Andor's Trail

Thanks for the feedback!

With the activity on the forum, I'm surprised more people haven't contributed. ATCS and Tiled are easy to use and the tutorials explain everything. The only thing that gave me trouble was Android Studio.

Yes, the maps were created in Tiled. Everything else in ATCS. I should have mentioned that b/c I couldn't get the graveyard map to open in ATCS either. Now I know why!

1. Yes, the quest_70 (saying you killed the boss) goes off when you speak to the boss b/c I could not figure out how to make the event go off AFTER the boss dies or when you get the key. I didn’t think of the script areas, I’ll try that.

2. As for being unbalanced, I was aiming to make it a notch more difficult than Lodor’s cave but honestly I just put random stats for the monsters. I’ll take a look at existing monsters and tweak them accordingly. I’ll also tweak the sword.

3. Dialogue – no problem changing that. I recall a couple of dialogues that poked fun about RPG hero’s barging into houses and was building off that. For algore’s intro, I understand if breaking the 4th wall is too much. No political statement per se, I just thought it was funny that putting the name together looked like an RPG name. I'll change it. The other instances are not supposed to be breaking the 4th wall. My thought was it’s the hero’s internal thoughts. I’ll clean them up and also remove the cursing

4. Shading – I wanted to have the player enter the graveyard at night (even though like you said there is no passage of time in the game). I read somewhere in the forums about using the shading to simulate night/darkness like in Lodar’s cave. Guess I didn’t think about having it change back. I’ll try your suggestion, maybe I’ll change it to a curse or something that makes it dark and then have it revert back when the curse is broken.

Anyways, the other suggestions (making the map more diverse) are simple changes. I’ll correct them and resubmit.

Thanks

Great.

There's a new feature called map filters in ATCS that also can give this dark shading look without using the above layer. No way to change it by script yet, but that should be rather easy to add.

Tomcat wrote:Does he tell you an inconvenient truth?

Man-Bear-Pig

Salzano wrote:With the activity on the forum, I'm surprised more people haven't contributed. ATCS and Tiled are easy to use and the tutorials explain everything. The only thing that gave me trouble was Android Studio.

Yes, the maps were created in Tiled. Everything else in ATCS. I should have mentioned that b/c I couldn't get the graveyard map to open in ATCS either. Now I know why!

great work Salzano & thanks for this thread!

almost everything i've contributed needed work from the coders to make functional...

i'm just getting active on GitHub for the first time (after lurking awhile)
and the information in this thread is indispensable to someone in my position.

now i can more easily contribute content that can be injected right into the game,
without repeating what is being addressed here.

nyktos wrote:

Tomcat wrote:Does he tell you an inconvenient truth?

Man-Bear-Pig

will only make sense if you've seen the South Park episode...

Whoosh!! All I know about South Park is that some poor slob named Kenny gets killed every episode...

Salzano wrote:2. As for being unbalanced, I was aiming to make it a notch more difficult than Lodor’s cave but honestly I just put random stats for the monsters. I’ll take a look at existing monsters and tweak them accordingly. I’ll also tweak the sword.

In my personal opinion, this game doesn't need more areas as hard as Lodar, right now. Someday, absolutely. But what is needed are more areas for intermediate levels, so that you can get to Lodar-ready levels with more questing and exploration, less repetitive grinding. I don't know if the current dev team sees it the same way.

But regardless, whether your new content is nerfed to fit the more immediate need or if it is left high-powered (which I'm sure a lot of players here would love!), it is a very welcome contribution! I hope you feel inspired to continue!

I looked though your quest. It's very entertaining, but as Zukero says the dialogues are not suitable for AT. No swearing or expletives, and no references to things such as "Greenmaze grass" or "a line of pure Fallhaven Bonemeal". LMAO when I read that, but it's just not AT. The dialogues need to be written in the same style as the existing dialogues, so that the game has a consistent feel. Writing in a style that's not your own is not always easy, but try and get it as close as possible.

On to the subject of balance. You need to create your items and NPCs while keeping a very careful eye on what already exists. ATCS has an item comparator and an NPC comparator. Alternatively, you can use this website: http://andorstrail.irkalla.cz/0.7.0/index.php.

Taking your sword for example, it has an attack cost of only 3 AP, an attack chance that's as high as any other weapon in the game, a block chance that's as high as any other weapon in the game, a goodly amount of damage, has a critical skill, and it would be the only weapon that also increased DR, and it would be the only weapon that also increased HP. Add to that, you have given it 4 actor conditions, with 10-20% chance for each. Two of those, Dazed and Stunned, are pretty powerful effects. It's just too much of everything. Nothing gets an attack cost of only 3AP (one weapon currently does have this, but it will not be repeated). The minimum is 4AP. You would have a hard time selling me on the idea that a weapon can boost DR, or HP just by equipping it. Adding multiple actor conditions to a weapon is tricky to balance because it's not trivial to calculate the net probabilities. For your sword, the chance of one effect is 35.7%, the chance of two effects is 8.3%, the chance of three effects is 0.83%, and the chance of four effects is 0.03%, for a total of 44.9% chance of at least one effect, on each hit. That's kind of a long analysis, but hopefully you get my point. making a weapon special or unusual in some way is fine, but making one that special in every way is not. It needs to be scaled back, a lot.

You can get a reasonable judgement on how hard your monster is by comparing the XP gain to what already exists in the game, being careful to only compare bosses to bosses. Then allow for whether the monster is likely to be battled one-on-one, or you will have to fight a mob. The bigger the mob, the more you have to scale back each monster. Those nasty dungflies at the start of the green maze give less than 100 XP each, and I still hate them

A couple more technical points:
1) The angry graveyard corpse has a critical multiplier of 20 . I assume that was a mistake.
2) Some of the trees and the double height pillars and statues should have upper parts in the above layer, which are walkable. This allows you to walk behind them. You have this for the dead tree at the top of graveyard0, but nowhere else. Take a look at other maps to see what I mean.
3) You have part of a tomb in graveyard1 that's walkable, and it shouldn't be.

Despite all of the above, I'm impressed you put this together. We could use all the help we can get when it comes to content creation, so if you can adjust your content to AT style and balance it better (at least to the point where it's easier for us to tweak it), I'm sure we can find a home for it.

It took a month? Completed the game AND created some content?! Good for you. The maps look like someone swept them up. It took me like 2 months for my first char.