Darkfire RPG - retro roguelike game looking for testers

fiorel

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November 27, 2012
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Hi folks,

I just finished a new release for my game: http://darkfire-rpg.com

It's a retro roguelike online RPG game. The graphics are probably aweful, but the game is fun :biggrin:

There is lots of new stuff, but most importantly I have redesigned the resource system.

I would be most grateful for anyone who likes to test the game a bit. I need some help to figure out if the new systems works well, is easy to understand and at least halfway properly balanced. Any kind of feedback is welcome.
 
Joined
Nov 27, 2012
Messages
25
Hi folks,

I just finished a new release for my game: http://darkfire-rpg.com

It's a retro roguelike online RPG game. The graphics are probably aweful, but the game is fun :biggrin:

There is lots of new stuff, but most importantly I have redesigned the resource system.

I would be most grateful for anyone who likes to test the game a bit. I need some help to figure out if the new systems works well, is easy to understand and at least halfway properly balanced. Any kind of feedback is welcome.

I think this game has great potential. It has a very Ultima 7 feel to it. I rolled a Warrior. So far I've explored a bit, attacked a LOT of ants, and have a chair in my inventory. You know, for when I get tired of travelling. But I was sad I couldn't do anything to the barrels. I have to interact with my barrels you see... I like the detail that has gone in to this (from what I've seen so far). I'd say the weak link is combat. It appears that everything near you makes a beeline for you, enemies attack many rounds in close proximity to each other, you're not too sure if they're hostile or not unless you look at the combat log, and attacking appears to be a clickfest. My constructive criticism would be to slow down combat, perhaps change the mouse icon to something else when hovering over a hostile, and make combat a little more interactive? Also perhaps more detail and depth to the quests. So far the initial quest seems very bland. A lot less epic feeling than it should be. Great job so far though, looks like a lot of work went in to the details of this. It just needs some fleshing out to pull people in.
 
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Hi Caddy,

Thank you for your feedback! :)

You made a really good point about the starter quest. I'll definitly try to improve it.
The whole quest interface is still rather new and work in progress.

The combat system is a more complex matter. The core of the game is indeed a rather primitive "hack and slay" combat system. There is a little interactiveness in combat already, through the use of skills and equipment. The warrior is not heavily depending on skills, although good use of "titan strength" and "battle tactics" can speed things up quite a lot. If you'd try a wizard or a ranger, the interactiveness of skills probably became more obvious.
Shifting equipment is also required for some encounters, because all monsters have special attack types and resistances.

I'm aware that this is not much and the combat system could need more complexity and interactiveness. Given the tile-based nature and screen resolution of the game however, implementing a truely elaborate combat system would be very hard. To some extent I am satisfied with hack and slay, as long as it's nicely done and properly balanced.
Slowing down combat would be easy enough, but without further changes I don't believe that would improve the game.

Your suggestion that the mouse cursor could change when hovering over a hostile is a good one. I'll look into that. Another solution could be to display health bars over hostile monsters. Actually, there already is an animation over the player character whenever you get damaged - it doesn't tell you where the attack came from though.

What would you like to do with the barrels? The first thing that comes to my mind is to make them destructible, so that you can smash them in. They could even drop some loot occasionally.
 
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I think my meaning was more on the humorous side in regards to the barrels lol, however, they were the first object I tried to interact with when I started the game. Maybe they can just be containers like chests.

In regards to combat, I personally have no problem with the hack and slash style, I think what i'm trying to get at, is there's no rhythm to it. Sorry if I go back to Ultima 7 example again, but when I play this game I can't help but think of it. The combat was essentially hack and slash as well (i may get flamed for saying that, as it was party based and still had many elements of strategy), but you knew when you swung your weapon, because that 1 frame animation showed it, and when the creature got hit, it blinked red. And although you could click faster, there was a certain cycle of movement. I think your idea of having health bars over monsters is an excellent one and would help combat quite a bit. Unless of course you're going for the mysteriousness of how many hit-points or how much damage your doing for "realism", but I'm going to assume no, because all calculations seem to show in the status text below.

I'm surprised there's not more people giving input on this game, as it seems to ring true to the old-school RPG crowd (which is a good thing).

As for the quest, I figured there's a lot of things which are new as well as "placeholder", so i'm sure there's still lots of things to go through, like grammar and punctuation/capitalization, etc, so I didn't really dwell on those too much. All in all I was focusing on the actual structure, and it seems like a potentially solid and fun RPG.
 
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I finally got around to improve the starting quest. It was really hard to come up with something more interesting, because the starting quest has to be very easy to understand and follow. Please tell me what you think :)

I also put up a gameplay video on the Darkfire RPG website.
 
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Yes, quite a number of people have tried the game so far and I got a lot of valuable feedback. More players are always welcome of course! :)

I'm just looking for people to download and try the game, without any further obligations. Every player helps me to improve the game. Thanks!
 
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Do enemies still respawn nearly immediately? I liked the game but it was difficult to progress because I would fight a tough enemy and have to run away a bit, only to find the enemies I had previously killed were all respawned, thus making it more difficult.

If you have addressed that part a bit I will definitely give it another go.
 
Funny, the look and UI remind Mac games probably first years of 90's. It's a lot because of the UI using a look that remind first Mac OS with color and how standard UI is merged to the game (instead of doing a custom interface). But also the graphic style remind this a bit.
 
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Hi Ihaterpg,

Indeed, early 90's games had a lot of influence on me. Crossfire, Wyvern, Final Fantasy 1/2, Secret of Mana, Diablo 2...
There was also an ancient mac game called "The Dungeon of Doom".

I didn't use any libraries for the UI, just working with native DirectX.
That's the reason why the interface elements are very basic and simplistic. It was hard to do any better :)
 
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Hi Fluent,

I have adressed it a little bit - by increasing respawn time of generators to around 5 minutes. A lot of maps spawn monsters without generators though, mostly out of sight range. These still have high spawning rates. I don't really want to reduce those rates, because it might ruin the multiplayer aspect and also tamper with the difficulty level.

Part of the equation may be the overall difficulty of the game. I try to maintain a difficulty level that is challenging, but not unfair and not frustrating. I'm still working hard to get there.

The balance of several classes may have improved a bit over the last months:
  • Robot is slightly OP.
  • Warrior, wizard, ranger and monk are pretty well balanced.
  • Mutant is poorly balanced, still requires a lot of work from my side.
 
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I've been working on a big update to expand the game world.
Here is a screenshots of one of the new areas - the haunted ruins:
screen_poison_ring.png

The balance between character classes has also been improved.

Several players managed to beat the game last year. That was a great motivation for me to work on the expansion. So far I'm still waiting for players to beat the new expansion bosses. :)
 
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Hi fellows,

I just finished another game world expansion.
Among many other things, there is a new town called stonegate, personal apartments to store infinite loot, an easier combat mechanic and many new items, monsters, skills...

I'm still grateful for anyone who likes to test the game a bit. All feedback is welcome.
 
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