Desktop Dungeons

[sagittary]

You can already adjust the window size, I've been doing it every time I run version 0051. It would be nice if it remembered what size it was on close though.

Devs think of everything. :P Usually this isn't something games of this scale leave out smaller features like this.

[Lekon]

Devs think of everything. :P Usually this isn't something games of this scale leave out smaller features like this.

Yeah, just click drag the corner and it should be fine. I usually play it at a pretty big resolution.

I have a love/hate with the Animated Armors now. Love that I can go from level 1 to 6 in one shot, hate that if I'm the Half Dragon, those things are my bane.

(Though the Smack someone into them trick? Genius. I never thought to do that.)
Edit:

It was just said exactly how I said it in an IRC channel earlier. My version of describing this game to someone was "It isn't a roguelike, it is Puzzlequest: the Roguelike. The other guy rather likes puzzle quest, and sadly, he's been missing since I told him of the game. We fear the best.

[ortoslon]

i recorded a video where i just win the "simplest" game with the default character http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNt8vCYmksE

@ortoslon: I get the impression that you're a Roguelike fan, and these particular game design decisions may be controversial.

i greatly enjoy two roguelikes: DCSS (no unlockables, no intra-game effects) and DoomRL (unlockable game modes (which i detest but at least monsters aren't unlocked so modes don't change over time), no intra-game effects)

The unlock system isn't so much a matter of playing through a "worse" game to get to a "better" game, in my opinion, as it is an attempt to get newbie players going through a "simpler" game to a more "complex" one.

i want to be able to choose between a "simpler" and a "more complex" game any time

Because Desktop Dungeons has such limited dungeon space, this effort needs to be abstracted: "late game" unlock monsters still share an arena with the initial crew, and keeping certain game features hidden away with unlock requirements seems to emulate this well.

i like to compare my results with results of other people, for that i need to be sure that we are playing the same game. because of unlockable monsters and cumulative gold, even if we play the same mode with identical characters, we won't be playing the same game unless we've just installed the game

[dislekcia]

Were I in a position to do so I'd be very much inclined to get this out to the masses. Since I can't, I'll just recommend the donationware route - "if you like the game and want to support, drop a few into the dev's wallet. If you don't want to pay, that's okay too."

Don't worry, as soon as our current project load is finished, we'll be focusing on DD full time with the goal of turning it into the best damn game we can make :)

Now, that said, minor quibble. The text color of red and blue is almost -impossible- for me to see. It's probably my colorblindness but I have to literally push my face against the monitor to see what my health is when I'm poisoned and when low on health. Other red/blue text is almost as hard to see. It hasn't stopped my from enjoying the game, but it does make it cumbersome to have to take off my glasses and channel my inner blind 80 year old.

Don't worry, we'll be redesigning the interface in the next version, we want to remove a lot of the math elements by visually illustrating amounts with health bars and the like. Thanks for the reminder to keep colourblind players in mind! So it's the purple text when you get mana-burned or poisoned that is difficult to see against the black background?

Adjustable window size would be nice too. On a 1900x1200 screen, I feel like I should be able to scale the window bigger to have bigger sprites to click on.

I see other players have already mentioned the window dragging to change size, but you can also instantly fullscreen the game by hitting F4. Hitting F4 again will bring it back to normal size again :)

[dislekcia]

i recorded a video where i just win the "simplest" game with the default character http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNt8vCYmksE

Sweet! Thanks for that :) You'll be pleased to know that we've analysed your play-style and picked apart every decision you made (Like that worshipping Tikki Tooki was a great idea, you'd have needed a health potion against that last zombie if you hadn't happened to dodge!) and learned a lot from watching someone else play.

i like to compare my results with results of other people, for that i need to be sure that we are playing the same game. because of unlockable monsters and cumulative gold, even if we play the same mode with identical characters, we won't be playing the same game unless we've just installed the game

That's a good point. I think in many ways the challenge dungeons represent situations where you know what you're getting into in terms of the enemies you'll face and what the bosses are going to be. In terms of gold and shop items, they're as random as the dungeon layout (which could kill you early or make it a breeze if you're really lucky) I think it's safe to assume that anyone going into a serious score run is packing the max gold they can carry. We are thinking about the scoring system and high scores a lot though, one of the things we want to do is make them a lot more granular so that people are competing on fairer grounds, like you've said.

[ortoslon]

maybe make several "tournament" modes where you always start with the same amount of gold and same monster set (different between modes, of course) and unlock all those modes from the start. that way, the game would split into the "ladder"/"campaign" (same as now) and "tournament", and progress in one half wouldn't affect progress in the other half. would be supernice if replays of games were automatically recorded in some terse custom format and replays of top-score games were stored on the same server you store highscore tables

[Almost]

i like to compare my results with results of other people, for that i need to be sure that we are playing the same game. because of unlockable monsters and cumulative gold, even if we play the same mode with identical characters, we won't be playing the same game unless we've just installed the game

Once you reach ranked mode no more monsters are going to be unlocked which means that you are essentially playing the same game as anybody else that is in ranked mode. This is also the moment at which you are able to submit to the highscore tables.

[Tyroie]

+10 points

I hope the zelda open-a-chest tune plays if I hold them over my head. :)

As long as points are being handed out for tips, I just discovered something that surprised me in a very nice way. I'll just say the Earthmother is the best enemy a Transmuter could make... I love things like that in a game. (Sorry if this may have already been mentioned)

Also, I think I really like the Vampire enemy a lot, simply because he initiates an attack on his own. So I like the Crypt a lot because it feels like it "pushes back" more than other dungeons.

[dislekcia]

As long as points are being handed out for tips, I just discovered something that surprised me in a very nice way. I'll just say the Earthmother is the best enemy a Transmuter could make... I love things like that in a game. (Sorry if this may have already been mentioned)

Oh wow. Nandrew and I were just talking about that earlier and he kept saying how obscure it is, nobody would notice it...

Imma have to give you +15 points for that ;)

[salejemaster]

hey dudes, this one thread is getting really clogged up, would it not be possible to create a DD sub forum in this sub forum so we could have one thread for game dev, one for strategy and one for general discussion, just a thought :p

[Feynman]

Perhaps you've already tracked down and exterminated this bug, but if not:

Remember that bug a few pages back where somebody went into negative experience? I've managed to replicate that bug consistently. It occurs under the following conditions:

1. You have death protection
2. You have lifestealing (as a result, this bug is most easily replicated in the Crypts with a Paladin).
3. You kill an enemy at the same time it kills you.
4. Your lifestealing is high enough to bring your health back into the positive.

If all of these conditions are met, then when you and your foe kill each other at the same time, your death protection will not activate. Instead, your lifestealing will heal you up, and your death protection will remain active. You will no longer gain levels and can even go into negative experience until you let something kill you and active your death protection. As soon as you use your death protection, you will begin gaining levels again (and if you're in the negative XP, you'll actually level up right then and there).

Not only can this issue stunt your character growth (any XP that pushed you into the negative doesn't carry over into your new level), it can be exploited as well: by deliberately activating the bug before engaging the boss, you can get a few free hits before your death protection activates and restores you to full health and mana. This definitely needs to be fixed in the next version.

[sagittary]

Don't worry, we'll be redesigning the interface in the next version, we want to remove a lot of the math elements by visually illustrating amounts with health bars and the like. Thanks for the reminder to keep colourblind players in mind! So it's the purple text when you get mana-burned or poisoned that is difficult to see against the black background?
)

Being low on health and being poisoned are the two that stick out the most - I haven't progressed far enough to encounter other special conditions. In general, the red and blue in all instances can be somewhat hard to see at times. It's probably a combination of the font size and the low contrast and less the specific colors themselves.

[Almost]

Hmm, I seem to have found a bug.

I'm a level one half dragon in the factory. I have converted two glyphs, giving me 60% knockback damage, and I've bought an item to decrease my max damage by 20% and picked up two of the attack + 10% items so I have exactly 5 attack. I have been knocking a level 2 golem into a level 8 animated armour, many more than 8 times. It says that it has run out of charges on it's death protection, and yet it continues to say "saved from death" over and over again.

I tried knocking other enemies into him; he seemed to be invulnerable to knockback death. I then used CYDSTEPP and he died immediately to a normal attack.

Other animated armours are similarly unable to die when having an enemy hit into them.

(Also, when I'm level 1 with 5 attack and have 20% knockback it does 0 damage, though I expect it to do 1 damage)

[Feynman]

I've noticed that NOTHING can be killed by having another enemy knocked into it, not just animated armor. For whatever reason, I'm guessing that behavior is intentional.

[Delvin]

Gotta agree, the blood mage still feels kinda useless. BludtoPowah is "slightly" less useless now, but 99% of the time, its just an edible glyph.

Actually, BludtoPowah isn't useless at all.

It allows a L1 sorcerer to beat all of the special challenges with almost no effort! (You lose the trick after the first high lv kill, but you can beat every monster in the dungeon to 1-4HP before that)

This feels extremely cheap, and should probably be fixed somehow.

[Nandrew]

Ooh, there's quite a few nice ideas here, and thanks again to everybody for pointing out more bugs and balance concerns.

Just to clarify on one issue: it's true that killing an enemy via other-enemy knockback is impossible, no matter what kind of foe they are. You'll always have to deal the final blow directly. I'll try to make this less ambiguous in future version.

[Speusippus]

Actually, BludtoPowah isn't useless at all.

It allows a L1 sorcerer to beat all of the special challenges with almost no effort! (You lose the trick after the first high lv kill, but you can beat every monster in the dungeon to 1-4HP before that)

This feels extremely cheap, and should probably be fixed somehow.

I'll just straightforwardly ask you to spoil this one for me. I can't figure out how you'd do this.

Blood-to-power generally allows you to gain six mana by draining all of your health (this holds generally whatever your clevel might be). I can't see how that affords you anything more than an extra fireball, which of course is not nearly sufficient to bring high level monsters down to 1-4 HP. With potions, you can squeeze some more out of the glyph, but of course, there are only so many potions available.

And you're not talking about a method that also uses bloodpools, since you're talking about beating down everything to 1-4 HP without actually killing it until you're ready to kill everything.

So I give up! How do you do it?

[dislekcia]

Wow, that's tedious! But something we definitely need to look into, thanks Delvin!

[u2892]

Thanks Nandrew for a great game :)

Some things I noticed:

-> I once ended up in a dungeon which was absolutely empty except for the maze, level 1 me, and the boss (Gharbad the goat). Some sort of special level? (Didn't think to take a screenshot unfortunately)
-> Are half-dragon attacks really intended to knock enemies *through* walls? Makes for a tough fight, since they'll regenerate on the fly while you chase them through the walls and reveal more squares.

[Edit] Also, a suggestion... how about a separate speed bonus based on the number of steps taken (the usual measure of completion speed in other roguelikes)?

[Vandal]

Actually, BludtoPowah isn't useless at all.

It allows a L1 sorcerer to beat all of the special challenges with almost no effort! (You lose the trick after the first high lv kill, but you can beat every monster in the dungeon to 1-4HP before that)

This feels extremely cheap, and should probably be fixed somehow.

This is assuming you meet the conditions of finding both Blood and Fireball glyphs in the same game, early enough to actually do this with them. If you want to start scum there are far more broken combinations than this in the game, like a Vampire getting the no-magic or lifesteal gods before killing anything, and they only require 1 variable! Anyways you've managed to name the one circumstance where Bloodtopowah might actually need nerfed, in most other situations it really is a trash glyph. Poison, Heal, Fireball, +30% dmg, First Strike and even Death Protection are all far more useful overall.