Thank you, aaneton! File forwarded to Duncan for his fixes. After that, schedule should be open until mid July, during which we can test/bug fix/etc. (Unless Isaac ends up being earlier). Anyone who wants to test post-aaneton room 2, lemme know here or by PM.
Speaking of secrets in aaneton's second room, that's another thing to look out for while testing - just note places that seem like they might should be secrets (and aren't), because it's IMO a pretty cool sense of achievement to unlock secrets (rather than just finding them).
--Stuff I wrote yesterday responding to minmay's testing, etc
Also, Roxas (a long time Grimrock player newer to modding) has asked to make a room for the mod, and so I've asked him to begin working on an indoor room. Unless John shows up soon, someone will need to fill his Asylum room, and I think this should be a good place to put Roxas' room (he knows I'm not certain where I want to put it, so I'm sure we can make slight adjustments to ensure it fits the room). Should John come back to do his, it can most likely work in the Mines (I closed off the Town East main entrance since we didn't have a room for it, but can obviously re-open it).
Now, on to minmay's post:
First, the in between levels: I've added bits and pieces (it was entirely empty; I've added the occasional small puzzle), but if you have time, help with finishing those areas would be great (I did think the outdoor ambience from original LoG2 would probably work, but I honestly didn't pay much mind to it, and something new is always cool regardless).
The Hall of Mages basement trap was a fairly shitty attempt at adding a very small piece of hidden loot on my part. John had added the basement, but not anything to it yet. My reasoning for going the "instant death" route was that the player had most likely saved at the crystal in the town, and considering how safe of an area it was, if the traps weren't instant death, they pretty much wouldn't mean anything. However, I don't disagree that this is just not very interesting; I threw it in in approximately one minute. My thought for a better way to make use of this basement is to make a rewards room (choose loot based on how many extra quest items you have per area). Suggestions on an implementation of this would be helpful, since the solution in ORRR2 was much simpler IIRC (extra seal key? pick a treasure) and doesn't work in this semi open-world format.
My assumption is that the new races, classes, skills, and spells were added by John and he simply never had time to finish them. Most likely, we should just remove them, unless someone particularly wants to finish certain ones of these.
I honestly didn't even think about performance optimizations yet. Personally, a friend and I have been playtesting the file before minmay, and we have had no performance issues (1080p/max settings on my 3rd gen i5/GTX 850m laptop, and I believe 900p/med settings on my friend's 1st gen i7/GTX 460m laptop; mine was almost always solid 60FPS, and though his FPS wasn't recorded, I'm fairly certain it never went below 30). That said, performance optimizations are always welcome; some basic suggestions for people to follow in regards to occlusion/lighting would be helpful.
Combat balance is definitely something we expected to be messed up before any testing. I am certain that my room is, for the most part, far too easy. What makes balance even more difficult is considering how much the player is willing to explore before continuing. Without any of my input, my friend decided to explore the town for secrets before even doing the catacombs (right after he did Eleven Warrior's room) and ended up with a decent gear loadout. Catacombs need to be balanced to essentially account for a party having NO gear and a decent amount of gear (ranged weapons, throwing weapons, and light/heavy melees should all be accessible within secrets in the town; though in the current file there is no heavy weapon, I know where I want to put it).
Speaking of loot, that seems to be the most significant issue with the mod overall. There are very few bombs, rings, necklaces, armor, and even weapons for the most part, and perhaps too many herbs. I'll get more specific on this after more rooms are implemented, but it's something to consider (for example, Skuggasveinn's room has the weapons most parties will use for the entire mod, a very good light, heavy, ranged, and staff weapon - some need to be perhaps moved from here and into another, perhaps replaced by some of those objects lacking).
As for room specific feedback, I am working on a list myself. Your points generally seem reasonable, and we can compare more thoroughly when I've organized my thoughts a bit better (I do personally think Azel's room isn't too difficult - I found escaping the basement to be fairly simple to understand, though I absolutely did not kill all of the monsters; I juked around them, which I imagine you did, too. It definitely should not be permanently sealed, though; perhaps the spike traps/room closing it is just stopped, and the monsters remain or die when it's completed?). As for the difficulty curve, I think a player who finds secrets and does catacombs before everything else should be able to do the other areas fairly easily (my friend pretty much stomped the enemies in Xan's room easily, though he had gotten all the great loot from Skugg's room first - as long as I make it more clear to complete the bog after the other areas, and we spread out loot better, I think it should be fine). He also didn't find Ascension (Dhomo's room) very difficult in regards to damage, but only in regards to puzzles (which is of course good). We definitely need more input on the difficulty curve, but we obviously do need tuning here.
I didn't realize that secret door in the town had minimalSaveState, I'll add that to things to fix. As for why it's there, the idea was to add a couple small secrets to the tavern (the potion in the cellar, and the button to open that door above - that's a small storage area which also closes the route between the pub area and the back, a sort of "even the tavern keeper has secrets" thing). If you think it doesn't fit, we can always just remove the secret door and make the chest directly accessible, should the player have a lockpick, but I personally think it works fine. (The tavern, originally, was one floor, no secrets or anything, and I thought that might spice it up a bit).
NPC cohesion: John had the ratlings placed here, and the town intro dialog. For the others, I went the route of repeatedly printing a useful line of info, not aggro'ing/being killable, etc. It works in a fair amount of games (top down RPGs do stuff like this, like the Breath of Fire games IIRC), but it can definitely be improved if you have thoughts here. Can't really remove them at this point as the blacksmith is essential (we COULD, but more work here; I'm open to whatever you have ideas for). As for not noticing you stealing, I was going by the concept that the rats JUST showed up and everything was the human's, not theirs yet (not fantastic justification, but you can see the rat in the tavern mentioning that he doesn't like human food, etc).
What specifically needs to be done to account for smaller parties? There shouldn't be any puzzles that break from having fewer members, and I thought LoG2 automatically accounted for the difficulty by multiplying the XP each member gets when there are fewer members (been a while since I played a small party, though)?
AndakRainor, the bug you mentioned is one I had already fixed in my original implementation, but someone the fix didn't make its way into my scripts in the mod. I believe the freeze (which was a massive memory leak) should no longer be possible; fireballs can still be stacked, but should not cause issues now (unless the party stands in front of the force field when it releases the mass of fire
). Also, a mid July date should be no problem. I'll probably ask more people to start testing before then, and we can come back to later rooms when they are ready.
minmay (and everyone else, obviously), let me know your thoughts on all of this. I'll be back with some specific per-room feedback soon. And for anyone who'd be interested in testing, I think we should probably start that after aaneton's room is done: that way we can make some progress, and since he's the last person currently scheduled to have the file, we can pass it around for bug fixing/rebalancing before Isaac, Andak, Roxas, etc. are ready. If there are any modders who've implemented rooms that might need some changes and aren't hanging around the forums anymore, we may have to change some things without their input, so I'll want everybody else's in those cases - even if you don't have time to help test, your input is appreciated here
--End yesterday's essay
BTW, I have started designing the final boss and his arena. Will share details when I get a bit closer.
