Hello everyone!
First off, the prototype game of Dungeons of Daggerhelm went far better than we anticipated. 18 downloads in three days! Wow!
We're excited that the game got some exposure because of this. The only issue is that the prototype returned a lot of bugs and problems that made the game incredibly hard to play. We're going to list them now and perhaps you might agree with some of them:
Enemies shoot too fast!
We know, we know. Unfortunately for the first players who downloaded the game, an issue arose where the enemies had the same fire rate as the player. This issue was a known factor in the game but we did not fully determine whether it would be difficult for players to successfully kill the enemies. What did we do about it? In the code, we nerfed enemy fire rate to around once every 2 seconds, instead of 4 times every second (ish). We also buffed the enemy's range so that they will shoot from farther away, making them more difficult to target. The player's fire rate was also buffed slightly. A give and take of difficulty.
I killed an NPC by accident! -sadface-
This was a bug we didn't exactly catch until a tester noted that "while I was clicking on Holly the potion vendor to talk to her, she died." This was something that was hidden in the code somewhere, and we eventually rooted it out. What did we do about it? Instead of making NPCs... well... not die, we instead increased their health by 1000% to around 1000 life. They take more hits to kill, so don't fool around anymore, people!
I reached a blue ocean-thing and now I'm lost.
This was a known issue. The map did not cut players off from viewing what we call "void tiles" which are non-graphic tiles of a specific color that make up the rest of the map you can't see.... well, aren't supposed to see. What did we do about it? We hand-drew walls around the entire map that the player should be able to access, and determined bounds for where the player could walk. This contains both the player and the enemies so they don't go wandering off in the unrendered wilderness.
I hate waiting for this textbox to end. I want to play the game!
Well, we couldn't outright remove the textbox, but the speed at which the text scrolls was, indeed, a minor problem. We just wanted you players to get the necessary info, y'know? What did we do about it? Fortunately, our programmer included a method that increases the scroll speed of the text, so if you're reading it for the second time, it goes by about 3x as fast now.
This map is monotonous. There's nothing to see!
This "issue" was known the whole time. Yes, the map looks dull with just walls and grass and rocks. What did we do about it? The sprite designer fixed the flower tiles we had before, and made them look like a part of the level. Now the map sports some nice flora everywhere! There's even a grove of flowers near the bottom-right of the map!
All of the changes we've made are in the new prototype file located in the same place you found the first one. just re-download it for the newest update, fixing 99% of these issues.
http://www.indiedb.com/games/dungeons-of-daggerhelm/downloads/dungeons-of-daggerhelm-prototype
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