloading saves a lot?

[VIDEO]

World map graphics, options screen added

VIDEO (sfx but no music) www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpBps-BCv-c

Looking great!

I don't really like the filters, personally. I really like the retro look, and it kind of takes away from that.

However, I really like the choices in color palette, seeing them all in quick succession like that.

Oh, and those battles looked a little quick?

Downloaded. I'm so trying this out later tonight. Probably the most interesting version of Pong I've seen in a while.

Each flag is a different level with new enemy selections and environmental differences. I propose that the first time you enter each level, it has a preset sequence of enemies/events. Only when you complete this sequence do you unlock the version of that level with randomly-spawned enemies, and only then do you unlock the way forward. This way, I can introduce enemies as I please and provide a reliable way to fight bosses.
However, I also want players to be able to re-play these preset sequences whenever they like. I could simply create a new offshoot level next to the normal one on the map or let players select between random and preset when they choose a level, but that seems contrived and might confuse players. Instead, I think I'll actually have little enemy sprites occupying the flag locations on the map to signify the preset sequence. When you complete the sequence, the game would cut to the map and show the little enemy sprites walk away a little bit as the flag appears on you. This way, you could move to the enemies and complete the sequence again, or go to the flag and fight the random selection of enemies. This also makes it clear that you can't progress while the enemies are blocking the flag.

I could even keep track of best completion times or suchlike for the preset sequences

Any thoughts?

Yes. Do it. I don't think there's a better way to introduce the enemies in a more "fair" manner than that.

I know when I played the demo a while ago, there were a few issues I had with some of the enemies, and it took a while longer than I'd hoped to get used to them due to them repeatedly stomping me. The chaingun guys come to mind, and on a lesser scale, the indians with the bows/arrows caused me a bit of trouble initially due to not expecting the arced movement of the arrows.

EDIT: To reiterate that, the dynamic between certain enemies requires a certain amount of experience dealing with said enemies in different situations to handle them together.

The next big design question I'll probably mull over is whether to do any sort of difficulty scaling based on the number of players

That is a harder question to answer. The best thing that I can think to do is to release the beta, see how everyone reacts as a whole, and then make a decision based off of feedback. May turn out the base game is too hard for the average player alone, or that specific levels are too hard for multiple players, or something else.

I'm currently taking requests from anyone who's working on a game and wants it reviewed or previewed to be put in the January issue of indie(Magazine);, which is run by indie(Function);.

Normally, I'd reach out to developers myself, but I'm interested in reaching projects that I may not have reached otherwise, so I'm reaching out in a different manner.

If you're interested, go here: http://indiefunction.com/contact

That sucks. I had to reformat the last computer I had, and that's when I upgraded to Win7. Took a virus to make me want to go through the crap that new Windows releases come with.

Anyways, awesome! About how much content is there so far? Granted, I could probably do a few runs with a few people using different classes this weekend.

Some devs are positive about the idea, others less so. Would love to hear your thoughts.

I'm of the opinion that while machine-made products can be decent, or even good, they can never be great. The humanity of it just doesn't exist. It's all numbers, after all.

It's like the fact that a robot can play a guitar, but that robot will never sound as good as, say, Santana, because a robot can't be soulful.

The overarching ideas will be the same, but the little tiny details, the ones that make the whole experience that much more believable and humanized, will never be there.

That being said, it is interesting to see a computer design platformers, and I am looking forward to the end result.

This game is just awesome. It works out perfectly. I really haven't played a competitive board game as easy to learn and fine-tuned since Chess.

I can just tell by the screenshot that the shop looks really uninformative.

I'll give it a shot later, though.

Oh man, I signed up to test this and then forgot to check the email I gave you for a while.

Sorry about that. I never saw it on Google Drive, by the way. :/

I'll give the demo a shot and give you feedback since I botched that one up.