The new year starts with a little trailer I put together. It shows most of the common stuff in the game so far. Swords, staffs, some of the spells, the enemies, container smashing, etc, etc. The Magic Armor spell is new though. Cast near the start of the dark section of the trailer. It gives a temporary bonus to DEF.
Remember, everything is still a work in progress. Controls are a bit sticky here and there, enemies react through walls, basic camera focus... you name it. All in good time.
BeamSplashX:
I was thinking of random loot only at first, but I think it'd be fun to have a few unique ones as well. Some of them could possibly be obtained via simple side-quests, like killing a number of certain enemy, then returning to the quest giver. I want the game to be playable in many different ways. Grinding the basic dungeons and focusing on the random stuff is one way, collecting equipment by doing side-quests is another, in which case exploring every single dungeon level isn't always necessary to get proper equipment.
Nice. I recommend you speed up most of your effects (mainly the ones where weapons hit enemies), they linger too long. Perhaps you should consider making gold slightly less common, and slightly larger, picking up little coins doesn't seem very appealing.
alastair john jack:
You may be right about the weapon hit effects. I've now hastened them up slightly. As for the coins, I may increase their size, depending on what other money items will appear in later game. Basically, there's currently coins and diamonds. Coins are worth $10, and are size 6x6. Diamonds are worth $100, and size 8x8. Obviously, the item that is worth $1000 will be 10x10 or larger, so eventually it's fairly fine to skip going after single coins anyways, and focus on the more worthy and more 'appealing'-looking valuables instead. Unless you're really desperate for money. Right now the money has no use anyways, so it's not a huge priority at the moment. Will look into that eventually.
Also, unlimited arrows for the bows? Maybe you should make it limited otherwise people will opt to use ranged over melee more. Well maybe, it's your game you'd know more than I would
Del Duio:
I've been pondering about the arrows. Bows are certainly the safer choice most of the time, but I hope to make the higher level enemies trickier, so that it's either harder to hit them, or they retaliate. So far bows are also slower and weaker than melee weapons, so I tend to rely on melee more often, just because it gets the job done faster, if with some risks. It's hard to say how it all works in higher levels though, so I may still choose to have a limit to arrows or some sort of penalties to excessive use. We'll see.
If you do decide on making limited arrows you could then have a new mod like "+50% max arrow capacity".
So say if somebody found some archer's gloves that had the mod they might pick bows over swords because when combined with the gloves they'd make bow and arrows better overall.
Del Duio:
Possibly something like that, yeah. Though I doubt I'll have gloves as an armor type initially. I've been planning on having a chest piece and helmet for the time being. But I do get what you're saying. It could actually be better as a part of the chest piece, as it could be explained that the quiver that holds the arrows could be attached to it, and naturally have more capacity, rather than 'magically' increasing arrow capacity.
I was also pondering on making basic arrows unlimited, but to have some sort of quality arrows that were limited. The basic arrows would deal half damage, and possibly have other penalties, so a bow without quality arrows would be weak, but still usable at all times. Not sure if I want to do this though. Might be easier to just set a capacity limit, and make sure there's generally enough arrows to use most of the time. Fetching/buying arrows constantly should never become an issue though.
If you wanted you could maybe make arrows drop from enemies 10% of the time if you were using a bow. That might help so you'd never run out of arrows. It could create an arrow treasure object that sets alt value A to random 4-8 or something and that's how many arrows it refills when you pick it up. (?)
I don't use bows much in Diablo 2 but I do know that you NEVER EVER run out of damn arrows lol. It seems like every monster drops them, and at qtys of 80+.
I have a similar system for spells actually. finishing off enemies with offensive spells makes them drop water orbs that restore MP. Mystic spells have a 100% chance, Elemental spells 50%.
Anyways, what you said there gave me an idea, which is pretty logical too, to boot.
If the number of arrows each enemy has been hit by is counted, then a number of those arrows could be dropped as loot from the enemy, as reusable arrows. The ratio could be improved with bonuses, etc, explainable as skill to aim and operate arrows in a manner that preserves their functionality over use. Occasionally you could also loot arrows from enemies and containers too, but you'd still need to be careful not to waste arrows by missing targets. Thus it would also make aiming more important, rather than spamming.
Might need some testing, but overall that might be something worth pursuing, and easy to implement.