Very Stone Soup like, which is a good thing. Just needs clean up mostly.
Reviews for "The Rogue Fable"
JustinWang123 responds:
Thanks for the response! I played aloooot of DCSS while developing this so the influence is probably everywhere. Even managed to get to the orb of Zott for the first time then was immediately slaughtered by demons after playing for 13 hours lol.
Reminds me of my first roguelikes :) Though this one isn't 'classic' in the way that means 'ASCII'--it's a simple game reminiscent of the roguelike theme + RPG mechanics. You only have 1 life, you safeguard your character, and it's always a choice to fight or commit flight.
The UI is well-formatted, the graphics are to level the casual player with the roguelike idea, and there's a handy encyclopedia with pictures and text (my favorite: Books!). My only qualm in the RPG area is that we cannot used ranged weaponry--merely Throwing weaponry, as the attributes [of 5 areas--health, mana, attack/throwing strength and throwing item save, and...stealth?] are pretty simple and straightforward. A tiny suggestion for improvement would be adding minor 'idling/speed' features like an 'auto-explore' button, and added details surrounding the character attributes (like how does stealth work? Anything other than having the enemies not go for your throat as soon as you see them?)
My only complaint-that-isn't-really-a-complaint is that the xp pool has a maximum of 100 turns, rather than 'boosts by 100 turn countdown' (thereby wasting any extra turns if already on an experience boost).
JustinWang123 responds:
Thanks for the detailed response.
The reason I didn't added bows and crossbows and such is that then they always need to spawn with ammunition. Every time arrows spawn you'd sort of have to spawn a bow with them. Otherwise players could find tons of arrows with no bow or the opposite. Throwing weapons seemed like a nice compromise since they are immediately useful to every character.
I'll add some more descriptive text to the skills in the next update and possibly include a page in the encyclopedia detailing some of the game mechanics in more depth. How stealth works. How armor and resistances work etc.
Auto-explore is a great idea. Might take me a few updates before I get around to adding it. I definitely play the first 10 levels or so of DCSS on auto explore auto pilot so this is a feature I myself use.
As you noticed stealth lets you avoid monsters that can't see you. Whats not so obvious is if you find a dagger or short sword you can back stab unaware monsters for double damage. The dagger mouse over text describes this and stealth is sort of obvious but the fact that these combined let you create an assassin build type thing is not obvious. Possibly an entry in the encyclopedia could clear this up.
With the experience thing, yeah that is sort of a holdover from when I was going to have a lot more status effects and I didn't want people stacking up huge numbers of them. Doesn't really serve a purpose now, I'll just remove it with next update and make em stack. Could make for some nice rampages if you manage to find a couple exp pools in a row.
Classic roguelike, would like some kind of animation. Not bad.
JustinWang123 responds:
Thanks for playing! Will likely have animation in the next project. My girlfriend taught herself pixel art to help me with this project so this was her first attempt at it and we wanted to avoid animation to keep things simple.