ALPHAFUNDING +FAILED+ | TEAM GOT DISPERSED In order to continue development, we have to put a new team together, and fund the game through alternative source of funding. That will take some time. This project has not been abandoned. Unless information comes from the official source, please disregard online rumors. Indie game dev is a very tough business and the year 2013 is even tougher due to many new indie studios funded by former AAA developers. Competition for human resources and funding is fierce. People who believed it the game and ordered alpha - huge thank you, you will never be forgotten and when the game is resurrected, we will make it up to you, somehow. Thank you for understanding.

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Report RSS Tomes of Mephistopheles alpha #10 overview
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GiffE
GiffE

I like what I see motorsep! As it does look like its polishing up quite a bit! Your doing a good job harnessing darkplace's power. If I may make some suggestions/criticism.

Firstly, I know this is something your working, but I understand that your dungeons are random, however the rooms are quite vacant and need more in them to spice it up. For instance that room your in has nothing but a fire pit. What I'm interested in knowing is what are you guys doing to spice up the rooms?

Second think I noticed is with the chest. The sound does not match the animation's speed. It just doesn't seem like the sound is coming from the chest because the chest opens slower than the sound plays. Personally I think it would have been cooler if you kinda threw the chest door open as that's a bit more realistic than the slow opening as when someone comes across a treasure, their natural reaction is to get at it as fast as they can. But slow works I guess if you just match the sound.

The clicking when hoving over EVERY inventory slot kinda excessive, I'm all for feedback! but the highlight color is probably more than enough for players to realize their hovering in a different slot rather than what sounds like the sound being spammed. Its just a minor detail though.

Now these are just some minor polish details, and obviously your long til full release so I'm sure everything will be iron'd out. I like the progress in this video, its come around miles since the last one I've seen.

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jamman88
jamman88

the spell creation looks amazing, i love it, but as giffe pointed out, the rooms are bland, maybe some simple tables or statues to go along the walls at random

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motorsep Author
motorsep

all that will look tacky. The issue is that each of the tiles that make up the rooms is 512x512 units. That room with fireplace made of 9 tiles. That's big. No matter what you put in there, it will look out of place. The solution is simple - use smaller tiles (but that will create performance issues) or dump that idea of totally random dungeons and do what Diablo 3 did - huge static world with bunch of branches which are blocked off / locked and every time player starts a game, certain areas get unlocked while other - locked. We are going to loose seamless infinite world if we do that.

It's just each approach has its trade offs. For example, we we were to do static world with many forks and areas + random placement of items/enemies/props, we would have better lighting and better performance. The architecture could be more complex and all that.

So it's something I have been thinking a lot lately, whether we chose right approach. There are certainly good things about seamless random stuff, but at expense of loosing fine tuning and loosing controls over level design. I'd love to know how many people really care for bland seamless worlds. I know some do, but I am not sure whether it's a majority or minority of users.

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GiffE
GiffE

Hmm, Perhaps you can mix quarter sized tiles with full size tiles?
Also perhaps some tiles which have tighter corridors (weave's and stuff within the large square tile? That would give the illusion of smaller tiles while still using large sized ones.

Props are a necessity but those take time which is why I imagine their not all there yet. But if the room is monstrous you can't just line the walls with book shelves. You have to find a way to place props which give the room a sense of purpose.

I did NOT like diablo 3's method but that's because after grinding through the butcher over and over again it was always the same.

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Davilink
Davilink

Why not do like this when you use split in spell creation

Fly + Fire + (3x) Split + Water

Instead of
Fly + Fire + Split + Split +Split + Water

What do you think ?

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motorsep Author
motorsep

I think it's cool, but I am not sure what would be involved from coding point of view.

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GiffE
GiffE

Use a stack. When ever you push a spell of the same type pop it and add one with an incremented counter.

I LOVE the spell system. Reminds me of Magicka. I've always loved being to mess around with different elements/runes to find out a cool spell.

Are you going to add maybe an off-hand animation (kinda skyrim-esque) where you hold out your off-hand palm and fire the molten ball of death?

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motorsep Author
motorsep

There will be no hand. Instead, player will use a spellgun ;)

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