Welcome back Linda!
Thanks for running through everything again, I hope to get a new area up soon with some quests and what not. I am also working on some more item images so I can some armor and other items into the game along with some of the skills that do not currently have a thread in the alpha.
Linda wrote:
First off, some good things:
The skill level ups seem to be working for me. I got two Dagger level ups and one in Life.
I like how the character pane now pops up the name of each slot when you hover the mouse over it. This will make equipping/unequipping easier (once I get some items, that is).
The floating description pane bug is definitely ameliorated. The description pane for an item does go away if I close the buy/sell window.
I notice there is now a popup window for multiple items that lets you select the number of items to be sold! This is awesome.
Mobs now automatically attack me when I walk into a room. I can still walk right past them, but I'll end up taking damage doing it, so there's less of a temptation to just waltz through a dungeon and only fight the more powerful creatures.
Thanks! Glad those updates are working out for you. I still have mob intellect n the list of things that need to make it into the game and will need to get some AI into the mobs that appear during some of the quest lines I am working on.
Linda wrote:
Then some less good things:
While I was level 1, all mobs attacked me twice before I could perform an action. Not much of a problem with a Rat or a Creeper, but with a Giant Rat I was half dead before I'd even participated in combat. Once I got to level 2, little mobs only got in one attack before I could hit them. Is this level-dependent and supposed to happen, or is it not supposed to happen?
There is a random chance that mobs can attack more than once, however, it shouldn't happen all the time or with each new mob. I will take a look at the logic for the random dual attack or see if something else is causing them to win out against you more than once.
Linda wrote:
If I switch to either the chat pane or the room pane while in combat, the mob will continue to attack me. In a way this makes sense--combat doesn't stop just because I'm not paying attention. But on the other hand, if there were lots of players on and I wanted to talk to them, and I kept getting killed trying to multitask, the game would be less fun. Maybe combat could pause while a player is looking at other panes?
I want to make things as real time as possible and later on introduce wandering mobiles, mobiles that come out a night, etc. It might become cumbersome allowing players to pause their view of the world. If you were in a group and the rest of the group is fighting something and you decide to pause, does that pause everyone in the world or just you? These kind of issues make pausing the world somewhat impractical as it should exist as a living thing.
Linda wrote:
For one reason or another, the sell button is still really, really finicky. I have to wave my cursor over it in a delicate little circle, wait a long time for it to turn into a hand, and then click and hope the button actually "sees" my click and lights up.
The buttons should be clickable when the mouse cursor is over them, regardless of whether or not it displays a hand. The hand is just a styling aspect, however, it should be displaying a hand whenever you place the mouse over the boundary of the button. I will take a look at the styling on the buttons to make sure the cursor is set properly.
Linda wrote:
And a random question:
Why does cheese exist?
Cheese actually provides 1 point of health and can be stacked, it can be sold to merchants and might be more valuable to some people than others. It exists in the game as food because all those fantasy novels I have read and continue to read feature the party as always eating bread and cheese when traveling to and fro across the land. It is my shout out to all my favorite fantasy novels. :)