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[kingdinosaurgames]

The gameplay looks so incredibly smooth, even in a gif - amazing job

[DeadAlienCult]

Digging this game's progress.  We have some similar game design choices it seems as well.  Looking good dude! 

[jctwood]

This is looking wonderful, watching those gifs I am never sure what is the player's projectiles and what are the enemies, will everything stay neon purple? Also what are you using to do the text in the game? I love the little squelch that happens to the names of the items you pick up!

[Kyzrati]

I was inspired by GridSages writeups on the random generation in Cogmind.

Glad I was able to inspire someone. I often see comments like "looks neat!" and all, but not a lot of "I looked at this and because of it did cooler things!" The latter is much more desirable!

Tiny Wizard is really looking good. I'm honored that we could be in the same RPS article (Which incidentally is where I learned about your game, heh.)

[kebabskal]

Hey!

There has been activity here. I wasn't aware
So, due to me not being able to make up my mind earlier this summer I didn't get far enough to start working on the greenlight stuff.

New plan: I'll post the very unfinished alpha here and hope to get some good feedback on how the game is actually playing.

Downloads UPDATED
Windows - Tiny Wizard 0.0.7a
OSX - Tiny Wizard 0.0.7a
Linux x86 + x86_64 - Tiny Wizard 0.0.7a
Note: These downloads use Google Analytics to report some usage parameters to me.

Feedback
I'd love any kind of feedback. Good or bad.
At this point I'm mostly interested in:
* Performance issues (post your computer spec with those)
* Controls and game feel: Do you use the spells? Does pew pewing feel good?
* Structure of play: Does the room structure feel good? Are shops a good idea? Do you feel you are making interesting choices on how to tackle a room, which items to purchase etc?
* Should it be harder or easier?
* What is missing?

What's new?
* Mana System: Spells and some items now cost mana to use. Slowly recharging over time, or pick up blue mana orbs.
* New Items
* Shops: You can now buy extra items if you have the money and something to blow up the walls.
* UI Improvements: Tool Tips, Prettier health and mana bars etc.
* Lots of tuning and bug fixes
* Google Analytics integration: I can track which levels most people die on. Average FPS per depth. How long level generation takes. Which spells are used etc. System specs. OS etc.
* An end boss in the last room: Needs more thought, but it's there at least. Sort of a bullet sponge at the moment.
* Bought Unity Pro (subscription): Not really using any of its features yet, but there might be some cool new effects coming out of this

What's next?
* Taking your input and making things better
* New environments: At least one outdoor environment.
* I've made some initial tests with leveling. One idea is that each level grants you an upgrade point. That can be used to unlock/upgrade a spell, or increase some stat, +damage, +shoot speed etc. Gonna see how that feels.
* Fixing the crit system. Broken now since the pink wizards starting wand only shoots crits.
* Hoping that Unity 4.6 gets released so I can start using their new GUI tools.
* Start working with sound guy.


Some new gameplay

Rad!

Thanks buddy!

Loving the updates! Keep up the awesome work!

Thanks! Will do!

The gameplay looks so incredibly smooth, even in a gif - amazing job

Glad you like it! Now play and give me some feedback on actual gameplay! :D

Digging this game's progress.  We have some similar game design choices it seems as well.  Looking good dude!  

Indeed. That Viking Ghost game looks very nice. Ambitious!

This is looking wonderful, watching those gifs I am never sure what is the player's projectiles and what are the enemies, will everything stay neon purple? Also what are you using to do the text in the game? I love the little squelch that happens to the names of the items you pick up!

Thanks!
Yeah, I think it's a bit easier to distinguish when you are playing. I have also slowed down the enemies projectiles a bit in the later builds. Feels decent I think but a simple color change might make it way more apparent. I'll give it a go.
For text I use Unity's 3D text and animate it using the animator.

I was inspired by GridSages writeups on the random generation in Cogmind.

Glad I was able to inspire someone. I often see comments like "looks neat!" and all, but not a lot of "I looked at this and because of it did cooler things!" The latter is much more desirable!

Tiny Wizard is really looking good. I'm honored that we could be in the same RPS article (Which incidentally is where I learned about your game, heh.)

Yes, I hope someone is inspired by me as well
Found you through both RPS and later google. Keep posting. I'm loving it!

[Skoggy]

Some notes...



Specs:
AMD FX(tm)-6350 Six-Core Processor, 3.9Ghz
AMD Radeon R7 200 Series
8gb RAM
Windows 8 64bit

Ran at 1280x720 - fullscreen

Arcane Rain - Very laggy sometimes, and I'm running on a quite high end PC
Can walk through wall outside of map, or rather the wall exploded so there was a gap.
Screen shake - Effectful but annyoingly often, I actually got nauseous
You can keep firing when you're dead
Obviously lots of missing sound fx?

Gameplay:

Overall feel is good. I feel like I'm in control.
Did not use spells so much, how do I see if they are available?
How do I get more bombs? Seems some walls only get destroyed by them?
More stuff! Like wands and such.
The rooms feel good in size/distribution of stuff.
It got way harder once bigger enemies started popping up.

[Arnold]

looks good so far, no performance issues.

what i think could be better is enemy bullet visuals, they need to be more clear.
they are almost not visible especially when the screenshake is high.
Which is the other thing, screenshake makes seeing the game hard at times,
you need to balance it more.

keep on working!

[imaginedd]

Spec - Laptop with 1.4Ghz i3 processor and 2Gb RAM.

Gameplay feel was good, I enjoyed running around and killing things although once I noticed the screenshake on every spell it bugged the hell out of me. Screen shakes on big spells would be great to emphasise their power, but not on everything.

Only ever got laggy when I ran into the middle of a room and spell showered everywhere (Spell 2), whatever that spell's called, presumably because it then had to render for so much further what was hit and how, although that's probably the best time you'd ever want to use that spell so maybe that would be worth optimising.

Found it annoying to have enemies spawn right next to me after walking into a room. Died a few times just because those self destructing enemies happened to spawn at my feet.

[bombjack]

Hi,

* Performance issues (post your computer spec with those)

As already said Arcane rain can lag a lot.

* Controls and game feel: Do you use the spells? Does pew pewing feel good?

Controls feels great excpet I have an 'azerty' keyboard.
That means that I use:

aze
qsd

in place of

qwe
asd

So when I remap the keyboard with the launcher, If have a double action for the 'q' key: it goas left and drop the item 

The pew sound is great!

* Structure of play: Does the room structure feel good? Are shops a good idea? Do you feel you are making
interesting choices on how to tackle a room, which items to purchase etc?

The room structure if good. I did't feel any specific choice on taking on a room. Just get there fire to everything.

* Should it be harder or easier?

Quite difficult to say right now. I played just once and gone till Room 6. Don't know if it's far.

* What is missing?

Maybe having randomly rooms with less monster but more difficults. Kinda small-boss.

I love the work you did until now.  You rock!

[jctwood]

Chrome seems to block the windows download link as malware 

[Kyzrati]

Chrome seems to block the windows download link as malware 

Chrome does that for downloads that contain .exe files (even zipped), just like Gmail.

[Savick]

Downloading now. Will play later.

[Kyzrati]

Pretty fun overall. Played on the highest graphic settings and didn't experience any slowdown on my laptop (though I played only in the default windowed view.

Repeating what apparently most others feel: Too much screenshake, and the enemy bullets are too difficult to see. Also, I'm not sure if it's intentional, but those white pluses traced in black that dead enemies sometimes leave behind are pretty distracting and don't seem to add anything.

The obstacles seem a bit too faint compared to all the action so it's easy to run into things in the cramped quarters, but reducing screenshake will probably help deal with that.

I had some little bats spawn in a corner shop and they wouldn't fly out--couldn't get to them and had to quit.

[jctwood]

Really fun, playing on a macbook pro retina and it looks beautiful! (tinywiz graphics setting) I had a few issues:

• when I died (frequently, I suck) the framerate would drop significantly and I would still be able to shoot.
• Some of the glowing skull tiles blocking the exit of rooms were misplaced so I could essentially skip rooms.
• The big spider dudes often jumped onto the wall areas around the levels before being slingshotted back into the level.
• The sound effects are quite jarring and would often have quiet echoes playing when they had finished. Also the lack of a coin pick up sound effect makes picking up coins way less fun, haha

But really, really wonderful! I love the simple system for dropping and swapping weapons and all of the movement feels wonderful.
[/list]

[tequibo]

been watching this game for a while, glad to give alpha a go!
few occasional hiccups mostly when lots of stuff was going on like using that spell number 2 on lots of enemies, rig: geforce gtx 760, intel i5, 8gm ram

ok, here we go:
slimes change colors when they die and that made me see them as a new object at first.
mana pickups are the same color as SOME enemy projectiles.
popup text on pick up item is too fast.
screen flash on damage is too distracting and makes it harder to see what is going on, along with screenshake
at first I couldn't figure out how to get to the shops. and I didn't understood that smiling faces are bombs. also they kind of blend with floor.
holding mouse to shoot would be nice.
spider parts with xses do look like they can be picked up at first.
need a coin sound!

I like the style very much! I just wish use of colors was more functional.

[Sam]

Hello, just played 0.07a

Performance:
Mid-range laptop: Windows 7, i5 3210M, Nvidia 630M. Steady 60 fps almost all the time.
The game freezing and kind of flickering for half a second when starting (I assume to generate the level) is not a nice feeling, especially as it happens while the player has control - put that off on a thread so the UI doesn't stutter if at all possible.

Visuals:

• Function of play items could be more clear: There are blue orbs that give you mana, there are also blue orb-like projectiles which hurt you. The pink slimes turn blue on death, which makes me think their corpse has some mechanical function. Spiders have their eye-thing roll out on death, which is cute but the eyeball again looks like it is meant to do something.
• Screenshake on firing a crit is visually tiring, especially with the default weapon's constant crits. Save those big effects for things that matter more than "you pressed fire".
• Coins flying towards the player from far away tend to zoom past very fast and then loop around, also very fast. Just have them vanish once they get anywhere near the player, I don't want to feel like I have a swarm of coins nibbling at my ears.
• There's a fine line between fast paced action and a screen of confusing mess. I think you're on the correct side of that line for now, but keep careful control over it.

Mechanics:

• I barely use the spells. The default weapon crits every time for 400 damage which one-hits almost everything. There's just no reason to spend mana on other things. The beam attack saw some use to snag enemies behind walls to get the last enemies in a room. It's an easy number-change fix to make the spells more powerful, but I think there's a more fundamental problem of having everything use mana. If everything runs off the same resource then it's hard to avoid there being an optimal use for that resource, which means either some spell or some weapon will be the one thing that's simply best to use. Diablo III handles multiple resources (including cooldowns) in a far more interesting way, their methods are worth looking at closely.
• Slow regen of mana means the most efficient way to play is simply stand still for a minute between each room to make sure you go in full. That's no fun.
• Similarly the most efficient play is to break every skull and vase in the room, which again is not fun times.
• Movement feels sluggish. Tap a key and there's a fairly significant delay until the wizard actually moves. Lots of cute tweening going on, but mostly I want to just move out the way of bullets.
• Largely the rooms felt chaotic, with too much going on for me to make much of a plan other than run around shooting and dodging. More strategy may come with practice, but with the stochastic nature of enemy movement I didn't find myself doing any herding or other higher level behaviour.
• That you can blow your way into areas by using certain enemies is fun. I guess I'm actually blowing my way into shops as the item costs money? Seems a little odd to have to pay for the reward after being clever to get access.
• Items show good promise for interesting combinations and good times. The self-teleporter is fun to use and the trail of goop boots hold potential for lots of good interactions.
• The influence of Risk of Rain is apparent, but that's fine. I'd advise giving the player more options for choice in what items they get so they can do more deliberate building of an item-set rather than just hoping for good combos.

[Neptonic]

I'm on Mac OS X 10.9.4 (Late 2012 21.5 in model), and it worked pretty well. I only tested with beautiful graphics, and I didn't seem to get any constant frame drop, only some spikes when I used some abilities. The only thing that could be changed is the color of enemy projectilies. I kept thinking the blue shots were mana, so maybe if enemy projectiles were changed to... I dunno, green? It isn't a big deal, just a personal thing.

There might of been a few generation issues (I think they're issues):




Also, bats can fly into shops, and if you don't have the money to open the shop, they can sorta camp in there until they fly out, which is annoying.

Anyway, great game, and keep up the good work!

Edit: Didn't realize you had to blow up the walls to get into shops. Whoops.

[Slogo]

I found the game very enjoyable, but I think it's critical you address the mana issue mentioned by some previous posters. It's just no fun if the optimal gameplay is to wait between each room to regenerate 100% of your mana. I'd say either refresh a player's mana to 100% between rooms, or put some other mechanic in to either disable regeneration between rooms or encourage the player to move on rather than wait around.

EDIT...

Ok beat the demo, some other thoughts.

• The stacking HP power-up gets out of control when it stacks to the point of gaining a crazy amount of HP if you get 3+ of them. Maybe some power-ups like that need diminishing returns. The run where I got 3 I felt pretty much immortal because I would gain so many hp every enemy I killed.
• I almost never find myself having to choose if I want to buy an item, the money from blowing up blocks gets you a ton of money so you can usually afford an item and the next time you come across as well
• Increase Attack speed (item and abilities) + arcane missiles stacks really well which is interesting
• Monsters spawning on top of you when entering a room is sort of frustrating
• Along with above it means that I enter every room by immediately casing the AoE spell, Haste, and arcane bolts to ensure anything around me will die and I can get some breathing room.
• Spiders feel unfair, it seems like they can still damage the player while jumping which is annoying/unexpected. On top of that jumping on you from off screen feels really hard to plan for/around.
  
• The player's spells are so loud and noisy that it makes it difficult to see and dodge incoming damage. Especially when the incoming projectiles are red/purple.

[thetate]

If you do want to keep the mana low you could simply add a timer when a room is beaten that will auto push the player to the next room. This would keep the low mana and keep players from feeling like they just have to sit and wait for the recharge.

But the best option would be add/fix the recharge rate to begin with so the player doesn't feel like they have to wait to succeed in the next room.

[nemryn]

For me, one of the key aspects of the 'procedural death dungeon' genre is that you have to shape your strategy around the items you pick up. If you get a lot of mana-regen items, then you start unloading with heavy, expensive attacks; if you find an item that increases crit chance, you start looking for stuff that gives you bonus damage or effects on a crit; that kind of thing. That's not really feasible here, though, as the only real choice you have is which two weapons to use. Outside of that, you just take everything you can get. A level system would probably go a long way towards fixing that, as would lettign shops have two or three items each.

Also, the spider and bat enemies have an annoying tendency to get stuck in shops.