Dungeon Monkey Unlimited v1.000

[Joseph Hewitt]

My secret project has been released! Dungeon Monkey Unlimited is a combat oriented tactics style fantasy RPG. You can control a party of up to four adventurers through a randomly generated world. It can be downloaded from SourceForge:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/dmonkey/

I have much more to say about it, and about the things I've learned which will be ported to GearHead, but for now I have to go home. Go try it out and let me know what you think. Initial reviews indicate that it's stupidly addicting.

[clockworkspider]

Downloaded it.  It's awesome.  I have two things I'd like to say, though.

First, sometimes when I'm in a fight, the enemies fire spells or arrows at where I used to be, rather than where I'd moved to.  Is this a glitch?

Second, Death Ray is stupidly powerful.  I must've used it something like 30 times, and it missed maybe twice.

On the other hand, having an instant death spell that isn't a gamble is crazy fun.

[Joseph Hewitt]

Yes, the spell mistargeting thing is a glitch. I'll try to get that fixed for the bugfix release out soon.

[Trucidation]

I do feel inclined to think that it can be "stupidly addicting"; could use some basic help text though - simple stuff like a help screen showing keyboard shortcuts, how to save (or letting people know this is a roguelike which saves when you quit), and letting you know that you should start a campaign with multiple designed characters.

Final thoughts:

• I discovered the mini-map function only late in play. Very useful. There REALLY needs to be a hotkey guide somewhere. Even a simple F1 help screen would do.
• Needs some class balance; felt very AD&Dish, what with priests being able to wear heavy armor.
• Documentation is a pain, I know, but it's better than expecting players to know the +/-s of each class.
• How useful are missile weapons? Melee classes appear to get multiple swings later (it isn't mentioned anywhere though - put this in the char sheet please), and combined with magical weapons they can deal a crapload of damage. Missile weapons don't seem to match this.
• More stats need to be displayed, or maybe you guys like obscure roguelike conventions? I don't. It's annoying to have to guess how well item X stacks against item Y. If we can see the def% increase then why not just show the bonus on the item itself? Just add a bit more text to the descriptions.
• Allow switching between character screens instead of having to esc back to map before bringing up another character's sheet.
• I'm glad you didn't go the random encounters route (always annoying when you're in a hurry) - and I loved the randoms while resting: the dearth of xp meant I welcomed any battles I could get. Not sure if this is a good thing or not. E.g. when I found several ?items? which needed identifying, I cast identify on one item then rested, hoping to get into a fight, before identifying the next item. I don't know whether it was necessary, but I wanted exp that much.
• Leveling up stats. Ho boy. After some save-reloading I realised the stat increase when leveling was RANDOM. Not to be an ass, but why? Kinda torpedoes your initial stat roll because an unlucky character could get several levels' worth of a useless stat, like int for melee chars. Why not have the job itself determine 1 stat to increase when leveling - e.g. warriors should get 1 random from either str/tough/reflex. I mean, my mage at level 10 had increases in str/reflx/luk and somehow managed to avoid getting anything for int/pie. I wouldn't mind a random additional point though, if the class' important stats get a point.
• Recommend allow buffs to stack - a round spent casting a buff is a round wasted not casting a damage dealing spell or otherwise disabling the enemy. Besides, buffs expire at combat end anyway. I'd be more willing to cast buffs if they weren't so useless. As it was by endgame I was just throwing aoe nukes or that instakill death spell. Making buffs (and debuffs) useful would lessen peoples' instinct to just pick zomgkaboom spells and ignore everything else, then complain the game is boring because they just spam the same spell forever. (Btw I like how you make enemies NOT die in 1 hit, it forces players to not just obsess on damage. In fact I dislike many RPGs because their status effects are useless simply because you can oneshot everything).
• Some kind of town storage or something? It really kills the packrat in me to have to sell stuff even though you nicely balanced the need for money.

Planning on ever updating DMU? I realise it's just a side project but even with literally nothing to do it's somehow still fun to play. Well, until I started leveling enough to notice I wasn't "unlocking" any additional spells in the library, but it was still a good romp.

[LomLom]

• How useful are missile weapons? Melee classes appear to get multiple swings later (it isn't mentioned anywhere though - put this in the char sheet please), and combined with magical weapons they can deal a crapload of damage. Missile weapons don't seem to match this.

By the end of my last game I had a Bard with a flaming longbow who got three shots per round. She was a capable damage dealer, not as much raw damage as the melee warrior but she could attack from range.

[Yuu Inohara]

Very good game, simple, easy to get into, and rather fun. However, like most people here  there are a few things that I feel should be brought up:

As I suggested a long while back for GearHead, a back button would be nice in character creations so you don't have to start over from scratch if you slip up somewhere.

A way to check your character's stats in battle without going to "change equipment" and losing a turn.

Acid Weapon may need a bit of balancing as it can be stupidly powerful by the time you get it (For example, my ranger became a one woman army with it on, dealing six hits of 1-8 damage per attack (3 normal attacks, and 3 from the additional acid damage), and with three chances to paralyze the enemy they're quite prone to getting stun locked, rendering even big enemies like dragons powerless and hardly a challenge.) and it barely costs any MP to use.

Thieves have... Dubious usefulness, since traps usually aren't much of a threat in the first place, you can simply use a bard and get magic to start off, or take thief and then on the next level-up swap to a new class with better equipment options/spells (In my first run I made my thief into a necromancer rather quickly). Really, you can replicate a thief with better equipment choices by alternating between bard and ranger (and you'd get both air and earth magic as a bonus) just as easily, since there are no real penalties for multi-classing other than perhaps stunted shard gains, atleast that I noticed.

[Erathoniel]

By the way, my Level 27 Ranger-Warrior-Monk-Ninja-Priest-Knight hybrid is a little unbalanced, what with having been solo his whole career and dying about 3 times. (With something like $45k last I checked) The Ninja's instakill gives a lot of this, while the Ranger's Acid Weapon is pretty much responsible for the rest.

Soloing might be part of my reason for the massive amount of unbalance.

Acid Weapon for the win!

EDIT: That's actually $68k. I wish there were a way to check in depth character stats, such as number of levels in each class.

EDIT2: Oh, I just found out that the change equipment does the whole screen, as does the library. Still would be nice to view a more complete write up (since the game seems capable of generating it with the stored data).

[SharkD]

Very impressed with the game! Hope to spend a lot of time with it in the next few weeks.

[Erathoniel]

Yeah. It's too addictive. It needs to be toned down. Maybe include instructions for a DIY electroshock therapy kit, so I can actually stop playing. Why, oh cruel universe, why did I have to recommend some Minecraft people to GearHead and have to double check the site? Why?

[SharkD]

One criticism: It would be nice to have a better visual indicator of how many APs using a weapon and moving a unit will consume. For instance, notice how in the following image the game displays the movement range using a multi-colored grid, as well as indicating the cost of issuing an attack order on each weapon's icon.

http://www.giantbomb.com/the-age-of-decadence/61-21194/all-images/52-175578/2008_0164/51-189348/

Finally, it would be nice to see the order in which combatants take their turns, as in the row of unit portraits along the top of the screen in the next image, and/or the CT (current turn) menu as seen in Final Fantasy Tactics.

http://www.joystiq.com/2006/10/06/DandD-fans-fix-temple-of-elemental-evil/

[Inu]

• How useful are missile weapons? Melee classes appear to get multiple swings later (it isn't mentioned anywhere though - put this in the char sheet please), and combined with magical weapons they can deal a crapload of damage. Missile weapons don't seem to match this.

By the end of my last game I had a Bard with a flaming longbow who got three shots per round. She was a capable damage dealer, not as much raw damage as the melee warrior but she could attack from range.

You think those are powerful? Get a Ninja (assassin) and you can go to town with insta-kills from a distance. Pretty lulzy, but I was pulling some guerrilla tactics when the rest of my party got wiped... Doing 0-2 damage against undead (4-6 of them) and occassionally getting an instakill (more common later on, about 1/5 of all hits)... Going invisible and kiting. They retain their value throughout the game, no matter what weapon you give them and what enemy they face.

The problem is that magic is overly powerful to the point that certain (most mele/weapon oriented) classes are pretty useless (except for the Ninja... Enemy you can't kill? Fire off a few arrows or take a few swings and the enemy may or may not be instakilled) because the mages can turn into psuedo-mele classes at will with their mele-oriented spells... And the classes which are useless at the beginning are meh near the end when AoE spells come into play. In short: I've had a bad experience with Human Warriors (always 2 AP short of the mages and always getting in the way >.> ).

I'm also annoyed that the major mele classes get blank crystals but aren't able to use magic (which is a tease since a class change would be severely inefficient and largely useless for the first couple of class levels). They should be able to learn skills independant of the main elemental branches.

[SharkD]

There's some more feedback here.