miki151It's not insanity, but reality 🙂 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-josqI9bOo
No reason to worry, I should make the keeper less scared of them too 🙂
miki151No, thanks for your support, I need to have everything working flawlessly before them steam premiere.
miki151Indeed, for some reason I missed those two dlls when making the package. They'll be uploaded in a moment. Cheers.
miki151They're rats, and no, it's not a bug, they can swim 🙂
miki151I couldn't reproduce the bug, but I'll keep an eye on it.
Did you try placing other eyeballs before the bug happened, and perhaps cancelling them or only that single one?
Could you please send me the save file if you still have it?
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 🙂
miki151The new Steam build has a counter in the lower right corner above 'speed'. If that number is increasing while you play, then it means that I've found the leak.
To anyone who has experienced this bug, let me know the result. If you've bought the game and still didn't get a key, let me know.
hungrycookpot: I sent you a key.
miki151The bug just happened to me, it seems unrelated to the large save file. The game somehow ends up in a state half way between real-time and turn based modes. Possibly because of an unlucky key stroke combination or something. I haven't found exactly why, but I'll keep looking.
miki151Thanks for the detailed report. I see the same behavior here after loading the save file, so hopefully I can figure out what went wrong.
The save file size is extremely big, did you do anything out of the ordinary in that game? Like cut down trees on the whole map or somehow produce a huge number of items?
miki151That makes sense.
I'll see if I can bundle the game with some auto-updater software, and distribute that to everyone who doesn't want to use Steam.
miki151Definitely. Features like this are far on the horizon, though 🙂
I noted it down so it doesn't get lost.
https://github.com/miki151/keeperrl/issues/542
miki151Makes sense. My plan was to make the 'furniture' more scarce, and make them block movement. The imps would have to be smarter though about building rooms.
I'm not sure about manual decorating, it would add more complexity and increase the learning curve right at the beginning. I'll think about it though, it's an interesting idea.
miki151It just unlocks some new minions.
miki151I plan to overhaul the whole economy anyway, but these are very good ideas on how to temporarily fix the problem. Especially reducing payment for some minions. Thanks.
miki151Even if you put a DRM free game on steam, it is still DRMed, by the fact that you need steam to install it.
In the same way that you need a PC with Windows, ZIP program, etc. That's not what DRM means.
You can freely copy the game around after you've installed it with Steam.
Also, if you should, for whatever reason, cancel or lose your steam account, you also lose the game ( + all other games you have on steam, for that matter).
No, you don't. You can back up the game folder and it will work ok.
But, well, it is your decision. If it is on steam, it is lost for me, but I'm just one guy, probably doesn't matter.
It does matter, but should I also provide RAR archives, because some folks are anti-ZIP, and COM executables, because someone doesn't like EXE?
Steam is a technical tool for me (besides a distribution channel), which makes my job much easier. It will make your life easier too, with auto-updates, highscore and dungeon sharing, etc.
Btw, if we're going on idealogical grounds, distributing outside of Steam will mean I have to continue using Paypal, which I have very strong arguments agains.
