MYRPG playtest report

MYRPG playtest report

Audric

Member #907

January 2001

This is about this game.

The package is a good 6Mb, which could be reduced by half if the screenshots and "thumbs.db" were omitted.

The game fails to run because "libgcc_s_dw2-1.dll is missing". I downloaded the following version and went forward.
http://pt.sourceforge.jp/projects/sfnet_openmarias/downloads/libgcc_s_dw2-1.dll/
(But don't you ship the DLL with the game... search for how to remove this dependency on liking)

Presentation is good. The order of entries in menu is counter-intuitive, when the user sees the target choice above the selected one, he expects "up" key to reach it.

Ingame:
Nice tiles. Graphically, the weak points are the character sprites and the 'log' font.

Controls are rather intuitive, and the design decision on how game turns "work" seem good. Contextual menu shows lots of promising actions, it is visible the game has a lot of depth and interaction with scenery (drinking from pools, jumping above dangers, pushing a table...).
My computer is very old so I ran into problems due to performances. FPS topped at 7 (not a problem for turn-based) but then even the UI is unresponsive, it's easy to miss a click or keypress. Also AI turn is long (2 seconds or more) and creatures need way too many hits to die - I abandoned after a dozen hits. In most roguelikes, many creatures die in 1-3 hits, so this looks weird.
Left-click + hold on an enemy seems to have the strange behavior of moving south of it. I suggest you switch to behavior of most roguelikes: attempting to enter a non-friendly's square is synonym for attack.

Seems not totally stable : 2 crashes (one is immediate when clicking the arrows next to the messages log), and weird behavior when loading a game, light is not retored (need to move to get lightsources re-computed) and character orientation is wrong too (drawn in one direction, but pressing up walks in another).

Globally, looks ambitious. If the computer turns have reasonable duration, this can be rather nice. Map seemed big (too big maybe) Be careful that the game doesn't require too much backtracking in emptied rooms.

Yodhe23

Member #8,726

June 2007

Wow thanks,

Some of those issues I have fixed (like click on the message box arrows), some I will fix in the next day or two with an new release.

Suggestions and comments have been taken onboard, such as moving into an enemy square. I will also weaken the monsters,

Loading the game probably need to be looked at, which I will make a priority. especially as I have increased the unit and map data.

I didn't know about the .dll thing, might it be a cause of moving across to code::blocks on a windows7 machine from windows XP Dev-cpp environment??

I appreciate the counter-intuitiveness of the menu system, and will swap it around to see if it feels better.

On of the main reasons that the game AI takes "so" long, is that there are currently 10 levels/maps, all of which are persistant and active. Unlike many other games creatures do not become inactive/disappear when you are on a different level/area to them.

Many many thanks for taking the time to test the game, and sharing your comments.

P.s. Latest fixed version out at http://www.onemananimation.com/myrpg