Slime Salad

I just tried to play Escape from Darkavern and I was amazed at how bad I was at it.

I fell for most of the traps and my RNG in battle was terrible.
I couldn't even get myself to play again after my third death.

The text? I thought it was cute at best, but it got incredibly repetitive as I had to reread it every thirty seconds.

Mogri said something about stats, but I personally couldn't find an instance when they did anything.

What was it about the game that kept you guys going?
What can I salvage from Darkavern?

IIRC, you're right about the stats not doing anything.

Part of the fun of the game is falling for the traps. The dialogue is charming and the variety of ways in which you can die is fun. Restarting is annoying, so an auto-restart feature might be nice rather than quitting back to the title screen.

My vision for this game is that you include an in-depth character creation at the beginning of the game with lots of silly options. You'd include abilities that sound really cool but end up as jokes on the player, like "Trap Recognition" that affords the additional message, "You see that you have triggered a rock trap!" shortly before you die.

As far as the actual gameplay, I'd like to see a sort of IWTBG dungeon crawl. (IWBTG link) The game wants to kill the player and doesn't play fair.

I was serious about my offer to help with this.

So it sounds like quite a bit of the fun was dying in charming way.

My vision for this game is that you include an in-depth character creation at the beginning of the game with lots of silly options. You'd include abilities that sound really cool but end up as jokes on the player, like "Trap Recognition" that affords the additional message, "You see that you have triggered a rock trap!" shortly before you die.

Oh, developing a custom character seems interesting enough to do!

As far as the actual gameplay, I'd like to see a sort of IWTBG dungeon crawl. (IWBTG link) The game wants to kill the player and doesn't play fair.

That is amazing.
It seems incredibly painful to play through, but amazing nonetheless!

I was serious about my offer to help with this.

I know, Mogri. I know.
I'd just like to get some preliminary stuff set up first.

Thanks a lot for the tips. I'd like to have something to show soon ;D

Twinconclusive wrote:It seems incredibly painful to play through, but amazing nonetheless!

Yeah. It's pretty fun for the first ten minutes, but the novelty wears off on your hundredth time through a screen.

I played this for the first time just now.

I died about 6 or 7 times before I gave up (spike trap shortly after being beaten by a green goblin but not killed.)

It did feel fun, but the further I got the less I could stand starting over.

My big suggestion is to save your progress at certain way-points so when you die you only go back to the previous way-point, not ALL the way back. Of course, you might need to add more ways to die to keep the difficulty balanced on the hard side. I just think that reaching way-points would give a good feeling of satisfaction.

This game reminds me alot of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCeAlHQD ... dowgate</a> on the NES (there was also a N64 one and some for the computer). The main draw to the game seemed to be the numerous and hilarious ways to die. I think you should model your game after shadowgate just a tad more. Mainly, the restarting (which was mentioned) and the number of ways to die.( I think the pit trap thing was over used.)