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First off, I havent been this excited about a game in a very very long time, from what Ive been able to see you have been inspired by almost all of my all time favorite games, Dungeon Keeper, Dwarf Fortress principally.
Utterly amazing job and I cant wait to see how the progression goes, and if this game is moddable in its release state, I can see myself playing for years and years.
Going to jump right into the feedback, from browsing the forums briefly I can see that some of my feedback has already made it to your ears, but I am going to include it anyway, consider it a +1 on those features 🙂
-Tree Spirits: They seems to spawn very quickly, either that or I am unlucky. Designated 4 trees to be cut from the initial pause and plan, spawned a tree spirit, keeper went splat. What I would love to divide the tree spirits into 2 separate mobs. One a sprite, or maybe even a dryad that would spawn randomly from any cut tree, these would be a minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things, maybe 60-70% chance of killing an imp in single combat. The second mob, more akin to what we have now as tree spirits maybe even more powerful would only spawn after certain conditions have been met. Off the top of my head; after X dryads have been killed, or maybe Y trees have been cut in Y turns the player would get an eerie message, like “You feel the pain of nature as the wind flows through the trees.” after this happens the more powerful versions would spawn, after another X turns, the player will get a counter message “You feel the rage of nature abate” which once again turns off the 'uber' spirits and the lesser dryads will once again spawn. You could even do something cumulative and start spawning Treants with the greater spirits the greater the 'rage of nature' gets, the first time you piss of nature, its just a greater treant, the second time he shows up with a retinue of treants, could start adding various nature based mobs like druids, satyrs and the like to personify that nature itself is against our humble hero.
-Map gen options, I have no doubts this is already on your plan, but im including it anyway 🙂 Would love to see options for animal aggression and power.
-Auto-Pause, the game already pauses when your keeper enters combat, I would love to have a small list of event types that would auto pause. Non-Imp deaths, non-imp combat, imp death, imp in combat, resource X hits 0 etc.
-Only left shift seems to activate rectangle selection, would be awesome if both shifts did.
-Pathfinding priority, allow us to designate low and high priority paths, this will help increase FPS when the player uses it right and allows us a bit more control over the flow of our dungeons.
-Stackable imps/flying creatures. I like how mobs in your game dont stack, with the exception of flying creatures, I would love to see flying creatures be able to fly over other mobs and pile up on a single tile.
-Groups, would be great to have the ability to assign the leader of the group.
-Gold / Econ: I like a few other players have some fairly major issues with gold, in my first game I was deeply in debt and completely mined out before even the first attack. I know you're fully aware of this and are making some changes to econ, especially gold generation but I would like to add my idea that I believe could work very well.
Mines, they are free to build, but require a constant intake of trees to 'work'(support beams right?) the ratio of time/wood to materials produced I have no real idea on, but there would be one for each mineral type, iron, gold and stone and they cannot be built within X tiles of each other, I would say something 20 at least.
Creatures must be assigned to work in the mines manually and will never auto-work them, as many creatures can be sent into a mine as you want and the tree usage / mineral generation will scale with them, and maybe mod it by the stat of the creature, stronger the creature, faster the mining. After X resources have been mined from a mine, there will be a very slowly increasing chance of a cave in, cave ins will kill every creature in the mine for the most part (I would start with 95% chance per creature). And any that do survive will need to be dug out, again strength makes this go faster.
One the cave in is cleared, the mine can be worked again and any surviving workers return to the map. Mines will also start to spawn creatures after the first cave in, I would love to see the creatures power scale with the total amount of resources pulled from the mine, after the first cave in, minor beasts might show up, badgers, wolves, bears etc. But as you go deeper and deeper the chances of something terrifying emerging goes up. This is the main reason, gameplay wise, the mines cannot be close to each other, it forces the player to juggle an efficient mining complex, that is essentially another doorway they have to guard, do we do 3 of each mine spread out in a wide area and try to dig as shallow as possible? Do we have one of each as close together as possible, guard it like a fortress gate and delve into the depths?
So those are my ideas, Im sure I will have more as I play, amazing job so far!
miki151Thanks for the detailed feedback and suggestions, I'll try to answer as much as possible 🙂
First off, I havent been this excited about a game in a very very long time, from what Ive been able to see you have been inspired by almost all of my all time favorite games, Dungeon Keeper, Dwarf Fortress principally.
Utterly amazing job and I cant wait to see how the progression goes, and if this game is moddable in its release state, I can see myself playing for years and years.
It should be moddable at some point, but this is still far, far away.
-Tree Spirits: They seems to spawn very quickly, either that or I am unlucky. Designated 4 trees to be cut from the initial pause and plan, spawned a tree spirit, keeper went splat. What I would love to divide the tree spirits into 2 separate mobs. One a sprite, or maybe even a dryad that would spawn randomly from any cut tree, these would be a minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things, maybe 60-70% chance of killing an imp in single combat. The second mob, more akin to what we have now as tree spirits maybe even more powerful would only spawn after certain conditions have been met. Off the top of my head; after X dryads have been killed, or maybe Y trees have been cut in Y turns the player would get an eerie message, like “You feel the pain of nature as the wind flows through the trees.” after this happens the more powerful versions would spawn, after another X turns, the player will get a counter message “You feel the rage of nature abate” which once again turns off the 'uber' spirits and the lesser dryads will once again spawn. You could even do something cumulative and start spawning Treants with the greater spirits the greater the 'rage of nature' gets, the first time you piss of nature, its just a greater treant, the second time he shows up with a retinue of treants, could start adding various nature based mobs like druids, satyrs and the like to personify that nature itself is against our humble hero.
I just realized there is a bug in the tree spirit generation, which causes it to count trees cut in previous games. I can see now why some players see them as too aggressive :).
As for your suggestions, they seem pretty out of scope for now, but a few months from now I'll start adding some more biodiversity, so we'll see.
-Map gen options, I have no doubts this is already on your plan, but im including it anyway 🙂 Would love to see options for animal aggression and power.
Not until much later. I used to have such options, but the result was that I needed to do more testing before every release to see if things are not too out of balance. So I'll probably add them closer to the 1.0 release.
-Auto-Pause, the game already pauses when your keeper enters combat, I would love to have a small list of event types that would auto pause. Non-Imp deaths, non-imp combat, imp death, imp in combat, resource X hits 0 etc.
Sounds good, I'll note it down.
-Only left shift seems to activate rectangle selection, would be awesome if both shifts did.
Ok, fixed it on the spot.
-Pathfinding priority, allow us to designate low and high priority paths, this will help increase FPS when the player uses it right and allows us a bit more control over the flow of our dungeons.
Locking doors is not enough?
-Stackable imps/flying creatures. I like how mobs in your game dont stack, with the exception of flying creatures, I would love to see flying creatures be able to fly over other mobs and pile up on a single tile.
It would require severe architectural changes, and the gain would be small, so most likely not.
-Groups, would be great to have the ability to assign the leader of the group.
There is, actually, just click on any creature in the group. I need to make it more discoverable, I suppose.
-Gold / Econ: I like a few other players have some fairly major issues with gold, in my first game I was deeply in debt and completely mined out before even the first attack. I know you're fully aware of this and are making some changes to econ, especially gold generation but I would like to add my idea that I believe could work very well.
Mines, they are free to build, but require a constant intake of trees to 'work'(support beams right?) the ratio of time/wood to materials produced I have no real idea on, but there would be one for each mineral type, iron, gold and stone and they cannot be built within X tiles of each other, I would say something 20 at least.
Creatures must be assigned to work in the mines manually and will never auto-work them, as many creatures can be sent into a mine as you want and the tree usage / mineral generation will scale with them, and maybe mod it by the stat of the creature, stronger the creature, faster the mining. After X resources have been mined from a mine, there will be a very slowly increasing chance of a cave in, cave ins will kill every creature in the mine for the most part (I would start with 95% chance per creature). And any that do survive will need to be dug out, again strength makes this go faster.
One the cave in is cleared, the mine can be worked again and any surviving workers return to the map. Mines will also start to spawn creatures after the first cave in, I would love to see the creatures power scale with the total amount of resources pulled from the mine, after the first cave in, minor beasts might show up, badgers, wolves, bears etc. But as you go deeper and deeper the chances of something terrifying emerging goes up. This is the main reason, gameplay wise, the mines cannot be close to each other, it forces the player to juggle an efficient mining complex, that is essentially another doorway they have to guard, do we do 3 of each mine spread out in a wide area and try to dig as shallow as possible? Do we have one of each as close together as possible, guard it like a fortress gate and delve into the depths?
This makes sense, I've been thinking about continuous mining as opposed to one-time digging out resources. I assume your mines would be located in random spots around the map like the current resources? Or would they have to be built?
Having minions (or prisoners!) work in the mines makes sense, as I'd like to keep the imps to do more urgent stuff.
So those are my ideas, Im sure I will have more as I play, amazing job so far!
Great, just fire away if you have more 🙂
