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[Destral]

Wow, been playing the demo since my last post, and it's super engaging. Really enjoying the ability to recruit/equip/customise all the heroes, the fact that the protagonist has abilities of her own, and the story's catchy. Looks like a really solid game so far.

Minor quibble: the music when you are defeated... sounds a lot like the game over music in FFVI, maybe? Or some other 16-bit RPG, at least. There was also a small typo somewhere in one of the first few story sequences.

All in all, I'm convinced that I want to pay money for this

[larsiusprime]

Thanks, Destral! Just to give you an idea, the final game includes 6 spells, 6 character classes, and 5 more acts of delicious story and tasty challenges, including some super awesome boss fights.

If I can convince the rest of the team, I want to go for some kind of pay-what-you-want promotion, but if not, about how much would you say this experience is worth to you?

[larsiusprime]

Just updated the demo file to version 0.5.0.2!

If you still see version 0.5.0.1 in the corner, try clearing your browser cache.
Check it out!

Fixes:
-The first time a ranger dies, you should get a dialogue pop-up, instead of a crash
-Fixed a few memory leaks in the flixel library
-Optimized file size (downloads faster)
-Optimized game speed a little
-Fixed various other tiny bugs here and there

Your old save files should still work. If they don't for any reason, please let me know!

[Destral]

How many levels are there? From the difficulty of the 2 and 3 star battles of the first levels, it looks like it'll have a fair amount of replayability, but does it have any challenge modes or an endless mode once you're done with the main story?

I'd say anywhere up to $20, from what I've seen so far, although I'm an indie like you and I appreciate that everyone's gotta eat, so $20 might be stretching it for the average gamer. $10 is a nice round figure that I doubt people would balk at for a solid, deep game like this.

[larsiusprime]

We've been thinking of putting in some extra challenges after you've beaten the main game, but none of that's in the full-version build yet. If that's a big selling point, then we'll definitely put it in.

As for levels - let me pull up my spreadsheet...

32 battles (for a total of 90 individual challenges, not including the tutorial battles and casual mode challenges)
8 of those battles are boss/mini-boss battles (24 boss/mini-boss challenges)
There's 9 towns.

[Destral]

Replayability is always a great value-adder. An 'Endless' challenge mode is usually a good addition to a TD game (for a good example, check out Army of Darkness Defense on the iPad, it's free and you can likely unlock the endless mode in a couple evenings of play).

[larsiusprime]

Great suggestions! I think I could pretty easily add some "endless" challenges that are unlocked after you beat the game - perhaps one for beating the game on each challenge mode?

That way, the player could really squeeze every drop out of the gameplay mechanics. Theoretically you can have up to 36 defenders (not including the "mcguffin") on the field at once, and boosting them all the way up to boost level 5 each ... that'd require being at like, level 80 or something. It'd be interesting to see a challenge that takes you all the way there and beyond.

[Destral]

Exactly. That way players of each skill level have an endless challenge that suits their skill, and less hardcore players can gradually ease themselves into the higher difficulties and have a reason to.

[larsiusprime]

Hey guys! Just added a windows installer torrent file

http://www.defendersquest.com/play_demo.html

Mac and Linux versions will follow in the next week. The installable version has some extra video features, such as fullscreen, resolution changing, etc, so you can play the game the way it was meant to be experienced

[Destral]

Getting

Something I thought I noticed, but I just confirmed: I don't see a place anywhere on the party menu, or the map screen, that shows you how much scrap you have. In fact, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems the only place to see how much scrap you have is in town, when buying/hiring. Any chance you might put that in somewhere?

[larsiusprime]

That is a super correct observation. That was on my list of to-dos once, but I totally forgot about it.

The party screen itself is jam-packed with information, so I'm not sure I can think of a natural place for it to go there. Probably the best other place would be in the blank space on the bottom bar on the overworld screen?

Got any ideas?

ALSO: I've tested the windows build without getting any super horrible bugs, but that doesn't mean you won't experience any! Let me know if you get yourself into any kind of trouble. In the rare case that you should get an illegal resolution problem you can't fix, you can manually edit the config file in:

C:\Users\YourUserName\AppData\Roaming\DefendersQuestDemo\Local Store\config.xml

I would have stuck that file in the program's install directory, but file write permissions won't let me. I'll probably distribute the final version of the game with a simple "edit the config file" app that DOES live in the local directory.

[Destral]

That's what I was thinking, the bottom bar next to the Audio button.

Just got to the end of the demo, and I'm really stoked to play the full version. It's really cool that you have the option to export your save file from the demo. I'm half tempted to keep playing to get a full set of class3 characters up to the same level as the rest of my guys.

I didn't come across any game-exploding bugs so far. I did notice that the game over music in the windows version is not the same as the one in the demo. 

[larsiusprime]

Yeah, sounds good, seems like a natural place to stick it.

The audio is different? Really? Interesting - must have been a conditional compilation flag I set wrong. What's the different audio sound like?

[Destral]

The song is different. The one in the demo sounds like this (placeholder, possibly?). In the windows version it's a different tune altogether.

[Devenger]

This is rather wonderful. I would describe it as a tower defence game with persistent characters rather than an RPG, though. I see something as an RPG if I play the role of a character in some world, often on a personal level. This is more a game about preparing for, and fighting, skirmishes on a battle map - even if it does have a (moderately intriguing) story.

One issue I found: selecting 'Movies' and the first movie of the first chapter (Opening) made the game go black and not respond to input. Frustratingly, I can't reproduce this issue (it seems to work fine now, having reloaded my game - thank you for making it autosave), and can't really make educated guesses as to the conditions that trigger it (beyond that I'd played through the entire demo and viewed every cutscene in the game so far, in that single sitting). This is in the latest stable release of Google Chrome, with the latest stable version of Flash Player.