Cory Petosky's Website

cries There’s no dungeon level 4… ran the entire map and no little green square. I don’t know if this happens every time, though. I SIMPLY MUST BEAT IT

woot! that time I got to floor 5.

You’ve made some really nice changes since this morning, I especially like the wall colors and how they change (even though 99% of my attention is on the mini map).

The scrolling is a little disconcerting though. While it seemed nice at first, it takes so long for the scrolling to catch up with the results of an action that in long battles (where I hold down “a” because I know that I’m going to win with zero damage but it will take forever) if I let up on the a key the game appears to be stuck. Don’t know if that’s even changeable.

ANYWHO, that’s my two cents. Very nice. I’m mildly addicted. I don’t know why, but I love games like these. My sister and I didn’t really have a game console growing up (we did get a hand-me-down 3DO from my uncle when I was in jr. high, but he only had three or four games and we only even liked two of them so we didn’t play very often. It certainly didn’t occur to us to BUY more), but we had a lot of games for our Apple IIe. Man, I miss the original Oregon Trail.

And now I have a burning desire to go play Trogdor. ugggh I was so upset when I learned that game was endless. I got up to I think level 125ish before someone told me.

Hey Candy, glad you like it!

That’s a good point on the scrolling text. I think, for the average casual user — the sort of people who are gonna hit this for the game contest — the scrolling text is better. However, I appreciate that holding down “a” is a common strategy in longer battles. In the “full” version (the one I’m working on that isn’t limited to 4 kilobytes), I’ll put in an extra combat option that “fights to the death” — that is, it resolves the entire combat until your or enemy dies and summarizes the results.

That said, I need to work on combat balance to make it less of the miss-fest it becomes on higher levels. Just adding the option to go back up to the previous floor would help, since you could go back and fight easier enemies until you can fight the harder ones on even footing. Adding additional combat mechanics — spells, equipment, more party members — would help too. The autofight option is an easy patch, but the root deficiency needs to be fixed.

You’re just the kind of person I made this game for. I have a soft spot for these number-crunching dungeon crawls as well, and you don’t see them very often these days. There are a lot of old Nintendo/PC games in this style — Wizardry, Might and Magic, Bard’s Tale, and Swords and Serpents spring to mind, though there are definitely more. Most of ‘em, you can find for download on the web these days, if you dig a little. Or, you can just wait for the expanded version of my game; I’d be happy to have you beta test it for me. :)

I’ve changed the way missing and mending work in combat.

Previously, missing always occurred if your STR + 1d10 was less than the enemy DEF + 1d10. This meant that if you fought an enemy with defense equal to your strength, you’d miss about half the time. The intent was that, if you found yourself unable to hit the enemy, you’d run away and hope for a weaker one next time. I’ve altered this mechanic so that, if your attack doesn’t beat the enemy’s defense, you have a 50% chance to do 1 damage instead.

I’ve applied this same effect to enemies attacking you — if their attack roll doesn’t beat your defense, they now have a 50% chance to do 1 damage. This should make combat faster across the board, since you’d often get into fights where 90% of actions were misses. It also makes holding “A” to attack repeatedly less useful, since even the weakest enemy will hurt you now.

Since there will now be increased reliance on healing, I’ve revisited it to make it less of a sure thing. Healing always fails if the enemy beats your defense roll (but, when healing, you get an extra 1.5x bonus to your defense roll, so this is unlikely). If you win your defense roll, you now get a 50% chance to fail your heal attempt, with the enemy doing 1 damage. Since healing tends to recover significantly more than 1 damage per action, this shouldn’t make the game too much harder, but it will require you to think ahead a little more and preemptively heal more often.

Hopefully these changes add excitement and brevity to combat. Let me know what you think!

Fixed bug: a failed heal will no longer trigger on the next enemy miss.

haven’t played since you made the changes you noted in your comments, but I would be more than happy to beta test the “full” version of your game for you :)

Added significantly better 3D rendering engine that allows me to go as deep into the maze as I like. I’ve set it up to render 5 cells away (any further is too small to visually parse anyway). Filesize is at 4,095 bytes, I don’t think I can do anything else to this thing.

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