[Feedback] My thoughts on the game so far.

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[Feedback] My thoughts on the game so far.

Postby Llamageddon » Thu Apr 20, 2017 1:53 pm

Hello, I'm an avid roguelike player, and a bit of a game design enthusiast, and I just picked this game up yesterday, and have done perhaps 7 poorly-ended runs so far, and I'd like to share some of my thoughts, including ones vetern players might not notice or mind anymore. I'll put it in a list format, so that anyone who'd like to discuss can easily address them. (that, and I suck at writing things down otherwise)

Also, let me preface this with: I don't think the game is bad at all - I enjoy it - I'm just writing down my problems with the game, because well, that's the stuff that bothers me :-P

  1. You need to display results of a turn before the animations play out, because they take long enough that sometimes you really want to skip them, which is almost always a bad idea because you don't actually know what happened before it does. Sure, you can press i to skip them, and there are warnings, but that's not enough IMO.
  2. This is relatively minor, but show relic abilities in menu, and in fact, add a menu with settings, high scores, exit button, if possible.
  3. Also UI-related,
  4. The way the game has so many abilities with uncertain effect, and high miss rates, really makes it feel like every single thing you've got is just goddamn flimsy. It's just not a good way to do RNG, and actual balance aside, it just feels really trash.
  5. Also, attack/heal power is just... fuzzy. It tells you nothing about the damage an attack is going to do, nothing about how stats or lvel affect it, just nothing. IMO, change it to show damage and how it scales, instead. Also, would be nice if different abilities, including passive ones, scaled differently, with different stats.
  6. Modifiers bestowed by creatures have way too goddamn many possible abilities to choose from, making them extremely expensive wildcards, not to mention that it's just hard to go through all of that stuff and evaluate them, which, again, makes them feel kinda worthless. Reduce the amount of skills each has, maybe split them into different modifiers, possibly split modifier skillset into two groups, first added ability rolled from first, second from second. And what if getting the modifier from a creature with it was cheaper, to give more of a reward for linking with such creatures?
  7. And this honestly is a recurring theme... everything in this game just... feels so flimsy, impactless, unreliable. Half the early creatures have enough weaknesses to be worthless, 3/4 the abilities seem to be either unreliable, low-impact, or share cooldown with more useful ones, modifying demons is expensive and usually only yields minor benefit, so you're basically gimping yourself permanently by doing it early, which leads to an unhealthy and unfun "save all you've got for later" playstyle.
  8. (some of) the branches are really crazy. I always do Tower 1 1/2, which while tough(and tbh not fun, since you've got to put maximum cheese into your efforts and the margins are thin) is doable, but the other two branches I encountered(Vikhor's Sanctum and another one) were just ridiculous. My level 3-4 demons got slaughtered by level 8 demons faster than you can clear the hounds in Actaeon's linking.
  9. I think that you should have more normal cooldowns, and strengthen many abilities at the cost of giving them cooldowns. Part of the reason is that I dislike the way you want each of your demons to be a one-trick pony, and another is that right now, most abilities feel like a way to boost your DPS/EHP than actual impactful skills. Abilities should be stuff I'm excited to find and get, not like... farts.

Thanks for reading!
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Re: [Feedback] My thoughts on the game so far.

Postby Ferret » Thu Apr 20, 2017 3:49 pm

Hi Llamageddon, and welcome to the forums. :D I'm glad you're enjoying the game :) Lemme poke at the feedback here a bit. :)

1. Animations and control over them is something that could stand some improvement, I agree. I'm not sure I agree with the proposed method of fixing it necessarily? But, I agree there needs to be a choice other than "wait and see" and "skip and don't see".
2. This is probably coming soon... I've been slowly getting drug in that direction by other things anyway.
3. Freebie! :D
4. Hmm... I don't necessarily disagree with the miss rates on some abilities being high, but there's some elements being left out here. The vast majority of abilities are either 100% or 85% hit rates. You only start to get less than that when looking at status effect abilities or reactive abilities that have a chance of firing. But, it's worth noting that these are the base rates: in most cases, you can get some pretty sizable modifiers based on your stats, choosing your target well, and help from other abilities.
5. Attack/Heal Power is largely meant to be a relative scale. i.e.: A 100 Power attack is x2 as good as a 50 Power attack. Showing the damage/healing expected would be one thing, but showing all information on how that's scaled/calculated in the tooltips might be a bit technically dense, though I wouldn't mind adding more details on that to the manual perhaps.
6. Cleaning up/splitting up modifiers is currently on the list. For example: the current "Body" themed ones will probably get broken out into Lifedraining, SP draining, Poison, Paralysis, and Infection themed modifiers.
7. Ideally, the way credits scaling works was supposed to prevent that feeling of "save it all for later"... but maybe I just don't scale it sharply enough? As far things feeling flimsy, impactless, unreliable... some of this is probably a little due to the group nature of the combat compared to other roguelikes. Your main character in Demon is never going to be as directly powerful as say, your main character in ToME or DCSS, it'd be pretty broken if this was the case. That said... I have been toying with an odd idea in my head lately for possibly addressing this, even though it'd be a pretty drastic change. I will write up something in the Possibly Coming Someday forum about it once I've fleshed it out more.
8. Branches are intended to be hard :D ...but also optional. If there's a problem, it's that cheesing them is possible.
9. See reply to #7.

I'll write up that proposal I mentioned in #7 fairly soonish: it's actually been on my mind for a bit now, particularly when I had to do this last bit of balancing for T:21-23 content. Thanks for the feedback. :D
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Re: [Feedback] My thoughts on the game so far.

Postby Gaswafers » Thu Apr 20, 2017 8:29 pm

Isn't it inconsistent to say that spending credits early on is bad, but also to say that early branches are too dangerous? You need to invest credits into your early demons to be able to beat those early branches.
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Re: [Feedback] My thoughts on the game so far.

Postby Llamageddon » Sat Apr 22, 2017 10:04 am

4. Hmm... I don't necessarily disagree with the miss rates on some abilities being high, but there's some elements being left out here. The vast majority of abilities are either 100% or 85% hit rates. You only start to get less than that when looking at status effect abilities or reactive abilities that have a chance of firing. But, it's worth noting that these are the base rates: in most cases, you can get some pretty sizable modifiers based on your stats, choosing your target well, and help from other abilities.


Yeah, I know, but consider this, in a game where you and your demons aren't all that strong at all, do you really find yourself wanting to use unreliable abilities that might take 3-4 pops to proc an effect, of a magnitude that you don't even know, especially when it might expire before your other relatively-high-miss-rate attacks even take advantage of it? I feel like having effect magnitude, which influences either duration, power, or both, would be better.

5. Attack/Heal Power is largely meant to be a relative scale. i.e.: A 100 Power attack is x2 as good as a 50 Power attack. Showing the damage/healing expected would be one thing, but showing all information on how that's scaled/calculated in the tooltips might be a bit technically dense, though I wouldn't mind adding more details on that to the manual perhaps.


I'm gonna have to be a bit bent on this one, I don't think it's a good idea to leave it out of the tooltips, it's important information in a game where every hitpoint counts, and the game really doesn't benefit from having loose power estimates of attacks.

6. Cleaning up/splitting up modifiers is currently on the list. For example: the current "Body" themed ones will probably get broken out into Lifedraining, SP draining, Poison, Paralysis, and Infection themed modifiers.


Ah, nice! :3 It would rock if the modifiers added something extra rather than just reshuffle stats and add 2 random abilities. I mean, it's not bad, but I'd really like a bit more for two early levels' worth of credits. I feel like one of the appeal points of pokemon was that you could go far with even your basic pokemon - DemonRL has even more of this potential, IMO.

8. Branches are intended to be hard :D ...but also optional. If there's a problem, it's that cheesing them is possible.


Jeez man, I'd say they're barely possible if you cheese, and you want to make them harder? X_X I feel like I'd need a full set of well-modded demons with right resists and skills to defeat one of those crazy level 6-8 demons in the branches, and you throw whole groups of them at the player.


Also, about credits: I dunno, I haven't so far really hit a point where credit scaling hits, furthest I went was up to level 4, and costs of copying abilities and fusing demons remained I believe constant. And I understand that the costs are there to prevent you from cheesing a super overpowered demon into existence, but I feel like giving a limited resource shared between the demons and thorough the playthrough is kinda sucky of a way to do that. That said... I dunno if I have any better ideas, I'm afraid not really. Perhaps giving monsters aptitude for certain things which reduces costs or boosts power? Maybe using a monster's XP for teaching it?
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Re: [Feedback] My thoughts on the game so far.

Postby Gaswafers » Sat Apr 22, 2017 8:24 pm

Encounters in branches are suppose to be generated so that the overleveled demons show up in smaller packs, and ridiculous demons like Raiju in Ccao's Sanctum or Oni in Rush's Sanctum are suppose to only show up alone.

"Credit scaling" means something more complicated than what you think. As you go up in the tower, you find more and more credits. As you go up in level, modifying yourself with transmutations starts costing more too. The cost to give demons abilities, fusions, etc is based on their "base" level; the level you encounter them at in the wild. Unlike the player, the cost to modify them does not go up as they level up, but demons start leveling up slower the farther they get away from their base level. The point of this being that the amount of credits you spent early on will be relatively small compared to your income later on.

I think the problems you're having have to do with how interconnected abilities are in demon. Many of the abilities you can start with feel much weaker than others because they are balanced around a scenario where you have multiple synergistic abilities to go with them. Eye of the Dragon is the worst relic in this respect and Crown of Glory is the best relic when it comes to being functional right out of the gate.
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