I have purchased the game, played it through, and created a level using the editor.
I read through this forum and had a few quick ideas:
Thank you for the great feedback.
Tilesets: River tilesets would be awesome, including tilesets for bridges to cross them. I think rivers would open up more exploration-like atmosphere.
I'd like to have some river tiles, I agree. I had planned them originally but haven't gotten around to making them. There are some lava tiles and bridges planned as well.
enemy AI: ranged units choose weakest party member OR highest threat party member to attack , and will group attack that party member if it will lead to a faster kill...conversely, if this is not possible, then shoot and hide. similarly, melee units will attack the weakest party member if leads to a kill, and will attack to kill or attack and run dependent on what will lead to the least amount of return damage. NOTE: since an enemy running away often will require that party members use up alloted action points to catch up, sometimes this will be a benefit to the enemy if the party member in question will have a less number of attacks available. enemies should also take advantage of skill specific attacks like backstab, which might mean blinking behind you like the thief does... Also, enemies may wish to consider spacing themselves out in order to better defend themselves as a group (avoid explosive shots, etc.)
All of the different enemies have different behaviours. Ranged enemy AI such as the goblin archers walk until you are in line-of-sight, take a shot and then run in the opposite direction from you to hide. Bats similarly "hit and run".
More powerful enemies will probably have some spell-like skills. The witches have an AP-reducing attack, and the lich kings can spawn skeletons (though they are not in the most recent build).
AI which "considers" the possible moves by the player and attempts to spread out to avoid explosive shots, etc. probably is not possible and I doubt that the player would notice this level of AI anyway (it would probably just look like random movement).
Ranged Attacks: Allow for shooting through enemies, but at a penalty to your to hit. After all, an arrow is fairly slim and can fit through tight spaces. This would allow for attempts at lobbing explosive shots into enemy groups.
Not a bad idea but it might have a couple of problems. A good way to do it might be increased miss chance if you aim at an enemy who is blocked by another enemy. However this breaks the tactical element of positioning your own player characters to have the tank (Knight) infront to take damage. Some kind of "lobbing" attack like a bomb is a good idea which could go over enemies. I'll look into something like that.
Critical Hits: Lots of blood on gibs, sure, but tons of blood on critical hits, and if there are bleeding units over time, then show that as well.
There might be more status effects like bleeding, burning, poisoned, etc. in the final build. More blood? Sure.
Lighting: I like the underground darkness. ... Makes torches contrast well and the atmosphere really is more spooky in the videos I see where there is darkness. A dark tunnel that had no torches which was lit up as a fireball hurled along the walls...that would be awesome.
Good to hear you like the lighting effect. The fireball originally had lighting but I haven't put it back on... I don't think.
Level Editor: Needs more assets like tilesets (like rivers) and monsters (the more the better). Also, in order to adequately allow for user generated content, we must have a knowledge base of the appropriate skill levels and assets of the player characters, etc., Could a script be implemented as a graphical interface element which allowed to create general monster pathfinding routines, like guarding between points A to B, and so forth? Also, is it possible to assign monsters a combat stance, like Aggressive or Passive? Is it possible to assign the monsters the command to attack players on sight as opposed to the opening of a door? That way monsters lurking in the back somewhere might not expose themselves too early, or might fall to a disadvantage as they could be taken by surprise, as it were. I think it has been mentioned, but the tile for a dungeon entrance is not properly encoded or simply will not work for me.
I don't think you'll be able to know what skills, etc the players will have unless I made some kind of skill-restrictions for the levels. The heroes' core skills (the ones they start with) affect the world/traps. No future skills will do that... to the same extent at least... I don't think. I'll have to ponder on that.
As I mentioned before, enemy AI is tied to the type of enemy, so there isn't an agressive or Passive stance. For aggressive enemy AI, choose aggressive enemies like Orcs who attack until they're dead.
Additional pathfinding/AI routines/waypoints are not planned to be added. Though perhaps some type of "location" element might be, and the AI could be instructed to pathfind towards X/Y position.
I agree that there needs to be another way for enemies to appear when doors open. It's more exciting if enemies can appear behind the player or unexpectedly. This can be done with triggers at the moment, but there needs to be more options.
Entrance tiles are bugged in this version. Fixed in future versions.
Traps: Traps like poison darts spitting from walls would be nice. Also, traps ought to be able to be invisible, so that a player might simply walk over one and WHAM! spikes, darts, smashing walls, etc. To counter this, the thief might have detect traps as a skill, which would enhance the RPG-tension. I suppose the elf could have a skill for detect secret doors, if a special secret door entity could be created. Disarm traps, too for the thief, which would ramp up his specialty. Infrared for the elf for those really dark places... these are skills which seem to me to be essential in dungeon crawling goodness.
I have some new ideas for traps that I want to implement soon. Complete tile-blocking blocks that go up and down will be implemented, as well as triggers that must be stayed on to keep them active (think spikes that only stay down when a player is standing on a button and go up again when you stand off = teamwork/synergy).
Some kind of wall trap like darts is planned as well.
Disarming traps is a neat idea.
Pets:
Pets are versatile, that could be interesting, too.
Cool idea but probably won't be implemented in version 1.0. There isn't really support for them in the current engine, though there is support for more than 4 playable characters at once.
Wizard: Mind control? To take over a monster for a few turns so that you can turn it against its own...
Not a bad idea, but code-wise a little difficult... actually maybe not. I'll think about this, it sounds pretty bad-ass and would be a lot of fun.
I also like the idea of not being able to see the dungeon walls that you have not explored yet. There is so much more atmospheric goodness in not knowing what you are about to come up against, but when you can clearly see the walls that you have not yet explored, some of that magic and mystery is taken away...
Might be worth exploring, you're right, it does sound fun. If I do implement a random dungeon generation mode in future builds then I'd definitely implement this.
Have you thought about allowing player characters to actually hold torches?
No I haven't, and I probably won't implement that. It wouldn't really work art-wise. The players and enemies have ambient light on them at all times.
PS: Love the game! Thanks for making it!
Thank you for the extremely detailed feedback and I'm glad you are enjoying it so far
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