Hello!

I’m lvl 16 rogue at floor 32, and I can’t open locked chests any longer, despite having the +2 lockpicking amulet and having found numerous lockpicking upgrades along the way. Current lockpick score is 11. Considering the fact that rogue has to be one of the best in this regard, the lockpick difficulty progression seems too harsh for later levels.

Suggestion: improve rogue lockpick progression OR reduce chest lock difficulty.

Suggestion: Focused status effect might improve lockpick skill as well.

Suggestion: Give rogue a lockpick skill buff spell.

Suggestion: Lower the chest lock difficulty increase, but make sure every level has a small number of challenging locks that even the rogue can have difficulty opening without buffs. Provide essential items inside those, like blueprints and food.

I removed my leather armor for an encumbrance 0 armor (Red cloth), which I enhanced to +5 with the scrolls I found along the way. This way I got rid of the encumbrance. That being said, some enemies can actually hit me for 2-3 damage now. But all enemies are actually the same thing with different stats. I really wish that up to this point we had some enemies with different behavior. This amount of challenge would be good for the first few floors instead of floor 30+

Suggestion: increase the challenge in earlier levels.

Suggestion: display a “miss” text instead of “0” when an attack misses.

Suggestion: provide a means to see the earlier events in the text bar provided below (with keys or small UI elements that, when pressed, show earlier events).

The game’s atmosphere is nice, especially better now with sound effects and music. The current music is good, but becomes too repetitive after listening it for 30plus levels. I turned the music volume down.

Suggestion: different music and/or ambient sounds for different tilesets.

The atmosphere can also make use of a little bit of story, especially if it’s creepy. Maybe we can collect story text pages. I would be willing to provide you with a lot of lore text, for items, monsters, story, etc… I am dungeon master for DND and Pathfinder campaigns for more than 20 years now. Just let me know, but maybe you already have a direction in your mind in this regard.

Improving weapons with the orbs is nice at earlier levels. But at the current level/floor, my shopping needs are over and I have more than 30k gold accumulated. Even the food is very expensive. Currently thinking of buying a lot of food before it gets really expensive to stay alive at later levels.

First ranged enemy at floor 37! Death Bringer! Finally! Have 45k gold. Unlocked some cool amulets and armor pieces, and shields. Can't understand which of those will be available for future characters and I'm afraid to test, because I don't want to lose progression. The progression is slow. Is it possible to make it so that the game has 50 levels instead of 100? The grind is really long :)

Suggestion: It would be nice if you could add a changelog to the menu :)

Wish you best of luck with all your games!

Hello. Glad I could both enjoy a game and help it grow. Here's the notes from my latest playthrogh:

Restarted with rogue, challenge was better. Didn’t have serious issues for a long time, but when I made mistakes (forgetting to buy food made me loose half my hp once) I paid for it.

At floor 10 I have 4 (1 from armor base, 2 scrolls I purchased, and 1 scroll I found) damage reduction, and enemies usually deal 0 damage, sometimes 1.

At floor 12 I took some damage in the first room. It felt like the start of the challenging part. But it turns out most of the damage was due to me forgetting to eat again. Throughout this level, only gnolls were able to hit me for 1 occationally, and I had 88 hp despite being one of the supposedly fragile classes.

Suggesiton: Maybe there should be a notification or effect on screen or sound effect to telegraph the hunger.

The enemies at floor 15 could occasionally deal damage despite having my armor maximized at 6 damage reduction. I also carry a def +2 shield.

Question: Does it also say “0” when enemies miss you? Or “0” only displays when they hit, but they deal no damage?

Suggestion: Deeper / invisible gold deposits can give more gold, making investments on pickaxes and vision scrolls more important.

Suggestion: Damage reduction armor buff scroll also increases encumbrance? And/or increases stomach cost of digging?

Suggestion: Searching shouldn’t break invisibility.

Suggestion: Alternative trap bonuses, scaling with floor (2xp x floor or 2gold x floor or % floor chance to get potion, etc.)

Suggestion: We need solid doors as well, which you can’t see through.

Improvement required: Enemy AI needs a touch, even when there’s more than 1 enemy in the room and I am inside the room, they often fail to surround me.

Suggestion: different types of poison and/or status effects that temporarily reduce base stats, like reducing strength, attack, etc. (I later noticed the status information tab in the inventory).

Question/Suggestion: Are some enemies capable of hiding? Sometimes I see rats coming out of nowhere, and once I thought a goblin suddenly became visible, but it’s impossible to determine if they came from another room or corridor.

Question: is it the same to perform the search action with 1 ap remaining or 10 ap remaining?

Bug: when entering a room by diggin a Wall through a neighboring room, the line of sight mechanic doesn’t work and you can only see 1 tile into the room.

I hope I'm not being a bother, but I sense that this is a great foundation for an extremely well crafted roguelike. It still needs something to distinguish itself from others, but I really would like to see construct having its own good rogue game and you've laid a nice foundation for it. Hope this will grow into something spectacular.

Hello!

I am really loving this game for some reason. The additional sounds and music has added a lot of atmosphere to the game! Awesome!

I still have some humble suggestions based on my own experience with the game. You don't have to take them too seriously, but maybe they will give some ideas, so I will just write them down, just in case.

Started with rogue, low str and weak weapon initially presented a slight challenge, and I could lose as much as half of my hp... but as soon as I bought the 50 gold, 1 damage reduction leather armor, enemy damage becomes laughable. Then it all went back to the same gameplay as knight. In fact, it was much better since I had a better search and lockpick skill, and found a lot of gold and items in hidden chests. With knight I couldn't even open a single locked chest, which is acceptable as a balance thing.

The throw knife skill of rogue is so bad considering its mana cost. It does laughable damage. In every manner of speaking, moving into attack is much better. Does it get better over time, or with increased mind skill? Another question: Lets say I have 12 action points when I'm next to an enemy. WHen I attack, do I make only 1 attack, or the number of attacks is based upon a combination of the weapon and the action points remaining?

I noticed that goblins have shield and can also reduce the damage I deal. Hadn't noticed this with knight, but it was noticable with rogue as I was dealing a lot of 0's. This is good. Enemy with armor can make it challenging.

A couple ideas:

-increased enemy damage or reduced starting hit points. This may mean that I want to get out of the level early for hp shopping instead of exploring all of it. This also means that constitution is more important stat, and health potions are essential. (I played with three different classes and never once felt the need to consume a health potion).

-remove the armor buff scroll or make it very expensive. Even the initial 1 damage reduction armor makes the damage output of certain enemies irrelevant. Mice and bats for example deal either 0 or 1 damage when I have 1 armor. When I increase the armor even later enemies deal no damage.

-Increase the effectiveness of all player spells. No spell I have tested was worth it, even the utility things like invisibility and combination of auto-crit when invis, are not worth the mana investment. It's almost always better to retreat, get a lot of action points, and slaughter the enemy. The spell scrolls, for example, it's almost always better to sell them for money.

-Introduce ranged and/or annoying/challenging enemies. If you already have ranged enemies, introduce them earlier. This would open up tactical play (like retreating and luring them to close combat, making use of doors, digging, etc.), and maybe make spell use more important. Every floor beginning from 3 onwards should have at least one annoying enemy that makes the player consider his resource use. The snakes for example should poison with more effectiveness, makes saving throws even the more important. A good idea might be to make the attacks of those "annoying" enemies cause status effects, like the snakes currently do with poison.

I will write more as I play, if you wish.

Started with ninja. Purchased the leather armor with my first gold. 1 damage reduction completely invalidates almost all enemy damage in the first few floors. Ninja is so fast that no enemy can stand the plethora of attacks, even with the puny damage output.

Found one bug: 1 amulet and 1 ring I unlocked with knight was visible in the armory, but their prices didn't display. When I bought them it did cost 100 gold ish. The same problem is NOT present for the shield that I had unlocked, which displayed the price correctly. (+1 attack ring and amulet of searching, to be specific).

I see that you have implemented xp gain from traps. Very nice.

I still didn't need to use any potions at all. Either our damage output is too large, or enemy damage input is too low. I am not sure if this problem goes away in later levels, like lvl 50 ish, but it's a long grind until then. I suggest that the whole game be like 40 levels instead of 100, and enemy progression is increased. Will need a lot of testing, but I think I would enjoy testing it out. Still, I suggest you keep a strict version library, just in case.

Br.

Looks really good, and there's always this potterish itch that can't be fulfilled in game environment to the extend that I want. Everytime I see one such project I get excited. Keep us excited here with frequent updates!

This is really good! You can really develop and expand upon this. I don't know what your intention on food balance is, but I played it down to floor 4, and until this point combat was a joke (too much action points, too small enemy damage -was playing knight, had 2 damage reduction maybe?) and all the money I collected went to food. I don't know what happens when your stomach is 0, do you die immediately?

Purely on a resource management basis, I think food should either last longer, or should be cheaper, so that player can look upon purchasing other items. Maybe things smooth out as we go deeper, but then it is a little bit slower on development, I think it's safe to introduce mambas on floor 3 for example instead of floor 4.

Basically, more food, increased difficulty is my suggestion. Roguelike people like sweet suffering.

Onto technical level, may I ask which the line of sight algorithm you implemented and how did you do it with construct?

This is amazing. Expand upon it and construct might finally have a worthy roguelike!

Hello friends, thanks for the comments. shinkan Iolva, why I had two versions? Because I have iAds in one and Admob on others, also the links to the stores where I ask the user for a rating are different, and I was not aware I could test where the game was running as shinkan said. So I seperated the code into two branches. Now I'm enlightened and will probably merge the code into one base in the next update. (It seems I must have an update as well, because a few dedicated players have already beaten all the 80 levels! A very spectacular achievement indeed considering how devilish some of the puzzles were!)

It was our first game release, and I was by no means a master of construct or coding or game design, but I feel there are many people out there in our position, and the challenges will probably feel the same for them as well. There were times where we had to stop for two weeks figuring out all the mopub thing, export options, fixing bugs and unexpected behaviour after exports, etc. The mood easily turns sour at those times, but we always came back for another round and finally the beast was down.

Things are very different now, of course. After the experience sinks in, it feels much easier as we now know our way in the dark forest of exportwood. So I hope this article may help people keep moving if they are stuck in the final stages of deployment.

Hello friends.

A couple months ago we came to a point where we were satisfied with the polish of our puzzle game 100CUBES and stopped development. It was now time for the dreaded export sequence. At that stage we were targeting android platform only; because phonegap was nothing like it is today and our initial tests with cocoonjs were -contrary to the forums' general consensus- quite enjoyable. We never had problems about fps, at least, and that seemed enough. The most challenging part was the advertisements.

You see, in order to display adMob adverts while exporting with cocoonjs, you had to implement another advertisement system, moPub, into your project. Along with another membership, integration of admob into mopub first, then mopub into your project settings in cocoonjs interface, was a very clumsy process. Especially, at those times, mopub interface was a nightmare. Somtimes controls on their pages decided not to show up, other times they showed up but did not register input. And there were some vague, hard to understand settings, with little to no documentation. There was, luckily, some very nice tutorials here in construct tutorial pages, so after a week of headbanging, we somehow got it to work.

By the way, at that point we were complete strangers to apk signing and, I must say, if somehow someone had warned me about what was about to happen, I may have completely left mobile programming. Now I'm glad no one warned me. Because I have my game on both major mobile platforms at the moment. But joined with the admob-mopub-cocoonjs cycle of torture, that apk signing process sucked all the joys of having a complete game out of us back then. We were horcruxes basically. That android SDK setup is a nightmare itself. It is a huge library with a user-enemy installation sequence. For the signing part of a project you are going to wrap with something like cocoonjs, you have to use command lines. You type some black magic to get a key, then you type some more black magic to sign your apk with it and then you also need to add some witchcraft because your newly signed apk needs "aligning"... Yeah...

-Early versions of 100CUBES

But... it worked. After a sleepless night, we were able to see our game in google play store. Initial reaction was mediocre, just by using our own network presence, which can be scored 2 on a scale of 10, we were able to get to trending page of the google play store for a couple of hours. A couple hundred downloads in a couple hours did the trick. We did not have a noticable follow up though, and since this was also something like a learn-as-you-do project for us, we haven't written blogs or prepared press kits about game either.

A week later, IntelXDK happened. We had also fixed a couple of bugs in our game so we decided to try it for our updated version's export. It was a relief to be able to directly integrate admob ads into it. No more moPub. Same performance. A very enjoyable interface - which is getting better every week. This time around we were also warlocks so black-magic part was a breeze. We had everything ready in a couple hours. We were so thrilled that we set our next target:

Deployment to appstore.

-Latest version of 100CUBES

IntelXDK said somewhere, that it can take your same project, integrated with admob, and export it for apple devices. It only asks for the certificates. Certs? What are those? It turned out apple uses some kind of certification process if you wanted to publish something to their store.

That seemed to be another nightmare period coming, but in truth, even though it cost us a 750 USD second hand barely working macbook and a 99 USD store membership, once we were able to get what the hell was going on with their certificate system, it was a relatively painless period. That certificate part, though, was very alien to us PC heads. I felt like a monkey with a bazooka while working on that machine. Countless times I closed the internet-surfer-thing's window trying to type an because the other key next to alt does a close command when combined with q...

Anyway, apple side wants to keep everything very safe and simple, so just by having a macbook you get an integrated authorization and signature process. It is actually built in to a service embedded into the macbook itself. And once I understood it replaced the signature process of the android SDK, I was relieved. Yet still, that part took a week to figure out as well.

Because you have to go into some legal stuff in order to be able to combine your bank account with apple's services, unlike google's paypal integration. So they take things seriously. But if you are thinking about using a pc for their websites, forget it. They are pc-unfriendly in every way possible. Even their colors show different in pc's, they also take forever to load and some controls don't show up -some of the time. When filling a form there, it kept giving me an error while everything seemed to in place. Only when I filled the form in our millenium-macbook I noticed there was a checkbox hiding from sight on pc. I compared the screens and it was invisible behind the textbox in my pc display. I was using chrome, for the record.

Anyway, our certs were ready, but IntelXDK didn't like them. I couldn't make it accept my certificates! So I decided to look for an alternative and I was surprised to see that Phonegap was something straight now. Yeah, it seems after iOs 8, phonegap is now a viable option if you accept the fact that it will only perform well in iOs 8 devices. Is that a problem? Well, in my country it is. here, some people still fight back against iOS 8 because they believe it includes secret codes that gradually kill the old phones in order to help sales of iphone 6's. My folk are imaginative, yes. We also have the disadvantage of using characters like Ç,I,S in our language... which turned out to be real culprit for IntelXDK not wanting to accept our certificates. It turns out there is a problem of intelXDK with Turkish language, because we never had problems before while exporting for the google play store. But after a format to our primary machine and installing Turkish windows 8.0, IntelXD became useless for us.

Anyway, back to the topic: Phonegap interface is very simple, process is also very straightforward. You only have to manually show some icons in your html settings before submitting the project to their website for export After that, our game worked painlessly and with very good performance.

Except, we had to replace our admob advertisements with iads advertisements, otherwise, export was successfull but the layout that we called admob ads crashed the game. Yes. So now we have two separate versions to update in the future, one for android, one for iOs.

But it is there out, working in both platforms, free but with ads. iOs version lacks intersititials because for some reason construct 2 api for iads lack the support, but it's fine. We can do with banner ads as well.

-Felt like a genious indeed, after figuring out apple's certificate system.

So, long story short... It's a fun experience to code with Construct. Exporting to mobile is a painfull process, yes, but only before your virgin voyage. That process has to be painfull, it seems, but once it's done, now you are initiated. I am pretty sure everyone will stumble upon this process, in different steps perhaps, but they will, and only thing I can suggest is to not give up. You can give a break -and god knows we did- but get your ass back to your project and start all over again. Because all the pain go away when a magazine accepts to write an article on your game, for free. Today it happened. We are tired, but we are proud. Our iOs version came months late, but it was worth the fight. And we are very hopefull for the future now.

100CUBES is now on iOs! It was a little bit complicated before, but with recent updates we were able to push the game through PhoneGap, with iAds. It's a challange itself to upload a game to appstore, but we have done it, all thanks to awesome Construct 2. Check it out, it's free <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt=":)" title="Smile">

https://itunes.apple.com/TR/app/id988403193?mt=8

I am sure kids wll love it. Nicely done.

It reminded me of a game I used to play in commodore 64 like... decades ago... I really like where this seems to be going. Would you consider varying the tree's heights? I think the forest -which is already nice- would look much better that way. Love the visuals.