For the last 3-months, WazHack has been polished by a web-based beta period, with a total of 9 beta releases, over 200 interim patch releases, and 30,000 games played.
The result of that polish is now available for purchase as a stand-alone Windows game on Desura:
The web version will of course continue and help rapidly test the 1.1 release, but already players are reporting that the Windows stand-alone version gives a much more familiar and smoother gameplay.
Dear Mr. Wazhack,
ReplyDeleteyour game is making me quite tormented, in a good way. It suffers from over-randomization, in my opinion. Currently v 1.0.10 build 738 (browser) is giving me nightmares. Roguelikes obviously, are random by definition, but I feel, without much experience of roguelikes, that it is too random. Every game has a learning curve. Fighting games =button bashing etc with some sequence.
Strategy games, thinking required if turn based and familiarity with all units/enemy is realtime.
However, the random generation of the dungeon is painful to the extreme.
On my first go last week I had 2 shops on the first 3 floors. A day later I found out that bakeries exist as do temples and they were right next to each other, but the entire 15 floors I had mapped had 2 shops.
At 300 feet a hard creature appeared that I had seen down past 800 feet.
I expect the randomisation routines were hard to create, but, I think this needs to be less random otherwise its just a mindscrewing game because it is just too random.
I absolutely love the design of this game and I can see there's a lot of work involved.
I have paid £3 for it on desura and I hope that wazhack can evolve slightly.
If your intention is to keep this for diehard roguelikers, then fair enough, I doubt I'll be playing it.
It's got quite some pull on me because you do have to think and remember.
Another issues is cursed items, of which there is an abundance.
I have had several games where I have had nothing but cursed items, no remove curse scroll, no temple........
In 40 games I have seeen temples maybe 4 times. bakeries 3 times, shops, 15 times.
I can only hope that within a few months this game is less random but still keeps the attention to detail and trickiness, reduces cursed by items by about 30% or at least has one church within 800 feet (at any point)
Anyway, just one person's opinion and i'm not even very resilient to these roguelike games.
I appreciate your efforts much and I hope that eventually I find the game to my liking. This does not mean that I expect it to give me a teddy bear to take with me or hot milk lol.
I could write in more detail if you wish, but I'll play it for a few more weeks probably before I would comment further.
Regardless of my thinking, this game, like a lot of indies, and a lot of flash games has something really good about it, even though my relative didn't appreciate it, the cad!!
I am torn between love and hate of this :)Grrrr
ANYONE READING THIS. SPOILERS BELOW
1) Eat food until you are "full" this way you will go longer and not have much rotting food. Freshly eaten is better.
2) Did you expect any more lollllllllllllll.
Certainly such randomness is the nature of a Roguelike. Shops are actually one of the things for which randomness is constrained in WazHack. The expected number of each shop type is tightly controlled. The rate is also controlled (but yes, sometimes you will get two shops in a row when you haven't seen one for a while), and ultimately anything is *possible* however unlikely.
ReplyDeleteMonsters however, should only appear around an expected level. The only exception to this is if there is a Polymorph trap, and even then the type is constrained to only a few levels deeper (in contrast, NetHack allows almost any monster in such situations!)
Cursed items I actually agree with, and I am in the process of tuning the rates.