Don't be critical with this build because it is pretty raw. I wanted to play around with some of the concepts we are thinking of, so I have prototyped a bunch of stuff. However, I don't want to make everyone wait until it is all over before you try it. So, I have posted this build up for you despite its obvious rough edges. So, enjoy all of the numerous bugs that I am sure it contains.
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| Fighting the undead on your ship |
The main thing to notice in the build beside the pirate theme is the event system. This is where you can sail to different locations and a different event will trigger at each one. Right now, when you sail it just randomly spawns an event. In the future, there will be some sort of map that you can pick the location you want to sail to. This gameplay style is borrowing a lot from "FTL" which fans of that game will notice right away.
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| Example of event text |
I am pretty excited about the event driven gameplay because it allows us to do a lot of different stuff. Most of the places that you visit will have some choices that you can make. What you chose will determine how the event plays out. For instance, if you come across a merchant ship you could choose to attack it or to trade with it. Whichever you chose will make a large difference in how you are able to progress.
Shout out in the comments with what cool events you think should be added into the game! And of course, any other feedback is always welcome.
Discovered this thanks to Kurt and I spent a little bit of time playing it. It's in good shape so far, but here are some things that I noticed over ~30-45 minutes of poking around.
ReplyDeleteShort Bow description states damage is "0" and the effect is "Shoot sparks of magic at your foes".
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Health Bar can be altered via mouse click / click+drag. This does not change the player's health value, only the UI element.
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Snow Fall Effect: The player can "outrun" the snow when moving toward the stern of the ship.
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Storm Effect: The rain "droplets" increase in number when moving left/right.
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Other: When travelling left/right along X axis there is a noticeable color change in several elements: Ship deck (light and dark grain), Ship border/railing, and barrels. Stairs, masts, deck grating, and water do not seem to be affected.
When wearing Pants of Haste this discoloration can be noticed on stairs and to a lesser extent on barrels and deck grates.
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Enemy health bars do not disappear with the enemy sprite when out of the player's FOV.
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When an accessory item has been picked up it is automatically assigned a (seemingly random) slot. If the assigned item is removed, the slot retains the item's description and will prevent a *different* item from being placed in that slot. A separate copy of an identical item can be placed in the same slot.
Feedback on things (with the understanding that this is early in development):
Ranged weapons are vastly more powerful than melee. Given how easy it is to dodge enemy arrows there is (currently) no point in wanting to get up close.
I have no real frame of reference for how much of a defensive gain armor grants me. "5 points" is less helpful than a percentage when I don't know enemy damage values or my numerical HP. Obviously it's more than the 0 the player starts with, but I would gladly switch it out for a ring that boosts attack speed.
Rings that boost attack speed should probably be limited to 1 at a time. 2 is silly. I assume 3 would be ludicrous.
Typo on armor item description "platmail".
Player movement is very quick. This, when coupled with the free "box" or range the player can move in before the camera is dragged along, reduces the visible field available ahead of the player's current direction. When in combat this caused me to run head first into enemies I did not know were there. I like the idea of "don't just run into zombies like an idiot" however, I did at times find myself thinking that I was moving at a constant run speed. This caused me to do some simple calculations (based on very rough estimates):
Assuming the player is ~2.5 feet wide, and the player takes up 2 deck planks in width, I calculated the width of the widest part of the ship to be ~170 feet. After several timed trips back and forth across the breadth of the ship, my average time was 2.6 seconds. This gives the player a movement speed of 45 miles per hour.
Silly calculations aside, I like the speed of the player, but as a constant speed it was really fast and I found myself walking backwards simply because it was easier to control him. When I found pants of haste I was forced to refresh because I moved to fast with them on and (as stated above) I couldn't put a different item in that slot.
Enemy monsters don't seem to perform melee attacks if they are not literally adjacent to the player. This makes getting in melee range trivial as long as you can keep them moving just a tiny bit.
Anyway, sorry there's no TL;DR but I did have fun playing around with what you've got so far and I look forward to seeing more.
Thanks for the great feedback! I will definitely fix some of these before the next build. However, some of them will be delayed (such as game balance issues) because I am more interested in getting all of the content framework in place first before worrying about them. Things are changing so fast that it would mostly be a waste of time at this point. This is very detailed and helpful though, most people have to pay money to get someone to test like this :-)
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