This.
This is a welcome change 
Yeah, although eventually theyāll still die. Poor adventurers and mercenaries are, letās face it, cannon fodder 
Just find one of the two companions available in the game. You can equip them, level them up and raise their skills. And they never die, just get incapacitated.
Found the time to play the new version a little. All the little improvements really add up to an even better game experience. I still donāt know what to do next (canāt reach the wyvern mountains, no idea where to find minotaur horns and canāt find the location where the orcs captured some guy)ā¦but I eventually made it to level 8 anyway. I noticed just one small flaw: My companion started with -1 available skill points, which increased back to 0 after leveling up).
the last bit was an adjustmentā¦ originally I gave them level+1 skill points, and finally decided that they needed to be nerfed down a little. Sorry for the ugly experience 
Wyvern mountains are still in development. They appear in the world map. In the next ābigā version, the world map will give you specific info on areas you tap.
Minotaurs are somewhere, I can tell you if you want. Same with the orc lair, I can spoil if you want. A couple clues: orc lair is real close to the woodman who gave you the questā¦ but not easy to get there without a detour. Minotaurs are on the northwest, far away.
Here is a full quest list in the same order they appear in your journal. That way you can check what you missed or was added.
Let me know if something weird happens with the road encounters. I still have to add more varied encounters, but I hope the engine works well.
As always, thanks for helping
Iāve got it installed, looks good. I got one crash on crossing a boundary (accidentally at that). Iāll be back once Iāve had time to play around with it more.
(Does eat battery pretty quick, but I guess that is to be expected.)
This is supposed to be crash free for some time now. But I did lots of changes to maps in 741 so Iāll read the report and fix it, thanks!
Iāve only seen it crash once since. One thing about both time, I was being chased when I crossed into a new region, and it crashed when I tried to return. Other than that the only problem Iāve seen is that the sound comes and goes unpredictably.
it is a crash, with message included, or the game just closes? I see no crashes in the google Play console, please if you get a message and have a button for sending info, make sure to click it. Iāve not been able to reproduce this.
sounds go awayā¦ music too, or just fx?
thanks.
Iāve seen a dialogue the first and third time; the first it disappeared before I could use it (perhaps I accidentally hit something else that took the focus away the second time?). I went back and crashed it again on purpose (predicted being chased to a new region and then coming back would do it, and sure enough it did), and the report should be on its way.
Got it, thanks
Only because I know people tends to be curious around here, it was:
com.badlogic.gdx.utils.SerializationException: Class cannot be created (missing no-arg constructor): net.fdgames.GameEntities.Final.Projectile
Caused when you exit a map and the dynamic contents (monsters, plants, loot, etc) is saved into a json for later reinstantiation. I forgot to make an empty constructor in one of the latest GameEntities I added: projectile. This was impossible to detect unless you fled from a monster that was shooting arrows at you, because projectiles are short-lived.
I am soooo glad we have these debugging tools nowadays. Back in the 90s, this is the classical āzone crashā bug that would have been plaguing a game through its whole lifecycleā¦
Will be fixed in tonightās build.
Incidentally, there will be no more updates until I come back from vacation, around ending July. 8)
I canāt find this orc lair. The quest giver says āother side of the riverā, but all I can find there is the orc campā¦no lair. I searched all the whole map several times, but I just canāt find it. I find lots orcs and that campā¦but no lair!?
Not the small riverā¦ Other side of the BIG river. You cant cross it in this area even if it is there because there is no bridge over the Bluemist, go to Kingsbridge or New Garand to cross the river, then try to come back to the small part of the area that is west of the river.
I found it. Iāve never been there, I think.
Edit: Making the NPCs that you have to protect a little bit tougher or at least less hasty would help IMHO. The stupid guy constantly ran into the enemies as if I would he able to fight them but died instantlyā¦ >:( I had to reload several times to get him back home in one piece.
Agreed. When I designed that quest, spawns were very static. Now they are more difficult as you level, so the NPC you escort must be rescaled just as the enemies are. Will be fixed.
Back from my vacation, now working hard in a new version, and hopefully a Beta within two weeks.
It seemed to me the biggest problem was the AI which I guess was shared with guards and hired cannon fodder ā not only did the rescued woodsman have little health, but he actively attacked enemies. It might help if rescued characters avoided combat, or would flee when injured. I did manage to get him home using the scroll of recall and all my heal-ups, and many frustrating tries, but it seemed like the guy was just suicidal.
The actual companions (Griselda or whatever her name was exactly) seem a little better, partly by not really dying and partly by teleporting back to you if you keep running. They do sometimes trap the player in a doorway with a monster horde on the other side since they donāt seem to have any cease and desist mode.
A few other things Iāve noticed: I did find what might be a small hole in the world by the bandit cave at Kingsbridge ā I once was sent to the next region instead of the cave, so the may be a gap on the far right (I ended up and an up painted area where I couldnāt move and had to reload). After dying the local map is empty of monsters until reloaded by leaving and returning. If more than one game is saved, and is switched, the character icon for the first game load is used for all, but the correct pic appears on the character sheet type page.
Iām at a loss on how to deal with ghosts ā so I get all kinds of ghost protection. I still seem to do hardly any damage to them, not enough.
I know lots of games do this, but stillā¦ if you make the spawns harder and the NPC tougher as the player levels up, has the player levelled up? (In any meaningful sense)
Yes, before release I will allow you to talk to NPC followers to switch tactics. Youāll be able to tell them to only attack enemies when they get real close.
Got it, thanks. Fixed for .744
I was not able to reproduce this. When you reload after dying, you will return to the map as it was when you slept, so maybe what happens is that you had killed all the monsters before going to sleep? Do civilian NPCs spawn normally?
Got it, thanks. Fixed for .744
Ghosts are almost inmune to physical damage, most weapons will only do minimum damage to them. Try elemental damage, because theyāre vulnerable to it, in particular shock. Or, as youāre going to deal minimum damage anyways, better to use a faster weapon.
EDIT: and use a Potion of Death Ward, combined with your items. Or cast the spell if youāre a cleric.
Thank you very much for those bug reports and for your feedback
A fair question, and an interesting one as well. Not only I see your point, but I have said the same thing myself many times when playing games like Skyrim. What is the point of having become godlike-powerful if I still meet bandits that kill me in three hits?
The problem is inherent to the design of open worlds. In a linear RPG this doesnāt happen at all: difficulty slopes up, and the player tries to keep up his power level with it. But when you design an open world, in which you have no control on where the player goes or in what order he does things, you have to face a conundrum: how to avoid presenting the player a world in which almost all the content is not appropiate for his current level. Heāll constantly meet enemies that are too weak or too strong.
And it will happen, and will be more serious than you might think. Imagine a game in which there are roughly 20 ādifficulty stepsā or levels. Imagine you design 100 areas/dungeons for your game, each of one different level, 1-20, and you give the player the ability to freely play them in any order. Only a 5% of them will be of an appropiate level for your player, at any given time. So as he wanders and explores, heāll find things either boring, or impossible. Even if you use tricks like, grouping geographically areas of similar difficulty, or blurring a bit the difference between levels, in the end, still most of the content will not be fun for the player to experience. Thatās why games like the Elder Scrolls series made the design choice of scaling up the content as player levels.
But like you pointed out, that kills the joy of becoming more powerful. So this is what I did: a compromise, based in two ideas. First, scaling up is not indefinite, has a fixed range. Second, the areas will evolve to not become obsolete.
The first point is easy to explain: goblins of different kinds are level 1-7, never more (except certain bosses). In levels 1-3 you face puny goblins, with scarce rewards. and in 4-7, you meet sergeants, firedancers, etc, which also have better loot and give more XP. And they never become more powerful than that, so yes, eventually you become more powerful than goblins, giving meaning to your leveling up. Other spawn tables, like bandits, or orcs, have their own level ranges.
That by itself doesnāt solve the problem, of course, because even if this helps increasing the % of game content that is level-appropiate, still the game areas become more and more obsolete as you play. But here is when the second idea comes into play. Once the player ādefeatsā an area, it evolves into a different challenge, with its own story, risks and rewards.
A little example to illustrate. There is a goblin dungeon, which is appropiate for levels 1-7, with a certain boss that once you defeat, ends the goblin menace. That could bring up some new options for the player, as the trade improves in the nearby town, and maybe new npcs with quests and stories. But eventually, a tribe of trolls sets up in the empty cave, led by their shaman king. This doesnāt need to be linear, or fixed at all, of course. This way, if the player finds the goblin cave ātoo lateā, when he is level 10. Heāll quickly wipe out the goblins and become the hero, but eventually when the cave gets new inhabitants, heāll meet an appropiate level challenge. Similarly, he can still accidentaly enter an area that is appropiate for level 18-20, like a dragon lair, and die quickly, because after all thatās what should happen.
So yes, answering your question, I think that leveling can be meaningful even with scaling content, if done right. My target is not making all of the game ALWAYS appropiate for the player, but changing that 5% of playable areas in my first example, to, letās say, a 50%. Still youāll run into things that kill you, and youāll also get chances to overpower things.
That is what I am trying to do, currently. It takes a lot of work, and most areas in Exiled Kingdoms still donāt have different āstagesā, just a couple of them do. But eventually thatās the shape I want it to have.
Sorry for the wall of text, but itās a topic that has been in my head for a long time
I have the same problem in the simulation I am working on; it seems to me that as the player levels up, the game they play should change - easy opportunities are still there but they are not rewarding. But new opportunities and interactions have been opened up that were not feasible at a lower level. To that end I am building in a hierarchical semi-feudal social structure into the game.
This usually happens when dying in the Lannegar mines and respawning at the inn in Lannegar ā on my way back to the mines the minor goblin camps I usually raid on the way are gone (the major NPCs in town are there, but I think the cannon fodder mercenaries are missing(?)). Theyāre all back when I leave the mines though, and I can spawn them by crossing into the Sagar forest and back. I donāt think Iāve seen it elsewhere, but Iām not usually look for that specifically, so Iām not always paying attention ā there it jumped out at me. Also, when I noticed that it wasnāt with the latest snapshot, since Iām a bit of an Android noob and only learned to install update recently, so I didnāt have the latest version until bedtime (which is why I didnāt go to bed on time last night).
I figured out the effective ghost killing on my second play through of the current main quest content ā the first time I derped around a lot and never finished the Lannegar mines quest line, so I never got the baronās sword. Having a shock sword made a huge difference.
On difficulty progression, it seems thatās a good idea but could be a hard thing to tweak just right. Right now some quests actually seem harder to finish at higher level (at least rescuing Constanza was, though its confounded by possibly getting better at the game). I like the idea of content scaling some like this, though when I have to spend a lot of time running between area for quests I wouldnāt really have a problem with some of the country side Iāve already explored and just want to cross seeming a little easy (though I suppose I could let the boat man take me some places).