Skullstone - an indie 3d dungeon crawler

Thank you for your opinion. I'm just a programmer with very limited sense of aesthetics, so I just like the current graphics
I'll pass your opinion to our graphics designers.

I have no idea why those screens wont load.

Here is the example animation for our latest mob: https://skfb.ly/LQQV
As far as I know the material is not finished, so the mob can look like made of plastic.

I think I have a current torch somewhere... let me see... Ah, here it is:

haha, sorry, was talking about the inventory icon

That's a really cool and "fresh" monster!

That bug with the red eye is really cool looking. I think the game looks great.

Looks great to me, I'd play it! Keep up the good work

We made a video with very early gameplay:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-0Pv57vP7U

FrozenShade said:

We made a video with very early gameplay:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-0Pv57vP7U

Click to expand...

Cool. Some feedback from watching this video, some might be gone later on anyways, but listing them cannot hurt:

in Chronological Order when watching
Cursor is MUCH too big
I am not a native Speaker but shouldn't it be "Temporarily" (The temporary increase, but it temporarily increases)?
Music sounds great, nice "modern" music with some retro adlib feel
Torch sound sounds pretty bad though
Nice and smooth movement, nice effect when picking up torch
I think I mentioned it before: But without graphical hit feedback the combat looks very unnimmersive. A short "hit" animation on the mob would be great, but at very least there should be some kind of blood splatter or whatver when opponent is hit as a minimum of feedback. Maybe a little "smack" wound and something like a blood splatter showing up with the number on it rather than the number floating out of the top?
Ability Icons look nice
All item icons look extremely cheap
Manually collecting Arrows will get annoying soon, there should be a mechanic to autmatically pick up arrows if you run over them
There need to be big graphical effects for all the curses on the party, text alone is not enough.

Ok, the music loop is maybe a little too short, at 5:20 already it felt somewhat repetitive.
What happened to the arrow which was shot against the bee while flying over the trap? Did it get lost? Can you jump into the trap and get to the area below? If you can also throw other items you might need to make sure that players cant get stuck that way by loosing a very important item prematurely.

Balance:
Player movement is much faster than AI movement. Looks pretty easy to exploit.

As the game is real time I think some of skills won't work well. The problem is that spells like Might or Wizardry, which give you a temporary boost are too insignificant to be worth the "click". It will be far more efficient to keep weapons on CD or spend the additional time at movement.
Shield however is an example of a skill which will work well. If you see the fights a little more like in Witcher - it's the preparation which counts.

Also it would be interesting to see what your attributes stand for. But I dislike systems where the whole attributes are just there for show. Where all Warriors put every single point into Strength and HP, all Mages into Intelligence and HP and so on. While this can be considered a "classic" system, it doesn't add any value to the gameplay. Character development becomes fun when you have decisions to make.
Your system of increasing the Abilities could be nice though if the bonuses are kept interesting.

Thank you for the feedback,

About cursor: I"ll pass that to graphics designers.

"temporary" - fixed

Torch - this is just a free asset, we will find something better.

We will make some particle effects on hit. It is on our TODO list.

Items' icons are just placeholders.

Arrows - we need to think about the solution.

Effects on curses are on our TODO list too.


When mob die you'll have all arrows on the floor stacked into one item. When you drop something into a pit it will fall down to the next level of dungeons. You can jump into every pit.

About movement - some mobs are slow, other are fast. Slowing down player's movement ends with very uncomfortable gameplay. Some mobs would cast debuffs with slow or immobilizing effects so player won't dance around a mob.

All skills and their bonuses would be balanced, they should be worth clicking but they cannot be too powerful. You can be sure that we will spend a lot of time on this matter.

There is no surprise with attributes. Str adds to melee damage, dex adds to ranged, int adds to magic. End is for energy/mana and con for hp. I still think about disabling attributes increment on level up, leaving it only for special cases, for example a magic item would give you some attribute points.
Abilities would give a very interesting bonuses, even an attribute increment is possible this way.

Thanks for the update

Well you could also think about a different set of attributes to make it more interesting. For example Dexterity to dodge or speed to reduce the Cooldown. Speed was actually a nice surprise seen in Divinity:OS, which spiced up the situation a little bit at least.
Of course this becomes even harder to balance. But it could be interesting to to think "Do I want to do more damage with one hit? Or do I want to hit more often? Do I actually have enough time to click? How fast are the others?"
You could actually adjust the group a little bit to your game style.

I'll think about that

Updates!

Hi guys! I'm here to tell you about all the new stuff we've added into our game - Skullstone. Hope you like long posts.

We've completed most of the characters. There's 20 of them and each has a different set of skills and abilities. It's up to you to gather the best team of adventurers!

Food system - nearly done. It's based on our own decisions and assumptions as we wanted to further differentiate Skullstone from other dungeon crawlers in development and on the market.

There will be quite a few kinds of food, but don't think you can find the highest quality products in the dungeon. These will only be available as a reward. Your character will be eating nasty stuff mostly. Such as the mushrooms shown on one of the screenshots below. Bon appétit!

Speaking of screenshots, there's plenty of them for you to see. Please, take a look.












As you can see there are new monsters, new items, new decorations, new walls, new interactive objects, et cetera. A lot of new things, and we still have a lot more planned for Skullstone!

If that's not enough screenshots for you, please go visit our facebook page - you'll find much more pictures and information there

And now, please share with us you opinion about all these new additions! We appreciate all feedback.

I don't have time to beta test, but I really like the direction you are going. As far as I'm concerned, I'll buy it when its done. Keep up the good work.