Hero, iteration 0.7 feedback!

A whole new level of quality!

/johno
"you can't stop the change"

Really huge steps forward since I last played the game! I found myself a weapon at the old battle ground, went to see my brother, and then met my fate at the bridge of death. Hehe. I was half-expecting there to be a troll at the bridge asking me what the airspeed velocity of an un-laden swallow is ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2R3FvS4xr4 ) .

The game looks and sounds nice. The dynamic shadows (cast by the player point light?) are pretty interesting, how do they work?

The game seems to run consistently above 60fps, provided that's a frame rate counter in the lower left corner, but I'm getting a lot of tearing when WASD-scrolling around the map. Maybe vsync it, for people who are not forcing that in their drivers? Although you may not want to drop all the way down to 30 or 15 on slower machines I suppose... Could maybe lock to 60 and immediately present any frames that are slower than that, instead of waiting for next vblank (funny how this terminology still stays around with LCDs).

But I didn't notice very many glitches overall, quite solid! A minor one was that multi-line dialogue highlighting only seems to highlight the first row.

Could you do away with the Go to exit / Exit level button? If there was a visual aid that showed you were the exit was, and something "in-game" to click on to exit... Hm, maybe it is kind of handy to not have to manually walk to the exit anyway. My initial response when I was told that the old battlefield is north of the village was to try and walk off the map to the north, since the level edges are open... But an invisible wall stopped me!

Maybe I'm just not a very good RPG player (probably true!) but I kept missing level ups, maybe it should be more in-your-face and just pop up the level screen? Also, what do all the little green/grey bars mean in the level up screen?

More quests would be great, but I think the amount of dungeons are enough for now.

How about marking the exits to the outdoor areas with paths? Like a trail or something (one square wide).

I really liked the new town, but it still needs work. =)
For starters I think you should be standing near NPC's to be able to talk to them, and also have a line of sight.

Something that I feel needs work now is the store feature, I'm still having to do trial and error when buying/selling stuff, and I don't think I saw any repair shops, but in the previous iteration that was a bit unintuitive also in my opinion.

And I definitely think you need to work on adding more items, and making sure they all have values when sold/bought etc. And that stores will buy and sell different items. Oh, and I couldn't wear one piece of armour and I have no idea why, (I'm guessing I needed more strength) it would be great to see why stuff can't be used.

Also, the hardened skill trait (I think that was its name), definitely shouldn't show as armour in the inventory in my opinion. =)

All in all I think itemization in combination with more quests is what is needed most right now.

All in all I really liked this iteration, it was great having more dungeons and a new map to explore.
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There's no kill like an overkill!

Some real quick feedback. I finally got around to playing it while being bored at my parents'. It's definitely going to be a great game. I like the pace despite it being turn-based, which i usually don't like. But here it's made with nice flow and speed and I'm not bored or annoyed as easily as in other turn-based games.

My first problem was that when your father said you should go to the north i didn't find the exit, and i didn't know where north was until i found the "go to exit"-button and saw the overhead map. I don't know what's north in isometric view so maybe you should have some kind of compass and be able to exit on all edges, and especially the edges mentioned in the dialogue. if not all the edge, add something really visible that stands out ON that edge that you can find and walk to without having to use The Button. It feels like the go to exit-button is a nice feature but only necessary because the design of how you exit an area is flawed

Another interesting thing was that the animation of the hero when walking towards you has one frame where he's looking the other direction. maybe i only saw it because of the poor performance on this old computer

It would be nice if the hero equips things placable in empty equip slots automatically.

When talking to your brother in iwan the hero shouted at him from the edge of the map while he was in the castle because i clicked him from far away. i know it was mentioned before but it looked funny

There's quite a lot of spelling errors and weird spaces and such in the texts. You're probably aware but someone should go through the lines, and now i'm being kinda rude but possibly writing a little better on the story

The exploration music could be a little better. I don't know why but something made me want to turn it off. maybe the lead instruments are too sharp or loud compared to the rest.

I hope you're taking my comments as constructive criticism and feel free to do the same with my game

Well, good work and i look forward to more music, sound, items, quests, monsters, story and skills.

Heh actually it wasn't so quick in the end.

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Solid Core Entertainment
Developer of Roadclub and Sense: Survival Prelude (Developer blog)

Heh, see i would have guessed upper right

I don't think i had equipped the sword yet. Well it was either bare hands or the sword you pick up from the first quest.

Yeah i think it's important the text is correct. Not just because i'm pedantic about it but because sometimes it gets hard to read.

I've tried to write myself sometimes and it really needs practise to be any interesting as with everything else. It would be great if someone who CAN write could give you some advice and give feedback on the dialogue. I'm not sure any of us are of much help there. I could help with spellchecking but it seems more efficient to let the computer do it

I could try to be more specific about what i didn't like in the dialogue in the future and maybe that'll help you improve. I didn't remember any specifics when i wrote the feedback. I'll read and note more carefully next time.

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Solid Core Entertainment
Developer of Roadclub and Sense: Survival Prelude (Developer blog)

Heh, you could add some way to report the dialogue, maybe with a small comment. I'm not sure how easy this is to do though. This would naturally be a beta thing that you'd remove later.

I think this would make it easier for people to help out with the dialogue without the overhead hassle of going to the forums and trying to remember what you saw and where you saw it.

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There's no kill like an overkill!

Malice - I think I need some explanation on how you would like the shops to work?

Is it just instructions and feedback that is missing or something more fundamental?

Hi and thanks for testing!

I agree on the mouse over items, it became very clear to me when I implemented the new "show every item, monster, door and crate when pressing CTRL" feature. I always use it now... much easier than finding the correct pixels...

And a new mouse pointer for grabbing stuff is really necessary...

I think the drag-mouse thing can be A* related, I calculate the path from the character to the mouse tile on frame basis...

And yes it might be a lot of draw calls...