Grimrock

Posted: **Thu Jul 14, 2016 8:29 pm**

I've completed most of revision 33. Here is my no-punches-pulled breakdown of balance and playability.

Let me make something clear when I complain about rooms having too much damage or monsters taking too long to kill. I am good at this game. I've done Isle of Nex on insane ironman using a solo farmer and GameMode.setTimeMultiplier(3) to make everything move at triple speed. So I'm not whining that rooms are too hard for me to complete. I'm whining that the rooms aren't fun because the combat isn't appropriate for the party's level: either it takes too long because the monsters have too much health or need to be kited too far, or you get punished with instant total party kills for walking into traps out of curiosity, or trial and error is required, or something similar.

I stand by everything I've already said about the town and other outside-of-rooms areas, so I won't repeat that. My offer to remake and finish them still stands.

Overarching loot problems:
- Heavy weapons are massively inferior to light weapons in this mod, even more than in Isle of Nex! Good light weapons are given out so much more readily than decent heavy weapons.
- Same thing with firearms and missile weapons, they suck compared to the alternatives until you reach my room (dragonbreath revolver is good for a while if you do Xanathar's room early). I think the stats on the weapons themselves need to be buffed.
- Food distribution is uneven, being really sparse in some places. In particular, there is very little food at the beginning of the mod. Food distribution should keep farmers more up to pace with other classes, like in Isle of Nex.
- Disappointing lack of custom equipment. Reminder that these items exist:

Overall the loot is actually a lot worse than in Isle of Nex, which is exactly the opposite of what I expected to happen.
It would probably be easier to balance rewards if there were more items outside of the rooms. You could put items behind gold locks in the intermediate areas, and have a single gold key in one of the existing secrets in every room (not sure what to do with the rooms without secrets though...except mine where you could just add the key to the "shop").
Alternatively just have many optional puzzles/fights with rewards in the intermediate areas.

Either way, the most important thing to decide on here is the desired power level. The highest damage output in Isle of Nex by far is from light weapons characters. I think this level of damage output is good for this mod, and the rest of the weapon classes can be adjusted to match it (this is what I did in MinAssets, except for throwing weapons). Because the mod is somewhat longer than Isle of Nex, it might be most appropriate to give out equivalents to the top tier standard weapons (moonblade, bone blade, cutlass) in or slightly before twisted forest and give slightly better ones in or slightly before dark tower. Although, this is confounded by the best weapons in Isle of Nex being obtainable quite early.

Healing crystals should be added to more rooms. There aren't many in the mod at the moment.

I have the appropriate art assets finished to make a room in the town outskirts (there's a big chunk of free space), if another room is wanted. And it will be way smaller than
3 MB this time.
I also have a third room concept that I'd be happy to implement, which would fit almost anywhere.

Also I'm willing to part with the monsters from Avenie's Awful Adventure early if they are needed.

General:
- The rusty longsword item has no texture or icon, but it doesn't really have a reason to exist right now, as daggers and machetes are readily available. I suggest removing it.
- Jgwman you really need to review what upvalues are, literally all your upvalues are spurious and most of them result in scripts not working at all because they don't serialize
- Not seeing any use for the gold/iron/orichalum ore.
- The way some of the rooms use ladders, I get the feeling I'm the only person involved in this who knows that you can strafe into and off of ladders and use them while falling as long as you started at their elevation.
- Unless we literally triple the number of rooms we're sitting on a lot of extra space. The current version exports at 24.1 MB and that's before anyone has done optimizations!

Eleven Warrior's room
Loot:
Two daggers is really good loot for light weapons characters, other characters get basically nothing.

Other:
I don't think this room works well as an introduction to the mod. It introduces rules that are not true anywhere else w.r.t. digging and swamp_dead_tree. It would be better if encountered after the catacombs.

The herders take too long to kill since the party has no real weapons yet. It should have greatly reduced hp.
It's good that the undead have lowered hp, but they should also have lowered attack power and no pierce. I'd suggest that they should also be retextured to communicate that they're weaker than normal undead.
The grave keeper dialogue needs to be completely rewritten, it is currently unintelligible.
There is no compelling reason to include the "Attack!" option deathtrap at all. If the "Attack!" option is selected, the trickster should just perform the escape action (smoke bomb) instead of throwing bombs.
The camera shake is too intense and causes panning chaos with the undead death sound. It should be less intense.
The water pit is excessively deep, there is no good reason for it to be more than 2 elevations deep.
I don't think the tomb walls are worth using in this level - the tomb set isn't used anywhere else in this mod and it doesn't mesh with its surroundings here. Cemetery walls would look better.

This level needs a better ambient track.

CATACOMB ROOMS
These rooms are easily encountered at level 1. Because of that, Azel's and THOM's rooms have far, far too much damage and monster HP.
NONE of these rooms give the player a heavy/missile/firearm weapon that I can see, and neither does the graveyard. Instead you get even more light weapons.

AdrTru's room
Loot:
Fine.

Other:
This is very much a pot/kettle situation, but the number of lights in the room is very high, hurting the framerate. The lights should be disabled when the player leaves the room, as currently they cause a big framerate drop in THOM's room while facing west.
I love the puzzle in this room and it'll be great once the bugs I mentioned earlier are fixed.

Azel's room
Loot:
Generous, but not ridiculous.

Other:
The area under the pit has way too much damage for the potentially level 1 parties that will be doing it. The upper floor is fine in that regard.
Even after the lift bug is fixed, it'll still be painfully slow IMO. I'd use a speed of 1 m/s instead of 0.5 m/s.

THOM's room
Loot:
Fine.

Other:
The secret doors make too much noise when opening/closing, the volume should be reduced.
The goromorg does too much damage, players are going to let it hit them once out of curiosity and that shouldn't result in a total party kill.
Overall, this seems like a room that should be a little later in the dungeon.

BOG ROOMS (i.e. Xanathar's Room)
Xanathar's room
Loot:
Fine.

Other:
The fights on the surface are bad. The initial ratling fight spills out of the room which would be fine except for the way the bog is currently laid out making it so you drop into the pit. The mosquitoes are bad because you can kill them easily by camping behind the blockers (though they might be too much for the party's level if the blockers are removed...)
The combat in the rest of the room is fine, and the room in general is great.

TOWN OUTSKIRTS ROOMS
Skuggasveinn's room
Loot:
Giving out a sickle sword this early is pretty generous, especially since it's alongside low-tier heavy weapons. The room is otherwise superb.

Other:
No issues other than a few bugs I've put on the tracker.

Dhomochevsky's room
Loot:
For how long the room is, the reward is pretty small.

Other:
The forced fall+fire trap are excessive for a room at this point in the dungeon.
Recording the wall texts manually is really obnoxious, it should be done automatically (or make them scrolls).
Hidden floor triggers connected to monster spawners are way overused in this room.
There is no reason for the three dimensions puzzle to lock you inside. Also (solution spoiler):

SpoilerShow

It should respect orientations other than north, i.e. all of the following should work:

Code: Select all

O.O   O.O   OOO
.O.   .O.   .O.
O.O   .O.   OOO

      O..   O.O
      .OO   OOO
      O..   O.O

      .O.
      .O.
      O.O

      ..O
      OO.
      ..O

Furthermore, it's not really possible to draw a 'Z'. The 'Z' pattern doesn't look like a 'Z', it looks like I or H. Even this looks more like Z:

Code: Select all

OO.
.O.
.OO

Maybe the puzzle should just be "Two dimensions" and only require 'X' and 'Y' patterns.

ASYLUM ROOMS
Both of aaneton's rooms seem fine as far as loot/monsters.
sps99's room is simple but not problematic.

TWISTED FOREST ROOMS
The Cube's room
Loot:
Fine. It seems you can end up with an extra iron key by completing the "good" path and then taking out the essences and destroying the counterweights afterwards (the voice in the wind also comes back when you do, which is weird since it supposedly had to leave urgently? And you need to destroy the counterweights to get the ghost remains and crystal gauntlets...).

Other:
The Cube's room is really good and the loot and monster balance is perfect. However, the way underwater magic bridges aren't visible from the surface is annoying. What if they had a model that only enables itself when the party is above water?
Also, the castle door needs something above it...

Diarmuid's room
Loot:
Actually seems somewhat on the low side, but that's okay.

Other:
Puzzle spoilers:

SpoilerShow

It's unintuitive that the reflection is supposed to be the inverse of the pattern. Also, visually, the "circles" are squares, and they would only geometrically be circles in Chebyshev geometry (Grimrock is taxicab). This leads to a possible misinterpretation of the first pattern: I thought it might be

Code: Select all

01110
1...1
1...1
1...1
01110

There's another possible misinterpretation of the "dark corners" hint as

Code: Select all

and if not for the fact that the second pattern is already an 'X', the third pattern could easily be an 'X' since that is also a cross, but the second pattern rules that out well enough I guess?
The reason these things are issues is that it takes so damn long to actually input the patterns.

Duncan's room
I'll let someone else handle this one, I don't have the patience to work around all the ways it is currently broken.

DARK TOWER ROOMS
Jgwman's room
Gower's Ring still breaks your savegame. The music is unbearably loud! Didn't get further than that.

minmay's room
Loot:
Well, obviously the loot for this room is way excessive. I expected the dungeon's loot would be somewhat stronger than that in Isle of Nex, not much weaker than that in Isle of Nex.

Other:
Something's breaking the onDrawGui hook. I would like it if a certain person who doesn't know how to use fw hooks would fix their onDrawGui hook, so that I don't have to rely on connectors for onDrawGui.

Posted: **Thu Jul 14, 2016 8:43 pm**

I honestly am not sure what I'm doing wrong regarding upvalues, and I had no issue saving at any point during my puzzle (when I tested my fixes a few weeks ago when you pointed out the issues), so if you could, please PM me with a bit more explanation.

Posted: **Thu Jul 14, 2016 9:04 pm**

It's not complicated enough to need a pm. These are the offenders.
In mod_assets/rooms/jgwman/scripts/items.lua:

Code: Select all

		 onEquipItem = function()
		  local behind = false
		  
		  --live hook champion with JKos's framework to check for projectiles from behind (projectile rotation vs party rotation)
		  fw.script:set('party.jghooks.onProjectileHit',function(hook, self, champion, item, damage, damageType)
		   if item.go.facing - self.go.facing == 0 then behind = true end
		   if champion:getItem(10) ~= nil then
		    if champion:getItem(10).go.name == "gower_ring" and behind == true then 
			 jgGlobals.script.protectedByGowers = true
			 return false 
			end
		   end
          end)

You're creating a function with the upvalue behind. This will crash the game if you ever try to save while this function exists (i.e. when wearing gower's ring). There is no reason whatsoever to use an upvalue here, just make it a regular temporary variable.
In crafting.lua:

Code: Select all

local ores = {}

You're using this as an upvalue in an onInsertItem hook. It is sometimes okay to use functions with upvalues as hooks in asset definitions (see mod_assets/rooms/minmay/objects.lua and the markWalltext example here), but in this case as soon as the game is saved and reloaded the upvalue will disappear, making it impossible to get the sealbreaker if you have loaded the game even once.
As it happens, this variable is completely spurious. You should just use SurfaceComponent:contents() instead of storing the surface's contents in a second table.

Posted: **Thu Jul 14, 2016 9:17 pm**

Alright, thanks. I had already fixed the behind issue, but only moved the fixes I did to the jgGlobals.lua file. I don't know why I decided to store anvil contents in a second table; will fix.

Sorry about that, I'd still appreciate feedback on the room (plus Master's Throne and the arena) if you've got the time in a bit.

Posted: **Thu Jul 14, 2016 10:08 pm**

Jgwman wrote:I'd still appreciate feedback on the room

I don't really have any thoughts on it other than
1. the music is too loud by a factor of about 10
2. you probably shouldn't allow players to carry the ring/staff outside the room

Jgwman wrote:(plus Master's Throne and the arena)

I actually assumed those were placeholders and not going to be in the finished mod. I don't think master's throne is interesting at all. Arena's pretty slow and boring, but the concept is fine, just needs a better implementation with reasonable scaling.
I thought those would be replaced in the course of finishing the inter-room areas.

Posted: **Thu Jul 14, 2016 10:22 pm**

I don't really have any thoughts on it other than
1. the music is too loud by a factor of about 10
2. you probably shouldn't allow players to carry the ring/staff outside the room

You said "didn't get further than that", implying you hadn't actually played it yet...

As for the other two, they weren't exactly intended as placeholders, seeing as we don't have a bunch of modders standing in line to make a room, but if the consensus is that they're terrible, feel free to replace them yourself.

Posted: **Thu Jul 14, 2016 10:29 pm**

Jgwman wrote:
I don't really have any thoughts on it other than
1. the music is too loud by a factor of about 10
2. you probably shouldn't allow players to carry the ring/staff outside the room
You said "didn't get further than that", implying you hadn't actually played it yet...

I hadn't finished it, then you asked for feedback on it, so I did. I'm not trying to be abrasive.

Posted: **Thu Jul 14, 2016 10:34 pm**

I meant, when I upload the functional version, I'd still appreciate you giving feedback, after you have finished it, if you have the time

Edit: R035 uploaded

Posted: **Thu Jul 14, 2016 10:57 pm**

I have finished it (without saving since you can't really save in most of the room) and that is my feedback. I have nothing else to comment on; the puzzles didn't seem exceptionally amazing or terrible, the combat is fine, I do find spawned projectile spam annoying but it's super common in mods so I assume a lot of other people like it. It's certainly not the worst room in the mod and it's certainly not the best room in the mod.

Posted: **Thu Jul 14, 2016 11:12 pm**

Fair enough. I'd be glad to improve it if you think of anything (since my goal was, in fact, to make a good room, rather than a mediocre one), but as long as it's a matter of not your cup of tea, I'll just leave it alone.

I don't know if you've attempted the final boss, but I'm assuming it has some issues that will need to be worked out; or it can be replaced, if it's too off the mark.

I have written a bit of music (possibly for the intro) which I can share when the intro gets worked out, but the final boss will need music (possibly two pieces for two phases, if it stays relatively as is). I can write it, or someone else.

Don't think I have anything else I need to work on. Feel free to fix any of the non-room specific issues you pointed out the way you'd like to. Keep in mind that there are between 3-5 more rooms already planned to be added (Andak - almost done, Isaac - ?, John - ?, THOM's second room - ?, Roxas - ?) when making changes. All have a defined location except Roxas' (will be indoors though; likely either taking John's room or alternatively added to mines).

Grimrock

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