SOTW 0.8.9 - First Act Beta preview!

[yayswords]

I'd rather just see the mana burn made an ability then rather than a spammable attack. Unless it burns a ridiculous amount I will just be mourning the passing of my magic bolt in most fights, especially random animal encounters.

Jack, if you just wanna prevent resurrection maybe you could have an ability targeted at enemy corpses that does exactly that.

[jack1974]

Yes that's why renke was also proposing a way to restore the caster mana, so that the normal magic bolt wouldn't be needed anymore. But this changes things quite a lot, so I am thinking to keep both, and not have the mana regen thing, since that one messes up too much with other skills of the other characters.
For example Riley has already a quickness+SP/HP regen skill. Having yet another mana regen would seem redundant to me.

Besides...I didn't want to make any big changes anymore to this game!

[renke_]

My idea was to give this skill only the druid (as they are violence-hating hippies), not all mages. The goal was a more unique druid, not a rework of the mage's base attack.

[jack1974]

In this case though I should replace an existing skill - the default skills are class based, and while there isn't any specific rule about this, imagine players getting confused "why the Druid has that skill and the other magic casters not?".
And if is to be a normal skill, as I said Rowinda has several SP manipulating skills, so she'll be the caster devoted to messing up with enemies SP
Ok getting back working on Act 2, with problems with other games writers, I definitely need to stop experimenting and finish this game, so at least I'll have something out before end of year

[renke_]

imagine players getting confused "why the Druid has that skill and the other magic casters not?".

okay, I see.

In this case I urge you to ignore everything I said. One char without a classical damage ability is imho an interesting extension, especially in respect to tactics. If all casters are not able to damage enemies without much hassle the experience will be most likely a bad one.

[jack1974]

Yes I'm keeping the game as was before. It was a great suggestion though, but unfortunately a rather big one that needed more planning, something I can't do at this stage... imagine myself hiding in a castle with a crowd of people with pitchfork screaming "when the next game is out!? you promised it was soon!"

[jack1974]

On a positive news I just discovered while testing a particularly long battle, that the slowness experienced by many people in the framework with long battles was because of the battle log displayed in a viewport at bottom of screen Asked Anima how to trim it so will display only the last 100 lines or so, since is not essential to have the full log always available (I think most people just read the last messages).
Expect a big speed boost on next update for medium/long battles (the slowdown is more noticeable on low-end PC).

[Troyen]

My guess is it's also related to the way it adds new messages at the top and scrolls things down. Auto-scrolling for every line of text gets slower the more text there is.

The log is kind of useful, but not when there are a thousand messages (where it becomes a pain to scroll anyway because the slider is too sensitive).

[jack1974]

Yeah, Anima suggested to get rid of it before SOTW development started (and in Planet Stronghold I don't have it for example). I think probably will do that on next games, have it available in a separate screen, but this way there's more space for bigger sprites or more buttons/better layout.

[Troyen]

I do like knowing what the heck the enemies just did because their turn goes pretty quickly (sometimes in Loren I'd have a character just die within a second and have no clue what happened), but that doesn't have to be in some kind of combat scroll log. Perhaps there's another way to represent that info in future games.