Development Info Mines of Morgoth is Final

[getter77]

Interesting. I''d generally reckoned melee styled classes(various melee mage flavors)were possible considering the stat rolls and such..as well as some proficiency bits I could make out towards the bottom of the inventory screen. Probably worth a mention to him on the lagging at trivial things bit as I'd imagine that's not intended.

I caught that bit on a strong backstab in the demo video, I think, when he attacks what I presume to be a beholder of some sort that was asleep.

I keep waiting for a New stable version of ToME before jumping in

Were you able to clear the demo floors? Difficulty?

 

[Damned Registrations]

Not really. You start with no money and a shovel (Required to bypass rubble, ala ToME) costs minimum 250 gold. Kills infrequently dropped 10-30 gold. I had no means of opening locked doors at all. There was no tactics setting so I couldn't temporarily raise my searching ability to find secret passages in dead ends of tunnels either. My first two trips into the dungeon I never even saw a monster; it was just a few short hallways ending in obstacles I couldn't pass. The third had a room with maybe 15 enemies, one of which would require all my mana to kill (assuming I don't fizzle a cast, which had maybe a 15-25% chance or so.) Once I gained a level it probably would have gotten a bit easier, but I wasn't really interested in sniping at goblins for another hour for a chance at getting to the end of the demo. At level two my mana went from 3 to 5, and I got the option to learn one more spell. I picked phase door to try and bypass some obstacles, and ended up dying to a goblin after running out of mana and failing to cast phase door. My melee ability was basically nil, and getting hit once by a centipede poisoned me to death at level 1. Goblins could kill me in 2 hits, and hit more often than not.

Overall, it just felt like a bad ToME ripoff to me. (Might actually be more based on ToME predecessors, ToME is basically an awesome Angband ripoff.) Look at these screenies for the gist of the difference: http://www.t-o-m-e.net/screen.php?tome_current=0 This game is like the Oblivion of roguelikes. If you want a graphical roguelike either go for one of the tileset addons to an existing one (Although they do look pretty ugly generally) or play Elona. It's got a lot of cheesy/humorous stuff, but it's of a much higher quality both in graphics and gameplay. http://elona.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Screenshots

 

[getter77]

Hmm...is there any significant ingame documentation on features, ingame rules, and such? With one of the latter attempt builds I worked on I COULD, under certain circumstances, access the F1 menu and I think there were some topics in there. Sounds like he'd to well to have some general info up onsite in the form of a FAQ as I can't imagine why there'd be stat rolling and all the non-dungeon diving activities in the Town/Tower if there's not some stuff to it in the background.

Honestly, I'm not sure what the degree of outside playtesting(for flow of the game moreso than bugs) up to this point has been for the game. I've been tracking this for awhile and didn't think I'd put it up for Codex news until it actually hit version 1.0 and had the full game available---there's been much earlier demo builds available for a looong time now (not that I bothered as I was also personally waiting for 1.0) Considering I never could seem to come across any impressions of those earlier demo builds, I wonder if this is the start of the step that most other Roguelikes begin much earlier in their general development. In retrospect, I should've got on this personally and mentioned in places much earlier to generate more of a testing playerbase so as to, one would hope, avert this odd state of affairs for 1.0 and perhaps result in a better game/gameflow overall.

Thanks for the ToME and Elona head's ups. Elona I'm waiting for things to get a bit more ironed out on in current development. ToME and *band games I really just need to hunker down and find one with a fair enough tileset and figure out how to set it to where the window isn't so insanely tiny and zoomed out.

Many thanks for the impressions and info you've put forth on your time with the demo thus far!

 

[Damned Registrations]

Yeah it took me quite a while to setup ToME so it pleased my eyes. Now I got a nice setup for it though. Main screen takes up about 80% of the screen (Generally enough space to show the entire level map in a dungeon), and the bottom is split into 3 extra windows, showing recent messages, a list of all visible enemies, and a list of either my inventory or a description of the current enemy, depending on the context. I still need to write a decent automatizer for it though. Sorting loot in ToME is a pita without auto-id.

Maybe I'll do a ToME lets play one of these days. Will probably be short lived though, the angry cunts will likely goad me into fighting balrogs early on.

 

[getter77]

Go for it on a ToME lets play one day! I still hope that one guy revives the Incursion one when the latest version hopefully hits in the near future as that unlikely Monk of mine he wound up picking was doing pretty swell all things considered.