Gustavo, this is really a fine game. I like it a lot!
Miscellaneous thoughts:
* I'm happy that you added many of your own ideas to make Wonderquest more than just a DROD clone. You've got quite a few new game elements here. The new characters are especially cool. If some developer goes through all the work to write a game, I really want him to make something new and different so that his effort is put to best use. I think you've done that.
* I'm envious of the fullscreen room view which looks great.
* The music and ambient sounds are really well done.
* The levels are quite fun and show that you are paying attention to what the player should know at each point. Very smooth difficulty scale here, although I think you may want to make rooms slightly easier to bring in players outside the DROD crowd. Remember that people here are like Jedi Knights of DROD puzzles and they will blaze through hard rooms that others give up on. If you want to aim at a wider audience, I'd say get testers that play other puzzle games but not DROD and see what they say.
* I'm not sure how the levels accompanying specials will work since I haven't tried them yet, but it suggests an upcoming design problem I had with DROD. If you have a power-up (special) that lasts beyond one room then rooms where the power-up may be used must either require the power-up or not require it for a solution. If the room doesn't require the power-up, then you've effectively made a way to cheat the intended solution of the room, perhaps trivially. On the other hand, if the room requires the power-up then other problems come up. For the power-ups to be interesting, there must be some opportunity to incorrectly use them. With multiple places where a power-up could be used, you might have the "
Tower of the Sorceror"
problem where a misuse of your resources requires restoring far back in the game to the point where you misused it (and then replaying all the same rooms again). So I'm interested to see how you handle this. Perhaps the key is creating levels where you can see all or most of the possible places where specials may be needed before you must commit to using a special.
* It looks like you hit another design dilemma with the player movement. If you immediately move sprites into squares, it looks a little old and simple, like one of those text mode games, i.e. ZZT or 'Merican. If you slow down the updates so that the sprites move smoothly into squares, it looks better, but plays sluggishly. I think that the current amount of time that you have for moving sprites is a good default, but it would be better to allow players to set the movement delay to instantaneous. You have a setting for it, but the fastest setting "
0"
doesn't mean sprites will move instantaneously. DROD vets and your more dedicated players will gravitate towards the instantaneous movement, I believe.
* I thought the "
bingo"
joke was out of place. I wasn't offended by it, but some people would be, and it doesn't add much to the game.
* The game could be greatly improved with better graphics. I'm sure you know that, since you've already asked for artistic help. One thing you might want to plan for early on is changing the rendering code for walls so that it allows for more visual variety, i.e. multiple tiles. It doesn't matter how good your art is--if you've only got one tile for walls, those solid blocks of wall will look boring. On the other hand, I'm not sure how ambitious you want to get about the appearance of the game.
* Here is one problem with DROD that is too late for us to fix, but in Wonderquest you might be able to do something about it: Monsters in both our games move in a predetermined sequence which is probably dependent on the order they were placed in the editor. This is hidden information that creates unpredictable behavior, i.e. in a group of roaches moving towards the player, some early-moving roaches will bump off of late-moving roaches. A fix for this is to order the sequence of movement based on how close monsters are to the player. Closer monsters move first and further monsters move a bit later into the empty space created by the closer monster's previous movement. So you get nice tight formations of monsters with which the player may easily predict and form strategies.
I'm stuck on a 3rd level room that I'll post separately about. It's been a lot of fun to play.
-Erik
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The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
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