Ok, a larger update:
Since we made this public at Greenlight, we have gotten so much press coverage, mails and other support.
Two days after,
indiegames.com picked this up, followed by
PCG-USA and then later
Rock, Paper, Shotgun, aside from all other sites that posted this I think these three have given us the biggest peaks in visitors and votes to the GL page. There have been many other sites too and there have been a lot of youtubers, bigger and smaller, mailing about test versions.
In general, comments have been mostly positive and people seems rather attracted to the gameplay, graphics and the very fact that it's "inspired by gauntlet".
I don't know how much I can write about what's going on inside the Greenlight, but in this week, we went at least from nothing into the top 100 and have been climbing since.
We started a
Q/A-thread at the GL page, where people have been asking questions, that I answer, as truthfully as possible and when possible, there's no reason why people should think this game is something it's not, or think it's less than it is.
It's really fun managing all this, but it's also an administrative burden (=takes time from actual work) and it's not gonna decrease =)
Some actual developing progress...There's still no decision what to do with the Warlock and his skills, since we removed the summoning, we need two more active skills. Summoning was removed because it was a skill that didn't require any activity from the player really, since you pretty much just called upon a spider and had it fighting for you. And you would rather waste the mana using the chainlightning.
We replaced the leapback skill for the ranger, with bombs, that works like in Zelda, you walk and drop. These are fun and they make the ranger to be like a cross between close combat and ranged, bombs costs mana, the more mana, the more bombs.
Bombs were also introduced as a hazard dropping as "loot", it's so nice, when destroying crates and boxes, suddenly a bomb drops and you have only a split second to move away, since the chance is so low, you tend to forget about it, until it happens the next time.
This bomb-thing lets us create enemies that drops bombs either as their attack or when they die, will probably create wisps for the archives theme, they shoot magic and when they die, they explode.
At the moment, the difference between 2P and 1P difficult level is to strong, when playing 1P, you feel the game is pretty easy, when coming to 2P, you kinda gets surprised how much more harder it gets, the solution is not to make it easier in 1P, but possibly, decrease the scale between 1P and 2P and instead make it harder in 1P...
GraphicsTo help the player know when getting close to dying, we introduced a exclamation mark above the head, it's slowly strobing and turns from orange to red the less health the player have. I wanted this feature, because in heated moments, especially in MP, you tend not to keep looking at your health, because when you do, you die, so getting that warning above the player really helps telling you when to back off a bit.
We created a new enemy, it's a living plant, in the "tower" category of enemies, it's static and shoots a branch out of the ground on close by players. It deals a lot of damage and you need to move all the time when around this. It's intense in MP, because it targets all players, so in MP, you better watch out so you don't get hit by the branch that targeted the player in front of you!
I did a tint version of the floor tiles on theme_a, I always felt I needed something to put on certain spots in a level, to make some areas stand out a bit more. It gives the illusion of a more dry setting instead of moist. Created some fence graphics too, theme_a is a "prison" so there really should be some bars and whatnot, gameplay-vise, ranged could shoot through these (should be able to).
Added the spawner graphics for the ticks, they work just like the graves for skeletons or the maggot spawners. These are great, because they focuses the player when he enters an area, you always wanna destroy these, unless you do that, they will spawn enemies indefinitely.
Been trying to find a boss artist, to create the The Knight (armory), The Lich (archives) and The Dragon (chambers), I just recently created the first boss, The Maggot (prison), it's a huge queen-maggot that spawns small maggots when resting and sometimes awake and then shoots a huge nova of poison around her. The only way to avoid the poison is to stand behind some pillars close by, oh, you need to raise these on a button too of course =)
I'm gonna output a video of these things soon...
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