Lords of Xulima - Indiegogo Update #8

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Numantian Games is back with a new update for Lords of Xulima talking about how traps work in the game. The project has 7 days left and still needs about $1,400 to reach its minimum goal.

UPDATE 8 – TRAPS: WATCH YOUR STEP!

So, you think you can take the treasure and just walk out of the dungeon? Clearly, you haven’t played many RPGs…

In Lords of Xulima there are many types of traps:

There are permanent traps like poisonous clouds, flames that burn through cracks in the ground, pressure plates that spring blades from the floor, spider webs that slow your movements while their owners inject their venom, and many other special surprises.

Each of these must be dealt with in its own manner. Some you will be able to avoid with a careful step, others can be neutralized with spells and there will also be occasions where the only way to get the treasure you desire will be to take your chances and hope the reward is worth the damage you’ll sustain.

The traps we will talk about today are those that are hidden from sight and are only triggered once. These are traps that can be found on the dungeon floor or in the locks of chests and doors

How are they detected?

Detection works automatically. As you get close to a trap your party members will use their perception skill. Based on the complexity of the trap and the party’s ability, there will be a roll to see if you discover the trap. If you succeed, a red zone will appear on the trapped area. Every time you move another attempt will be made to locate objects like traps and hidden doors. It’s a good idea to search an area carefully!

Once detected, you can use your “Disarm Traps” ability. There are two ways to do this:

Automatically

This works like the pen and paper classics where your chance of success is measured by your ability against the difficulty of the trap. If you fail, the trap will activate and damage everyone in your party.

Manually

Depending on the trap's difficulty, a certain number of gears will appear on this mini game. The gears rotate and change colors between red, green, and yellow. You have to click on the gears when they are green to succeed. If you click a yellow gear, nothing happens, but if you click when it's red, then you'll spring the trap. This may seem like a game of reflexes, but the gears change color according to fixed patterns. The higher your skill level, the simpler the patterns.



More information.
 
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So what happens when you run out of food? Is it game over?

Ha ha yeah I think all games I PLAYED was using the trick to provide the create food spell rather fast making it quite fake. In Dungeon Master before to get the spell or some infinite source of food you couldn't rest anymore if you hadn't anymore food, and had to use some fountain to restore magically.

I don't remember well how it worked in Eschalon Book 2, I just know that it was a game option but myself I activated it and found it working well.

EDIT: Looks like they won't make even the first goal. I suppose their comm isn't enough good, even the main page of the funding is not fully right. The main page of the game site is much better: http://www.lordsofxulima.com/
 
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What's a crowd funded project?

The problem of kickstarters and "affiliates" like Indiegogo is there's no way to get a good feeling on what will be the game. And, for me, it ends in a sort of blind systematic vote, few selected genres+mac release+seems not a planned crap. It's frankly stupid and won't help creativity or quality, but I don't see how do it differently.
 
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What's a crowd funded project?

The problem of kickstarters and "affiliates" like Indiegogo is there's no way to get a good feeling on what will be the game. And, for me, it ends in a sort of blind systematic vote,

Not sure what you mean by affiliates or why you have it in quotations. Are you trying to indicate sarcasm because you realize that their relationship is almost the opposite of being affiliates as they are competitors?

Crowdfunding does rely a great deal on being able to trust and have faith in the people you are giving your money to. This does cause a degree of uncertainty for prospective backers, which appropriate since this sort of system only works in the long term if its participants understand its speculative nature. I think the greater problem is the seemingly large number of people who are diving in head first without a sense of the uncertainty and seem to be treating it like amazon pre-orders. Some of that has to be the crowd that pre-ordered Sim City and would still pre-order its sequel if Maxis promised vaguely it would be "better." That it functions as a way to vote with your money - that's kind of the idea and pretty much part of how markets work.

few selected genres+mac release+seems not a planned crap. It's frankly stupid and won't help creativity or quality, but I don't see how do it differently.

There seems to be quite a wide variety of genres represented in the crowd funding scene. Granted though that they're not all there at the same time.

Not a planned crap? Is this some metaphor about irritable bowel syndrome and having to take a lot of unplanned craps? I suppose you could call it "stretch-goal diarrhea." I infer you don't like it that the wildly successful ones keep accepting money well after they've run out of reasonable stretch goals? Well I wouldn't want them to do otherwise in terms of accepting pledges, but I do think project creators need to be more disciplined in their approach to stretch goals in response to unexpected success. A few have had significant issues related to biting off more than they could chew. At the same time, Larian seems to be adapting quite well to taking on more than they intended and the game seems to be coming along quite nicely. That might be the exception to the rule though and I do think project creators could benefit from taking some stretch-goal Imodium.

As for there not being enough Mac games for your tastes, well I think that has more to do with a 7.55% useage share than anything particular to crowd funding. It also seems like a strange complaint since the mac support of Kickstarter games appears to be far better than the general market with 9 out of the top 10 currently running campaigns under video games at Kickstarter include OSX support. Additionally 8 out of 10 of the top grossing video game crowd funding projects of all time also support OSX. The one that doesn't was originally planned not planned for PCs at all and only just recently added planned support for Windows PCs at all. Looking at Steam, I see that only 6 out of the top 30 current best sellers have Mac compatibility.
 
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Might have kicked in for this one but I don't really care for indigo, and paypal has been hacked to the point that I'd never give them a cc number again.....so I'll look for this on Steam at some point. The concept looks like a winner.
 
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