Better than running the dedicated server yourself: work on a dedicated server client so that anyone who wants to help can just run it on their amazing machines. But like you said, its a completely different thing to look into.

This is from aaaages ago, but I thought I should reply:  This is what I meant, yes.  Not dedicated servers run by the dev, but just something that anyone can use to set up a dedicated server, rather than having to use the game's client and play in the match themselves (I believe it even closes it after each match, so it's currently impossible for anyone to just devote their machine to acting as a server.)

 think the game has a large enough fanbase that at least one or two people would run this if it were available, and there are some big gaming groups that might turn their attention to Masjin and do it if they could.

I actually have the file I need.  The problem is that it's awkward to send it to someone myself and say "oh, yeah, I didn't make this but it's under a license you can use, totally" -- I was hoping there was one official-looking source I could direct people to so they could use Assemblee resources in their games.  Oh well, that's close enough, I guess.

Is there any one place I can direct someone to go over all of the music, sounds, etc from the Assemblee competition?  I was going to recommend a particular song from it to a freeware game developer, when I realized that the old site for all the Assemblee resources was down...  and then when I tracked down the thread that the mp3 I was thinking of was in, the downloads from that had long since vanished, too.

It'd be a shame to lose that big treasure-trove of resources...  is there any place I can point someone to?  Are they still online anywhere?

...although, I meant to add, the main thing the game needs is dedicated servers.

Currently, you can use the enemy computers at their base.  This can be cool sometimes, but it also means that if you get into the enemy base while your team has a decent pile of resources and the enemy is distracted, you can rapidly build a bunch of turrets around their computers, making it very tough for them to deploy...  is that intentional?

Also, the scientists seem a bit underpowered to me.  Healing is useful, sure, but all of the other classes have a much, much more dramatic impact on the game, and tend to allow strategies that wouldn't otherwise be available.  It seems to get used a lot less than the other classes, too.

Nitpick - why do I always have to manually pick up a weapon before striking?  I see that other people also commented on this already. Maybe I missed it somewhere in the tutorials. I haven't really paid as much attention to them as I probably should have.

You don't.  Right-clicking an enemy with no weapon selected will automatically use the first ready weapon in your inventory on them, starting from the left.

I was the one who suggested that back after playing the first demo, that's how I know.   

I get an 'application cannot intialize error' when I attempted to run it.

XP 64, running an Nvidia 9800 GTX.  AMD Phenon II quad core.  4 gigs of ram.  It doesn't seem to load anything, as soon as I hit the exe the MessageBox with the error pops up.

I get the same error.  I also have XP 64, a quad core, and 4 gigs of RAM.  Happens with both fullscreen and windowed versions and with both the optimized and non-optimized .exes.

Error is always the same:  "The application has failed to initialize properly (0xc0150002).  Clock on OK to terminate the application."

And I was able to run that early demo, too.

Updated the first post with a link to new executables that fix a menu bug and some performance problems on low end machines.

Also I intend to resume development on this game soon (maybe next week). The final version should include 16 levels, some kind of save system, new dungeon features, puzzles, more visual effects for the different types of weapons and also for ranged attacks.

Hmm, since a lot of the fun of the game seems to be collecting new and interesting varieties of weapons (at least from what I recall of the demo)...

It'd be neat to have multi-target attacks (which hit every enemy on the screen, or maybe even ranged multi-target attacks that hit every enemy on the next few spaces in front of you.)  And perhaps status inflicting attacks, like poison or sleep or stunning or draining attacks or whatever.

...well, those are all kind of generic suggestions, I guess.  But it's hard to resist.

Hrm.

As eager as I am to see item pickups and other things that keep the game interesting and replayable as it goes on, 'monsters attacking back' probably needs to be done first, so you have at least the basic gameplay together.

I don't know how much you intend to base it on Puzzle Quest (or if you're basing it on that at all, or if you ever even played puzzle quest, he he he), but since it's the most famous game of this type...

One thing I liked about Puzzle Quest, which most of the later games based on it missed, was the large number of powers, spells, and other abilities you could collect.  Not just for the fun of collecting them, but because there were many that would drastically change how you played the game, effectively turning the puzzle into something different -- some strategies were based around collecting all of a specific color; others were based around setting up a huge combo or an instant-win condition; sometimes you'd have to focus on keeping particular colors away from your opponent, etc.  Powers that collect an entire row or column or square at once would encourage you to set up combos or attacks that you couldn't exploit before you had them.

Of course, I imagine that this is a much simpler game than that, so you probably haven't focused on those things.  But if you're going to cross a puzzle with an RPG, one thing you might want to consider including is some kind of collectible set of simple special powers or whatever that can change the rules of the puzzle as you collect or mix-and-match them.

The download link doesn't seem to be working for me; it takes me to the filedropper main page.

Beat it.  I didn't even know I was fighting the final boss (actually, I killed him in one hit, I think) until the end screen popped up.  Fun game, though!

Some thoughts:

Is there any way to see what skills you've learned?  Or to review what your currently-held misc. items do?  If you're going to do any more work on the game, those two things would be nice.

Also, if you learn the same skill multiple times on level up, does its benefit stack?  Why is there a +5% damage skill and a +4% damage skill?

Fun!  I didn't die when I was reduced to 0 hp, though (even though monsters kept damaging me, it stayed at 0.)  Is this a feature of the beta for bugtesting, or is it a bug?

Also, I ran out of weapons for a while.  Luckily I was able to find the Ice Axe and Fire Sword, but should the player perhaps have some way to attack even without a weapon?  Of course, perhaps dying when you run out of weapons is part of the game...

1) Had what I thought was a really good idea for a gameplay mechanic that would induce exploration. Basically, there would be nine runes that exist in the world. Each one would impart a tremendous power on the bearer of the rune. After a period of time (an hour? two?), the rune would leave its bearer and teleport itself to a random part of the world (perhaps with a hint as to its new location?) So there would be some incentive to look around the world to try to find one of the runes to use for whatever ends you may desire. There may be interesting ideas somewhere in combining the runes, and perhaps a kind of ascension can occur if you are able to get all 9 runes at once.

The problem with this as you've described it is that it doesn't scale with the number of players.  When you have too many people, it's almost impossible to get a rune.  When you have very few, it's much easier.

Also, most people stick to MMOs because of the sense of achievement.  Temporary powers that go away after a while will get old quickly.  Of course, you may not care about that, if you only want it to be a game people play for a while and then 'beat' rather than a (he-he-he) life-consuming monster like most of them aim to be.

At the very least, it'd be good if future versions of the comp asked all submitters to select a license, so future people coming through and looking at these things know how they can use them.

If you don't want to require one license, there could be a list of a few 'suggested' licenses to encourage consistent licensing (because, of course, it's a huge bother to use a bunch of different things that are under different licenses...  but public domain, free use with attribution, noncommercial-with-attribution, and competition-only categories would be useful.)

My understanding of the way things are now is that nothing submitted can be used without the creator's permission unless they've stated otherwise (though of course we can assume they've given permission for them to be used in the competition by submitting them to it.)  It'd be nice to use these comps to encourage the creation of a database of free resources to encourage future game development even after the comp is over.

Suggestion:  It would be nice to be able to select a 'default' item, so you can just keep clicking without having to hit buttons or drag between each attack.  Maybe right-click on an object to make it the default, then right-click to use your default item on the target...  unless you're planning to use right-clicks for something else, of course.

Alternatively, hold a key and click to select your default item, and clicking on a monster with no item selected uses your default.  Something like that.

EDIT:  Ooo, I have a better idea!  Make it so if you right-click on an enemy (or if you click with nothing selected, if you want to use right-click for something else) it uses the first available item in your inventory, starting from the left -- that is, the first one that isn't recharging, of course.  This way, you can arrange your inventory to form a 'default combo' of attacks.