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[lowpoly]

Congrats on finishing, looking forward to playing it! 

[Windybeard]

Congratulations, amazing game, ill have to buy this one real soon. 

[Chris Pavia]

Can't wait to try this when I get home from work!

[Oddball]

Thanks to whoever stickied this thread, I appreciate it. The response so far has been generally positive. I've been dreading someone finding a show stopping bug that somehow got past all the testing. So far it hasn't happened.

Please buy it multiple times.  I want to continue making music for this man's games.

Yes, buy multiple copies each so I can work with KomradeJack again.

[eobet]

Bought, and it will be interesting to see if the issues I had with the UI has been reworked...

Pretty much liveblogging my first impressions:

* Soundtrack caught me off guard... I was expecting chip music from the look of the game...
* Accidentally pressed shift which revealed keyboard shortcuts... very nice.
* Argh, first UI issue within 2 seconds: Point mouse cursor at door, can't activate... again, the reason is that I need to point at the bottom half of the door since it's (very) pseudo 3D... not good and closed doors should be an exception, imo. EDIT: Ok, I see the problem when the floor behind the door is visible, but how often do you want to move to the square behind the door without opening it next? I mean, the constant tool-tips would warm about what would happen anyway... but perhaps a better solution would be to have a special case for doors which don't have the room visible behind them yet. I mean, there is no such problem with doors which are drawn from the side, so it's still a case of inconsistent UI behavior.
* All monsters seem to hover up and down... I get that it's an easy way of making them pop, but this is a rogue-like of sorts... makes me wonder how an actual levitation animation looks?
* HP is just a number... it looks like there should be room for a small life bar to the right of it, which I think wouldn't be out of place in this UI, and would increase accessibility and readability. EDIT: Ok, after playing I while I get why there is no bar... however, there could be one, if you calculate percentages from where the last "maximum" HP was 100%... still think that could work.
* The sound effect of an opening door suddenly played and a room became visible... if I would have had sound off, this would have been confusing as there is no flavor text for it (ie. "monsters breaking down the door" or something).
* I'm really missing a 3x size of the window... the step between 2x and fullscreen is way to large.
* The space bar seemingly does nothing? I would have expected it to at least to a "skip go" action (which is what I would have liked).
* Ok, major UI gripe still present: An item drops. I hover the cursor over the item, it just says "move". I click on it to move, and A) my cursor is no longer hovering above the item, which means that the tooltip is gone and worse B) without moving my cursor even the item is gone! Major, major UI break, imo. Also, very costly if you do a keystroke analysis on the action sequence you need to perform in order to just move and pick up an item. This hasn't been fixed and I'm very disappointed. I mean, it's so easily solvable by adding a move-and-pick-up command.
* Fullscreen is not OS X Lion mission control compatible.
* Also, fullscreen isn't really fullscreen as there are huge, blue borders (at least in OS X). Imo, you really should scale up the graphics by any means in order to full the entire screen in fullscreen mode, or just skip that mode entirely.

EDIT: I'm still updating, but in case people are wondering why I'm nitpicking on the UI... that's part of my professional job, AND this is after all a rogue-like which is designed to have the ease of access UI as one of its strongest selling points...


OK, that's it for today. I had fun, and there seems to be more scenarios, and I bet more monsters and items and other variations to provide lasting value, but nearly no improvement in UI since the earlier demos which is a hurdle, I think.

Also, I had to stop because my eyes hurt from squinting so much. 3x, 4x scaler and fullscreen scaler is simply a must, and again, the game should be intelligent about it (if, for example, 4x scaler doesn't fit the current resolution).

[Oddball]

* I'm really missing a 3x size of the window... the step between 2x and fullscreen is way to large.

If 3x would fit on your desktop then you would get a 3x before fullscreen. On my set up I get all the way up to 5x before it goes fullscreen.

* The space bar seemingly does nothing? I would have expected it to at least to a "skip go" action (which is what I would have liked).

Spacebar is accept. The period is skip go because that is apparently the roguelike standard.

* Ok, major UI gripe still present: An item drops. I hover the cursor over the item, it just says "move". I click on it to move, and A) my cursor is no longer hovering above the item, which means that the tooltip is gone and worse B) without moving my cursor even the item is gone! Major, major UI break, imo. Also, very costly if you do a keystroke analysis on the action sequence you need to perform in order to just move and pick up an item. This hasn't been fixed and I'm very disappointed.  I mean, it's so easily solvable by adding a move-and-pick-up command.

I don't really understand the issue you are getting at here.

[eobet]

* I'm really missing a 3x size of the window... the step between 2x and fullscreen is way to large.

If 3x would fit on your desktop then you would get a 3x before fullscreen. On my set up I get all the way up to 5x before it goes fullscreen.

Then this is not calculated correctly in OS X, because as I noted in another point I made, my fullscreen mode has at least 30% of the screen covered in blue borders, so there should be no problem for a 3x mode in a window on my display.

* Ok, major UI gripe still present: An item drops. I hover the cursor over the item, it just says "move". I click on it to move, and A) my cursor is no longer hovering above the item, which means that the tooltip is gone and worse B) without moving my cursor even the item is gone! Major, major UI break, imo. Also, very costly if you do a keystroke analysis on the action sequence you need to perform in order to just move and pick up an item. This hasn't been fixed and I'm very disappointed.  I mean, it's so easily solvable by adding a move-and-pick-up command.

I don't really understand the issue you are getting at here.

Here's a quick keystroke analysis for your current UI:
1. Move cursor to item.
2. Click on item. (This causes the character to move on top of the item, and the item to disappear... which I think is bad for a first time user experience).
3. Move cursor to player. (Again, you previously aimed for an object, which then seemingly disappeared and now you have to reposition the cursor and aim again for a different object, yet your goal is the same... you are chasing the original object from your first action... again a bad experience to have the user chase after something he already clicked to get).
4. Move cursor to object. (Still chasing after what we want...)
5. Click on item. *phew*

All this could have been solved by a move-to-pick-up command... 1, 2 and with no interruptions, done.

[todd]

I played the demo awhile back and really enjoyed it. Just bought it! Congrats on finishing the game Oddball. To your future projects 

[Oddball]

All this could have been solved by a move-to-pick-up command... 1, 2 and with no interruptions, done.

Your solution doesn't make sense to me. How do I add in a move-to-pick-up command without adding in extra steps? What happens if someone just wants to move to a space and not pick up the item. I'd be removing some UI steps just to add in others. At the moment it's only two clicks to perform two distinct actions. Click to move, click to pick up. I do agree that items seeming to vanish when you step on them is an issue, and I did try various solutions, but non worked well enough.

[Helmeted]

Congratz on the release Oddball! I haven't had much chance to play with it yet (just one quick death) I'll be looking forward to getting into it all day at work.

[Del_Duio]

All this could have been solved by a move-to-pick-up command... 1, 2 and with no interruptions, done.

Your solution doesn't make sense to me. How do I add in a move-to-pick-up command without adding in extra steps? What happens if someone just wants to move to a space and not pick up the item. I'd be removing some UI steps just to add in others. At the moment it's only two clicks to perform two distinct actions. Click to move, click to pick up. I do agree that items seeming to vanish when you step on them is an issue, and I did try various solutions, but non worked well enough.

I haven't played this game yet, but what about if you hovered over an item on the floor and a little pop up came up and said "left click to move here OR right click to pick up item"?

[Oddball]

The game is played entirely with one mouse button, I dev on a Mac, so to have only one action require the use of the right mouse button would be a bit odd. Move-to-pick-up action would be easy to add for stacked items, the issue is mainly with lone items on a space. I considered having single items still pop up in a stack same as multiple items, but it looked odd and unnecessary above an empty space. It was one of those dev choices where it may not be perfect, but of the methods I tried it seemed the best. I could maybe have got it to work eventually but sometimes you've got to go with what you've got.

[Oddball]

Sorry to double post but... Rock, Paper, Shotgun review

[Del_Duio]

The game is played entirely with one mouse button, I dev on a Mac, so to have only one action require the use of the right mouse button would be a bit odd. Move-to-pick-up action would be easy to add for stacked items, the issue is mainly with lone items on a space. I considered having single items still pop up in a stack same as multiple items, but it looked odd and unnecessary above an empty space. It was one of those dev choices where it may not be perfect, but of the methods I tried it seemed the best. I could maybe have got it to work eventually but sometimes you've got to go with what you've got.

Ah! Okay well how's about having an option someplace the player could activate like "Pick up items on move"? If they had that unchecked then it'd play like it does now. If it was checked it would add the item to your inventory if you had enough room.

Regardless, good job on finishing this game. I will give it a try when I'm able to.

[caiys]

I've had my eye on this for ages, really glad to see it's finished now Oddball.