Hey, clean up your forum code. I just spent 4 hours typing only to have my work lost when I was logged out.

Why in the hell is your system auto-saving posts, if you're just going to log out users and throw their work away anyway?



>

VERY unhappy with this.

OK, I'll re-type it. Since First Take is so important.



Write-up complete. Please skip down 2 posts to the actual message.

Silverbel wrote:
Hey, clean up your forum code. I just spent 4 hours typing only to have my work lost when I was logged out.

Why in the hell is your system auto-saving posts, if you're just going to log out users and throw their work away anyway?



>

VERY unhappy with this.

OK, I'll re-type it. Since First Take is so important.

It should be common sense to copy any large post before submitting it. If this is your first rodeo lots of forums automatically log you out after a certain amount of time being idle.



I know from experience the aggravation of losing a long drawn out post because you've been logged out. Just play it safe and copy any long drawn out post before submitting and you'll never have to worry about it again .

I'm not going to spend 4 hours this time. You get ONE.



Hi! I'm Silverbel.

I just finished playing your alpha release of Dungeon of the Endless. I sat down and played through it in about 2 hours. I won without any real troubles, and I really enjoyed it.

So much so, that I'm going to give you a First Take - my impressions of the game. (again, despite losing the FIRST first take. I really liked it.)

Let's go over the really good parts, the vision I see for this game in the future, and the things that still need work.





The Good.



The first five minutes of this game were excellent. The graphics, the tension, and the perceived difficulty were all about right. That kind of hooktime is important, and it's spot-on in this game. Big Kudos for getting that right. It feels very much like your decisions matter, but since you aren't sure what's behind the next door, there's a very strong and satisfying feeling of making a limited-information decision.



The midgame progression was pretty satisfying, I could feel a lot of potential for growth into a very challenging end game. Naturally in a title so young, that content isn't ready yet. But I can feel where it should be. That's just a matter of time, waiting for the game to grow up into its potential.



This game taps into a really awesome idea that not a lot of other games have touched, making a player determine the value of space. Whether a room is worth powering on, isn't worth powering on... it carries a lot of gravity and it could easily become deeply strategic.





The Vision.



I can see this being a game where players have to carefully assess many, many factors when deciding which rooms to power. Right now, it's mainly just "is this a generator room? How many nodes, and how many doors? How close to the crystal?" when deciding which rooms to power. But there's room for this idea to grow a great deal. The more a player must rely on previous experience and strategic know-how, when carefully picking which rooms to power on, and the more obvious "oh, oops - I shouldn't have left that room off" is, when you lose, the better this concept will fly.



There's also room for the idea of "On the clock, off the clock" to grow. When a door opens, the enemy comes at you for awhile, and then the pressure is off - and you can consider your options and work out your plan. The pressure is on, and stays on, when you decide to move the crystal, but I think there's room for expansion on this idea. I go into greater detail later, but for example, being able to "seal" a door with Dust, and let enemies amass behind it as you scramble for the exit, seems like a really fun situation that a player could put themselves in if they aren't careful, or if they make those choices.



Creating a very complex "expert" system, room for players to grow well beyond the amateur and become skilled at understanding the more random aspects of the game, is how roguelikes become loved. You don't go around kicking sinks in Nethack your first time through. It takes time to discover that you can - and if you should - and this is where mastery comes in. Your game has room for that kind of mastery, in its room powering system. It's not there yet, but there is room for that stage of development. The more crazy things that can happen, the better. Tell you what, the first time I saw a room with a 'skull sphere' in it, I freaked out. If that thing had turned out to be some sort of Monster Nest that had to be destroyed before I could rest again... I probably would have been overjoyed.



The Problems.



Right now, the game is too easy. That's to be expected since the game is still in its infancy... but in the final stage, despite having dozens of rooms unpowered, I was never attacked by more than 4 waves (1 from the new room, 3 from other rooms). I think this was intentional and I want to suggest you reconsider.



It is also much too successful to simply pile all your heroes and defense structures into one room and tank incoming waves (The One Room Defense.) This is bad, because it makes the game one dimensional, and it strongly takes away from something your game should be awesome for - carefully deciding which rooms deserve power and resources, and which don't.





Ideas.



So, I liked it a lot, I have big visions for its future, I've identified some problems.

Here's a big pile of suggestions, impressions and ideas to dig though. Who knows, maybe there are some gems in there!

• Weak, Medium, Strong damage towers - players are not going to really savor these options. They will always want to build the strongest tower they can afford. Finding a stronger blueprint is nice, but it's not adding a lot of variety.
• Padding with Ice, or Electric, or Fire towers, is probably a bad idea. You've avoided it so far. Please continue to avoid it.
• The unique support towers you have, are all really COOL. Raising hero attack, defense, healing, slowing enemies... all functional and interesting. Good stuff.
• But, the healing tower is too strong and encourages One-Room Defense. Maybe change its format to a "health pack" style, that gives a single medium boost of HP to the first hero to be hurt in the room, per door?
• Encourage players to power on, and defend, new rooms. An easy way is to have towers already built in a room as it is discovered. Power them on and use them, or leave them to be destroyed?
• Place generators in rooms in the same way as towers, to encourage players to hold them.
• ...or only allow certain types of generators to be built in certain areas -
• ... or make it more efficient to build in certain spots. All ideas to encourage a more spread out defense!
• Monster nest rooms with 'air vents' or the like, that spawn enemies virtually every single wave unless powered, would force players to power the room for a different reason - dare they leave it unpowered?
• Force players to power a room for a certain time to have a prize. Put blueprints inside computers; power the room for a cycle to retrieve the new blueprint.
• Or a magnetically sealed chest that can only be opened once the room has power for a cycle.
• Surveillance or 'camera' rooms offer a different reason to power the room: gather information on new areas!
• A room that can be "mag-locked", or re-sealed with Dust, could provide a reason both to power the room, and an interesting twist on the "on the clock, off the clock" formula... can you find the exit before an overwhelming horde breaks through the sealed door?
• New types of enemies may force players to approach combat differently - say, an enemy that pounds the ground or blows fire or acid everywhere, damaging everything in a room at once.
• Or a slow-moving, devastating foe that should be fought room-to-room for a long time rather than confronted near the crystal.
• A bomb-type enemy that explodes when killed, I would definitely want a more spread out defense to handle something like that!
  
  

By preserving, and reinforcing, what makes your game special - valuing and electing which areas to power and which not - you could create a long-standing classic.



Cheers on your game. I can't wait to see its progress in a year.



And, get these ugly bugs out of your forum experience. I don't want to see "auto-saved" pop up every few seconds if it's actually not going to save my writing due to a log-out. I also had to re-type absolutely everything when signing up, because I missed the "I agree" checkbox the first time. Poor quality, import those fields and save a player some time. All just nuisance.

I thought the tower variants were different and it wasn't just based on strength of attack. The small cheap ones, are fast shooting ranged towers, the medium ones a shock area effect and the largest ones a slow firing artillery style turret. Admittedly they do also follow the amount of damage they do, but there are reasons to built a mixed variety of towers, and not just pile in a load of slow firing artillery pieces. Cost is also a factor.



The One Room Defense, is a valid approach to chokepoint defense, but - AFAIK you get bonuses for having heroes "working on" a room with a module in it, when the next door is opened. So if your strategy is simply to stack heroes in one room all the time, you're missing out on bonus resources. Also, its very costly to roll this "one room defense" (with a full turret complement) around the map, as you're trying to explore to find other heroes, and ultimately the exit room. Once you've explored a fair bit, and the map opens up, its very rare that you can still make a single room the main chokepoint. You'll probably never have enough dust to power on most of the alternate routes.



I suppose with this alpha taster, it really comes down to how much of a score you can eek out of the game with three levels and only a small percentage of the games features in place. You can get through with this one room defense approach, but I'm sure your score will be affected. As new features turn up, I'm sure things will get a lot more interesting. But the amazing fact is that even as it is, its still a rewarding experience to play.



Even with the basics learned, I can still make decisions that cause me to lose a hero or two against my better plans and judgement.

The ideal strategy is to have your heroes all in separate rooms working separate modules for +industry/food, send one out to open a door, then stack them all in the front defended room right after the resources have been added to your bank.

Hi,

Thanks Silverbel for this feedback and sorry for the forum bug

In the current version, we agree with the problems noted and we like your ideas!

Some of them are already in discussion or in the to do list.

- We will improve the diversity of damages (modules, mobs, heroes)

- There will be a lot of reasons to spread heroes in the dungeon (special building to defend, analyzing ruins etc...) and avoid the "one room defense" strategy

- We will add special rooms (linked to random events)

And thank you for reading. =D It's always nice to know feedback has been noticed.



Usually the 'idea-churn' past the first take is somewhat less valuable, but while I'm replying, I guess stuffing one more idea in can't hurt...

A popular way to improve the strength of player knowledge is to add "trends" to play experience... for example, seemingly meaningless decorations in rooms might help indicate what is lurking in rooms beyond. Broken holding-tubes, acid-burned floors, or the presence of power conduits running into a door might suggest an asset or threat just beyond the next door... skilled players can key up on these sorts of aspects.



Trends always emerge, even if only through statistical tendency... utilizing it as a play element is maybe a clever idea.