KickStarter Monomyth - A first person action RPG/dungeon crawler - now available on Early Access

[RatTower]

Finally I got a bit more time!
I'll try to address a couple things and compile a list of issues in this post. I'll go through all the feedback and probably repeat myself a bit, but in case I miss anything please let me know.

-I think blocking consuming stamina (and by this I mean just being in the "block" stance, aka RMB) is bit too penalising, and will only scare player relying on defense (unless this is your intent);

It's a balance thing. It might work out better once you push endurance. Gotta test that with late game.

-the slimes didn't spit balls of acid like you shown previously, did you disabled it for the demo?

Disabled right now. Coming back later.

-when I use a torch, it don't appear in any hand and there's no way to put it out; is this intentional or a bug?

Coming with patch.

-the biggest problem with it so far is the slow movement; I like running being tied to athletics, but the default walking speed is just to slow

Weight has an effect on your movment speed. Belric's Watch actually isn't the first area in the game, so this might just be another balancing issue.

By the way what do mean by dexterity determining the weapon's effictivness?

Strength = Equipment requirement for weapons + raw damage bonus
Dexterity = damage bonus or (severe) damage penality

The game is just too dark. Now, to preface this, it could 100% be an issue on my end. I have tried adjusting the brightness on my monitor, changing the settings, etc. No matter what I do, I just can't seem to make it bright enough. This is what I'm referring to: https://imgur.com/a/V8vOXLv
Without a torch, certain areas are unplayable. This is by no means a bad thing - it gives a lot of power and weight to both the torches and divine light spells. Because torches and magic are a scarce resource, it gives them even more weight. So often in games, these types of items are simply rendered useless due to a game being too lenient with its light. However, I found that the torches still didn't illuminate enough, and when they did, it was too centered on the player. In the center of a room, I would expect the sides to be further illuminated than they were. An easy (or maybe not so easy, because I do not understand coding at all) way to fix this would be to add a gamma slider. If that would break balance too much, perhaps making torches/divine light stronger would do. Just my 2 cents! This was my biggest annoyance, and it was extremely minor compared to many alphas I have played, so hats off to you!

The linked screen seems like it's from a deliberately dark area. As you already point out, these are supposed to give torches and lightspells more meaning. I will adjust the torch light radius.

Speaking of the fish, I was not enamored with how closely the items drop from your character. I would personally prefer it if the item just dropped a little further away from the player, or even better, allowing the player to place it. I recall the instance of cooking the fish; I felt like I had to almost stand directly on the fire in order to place it correctly. I could just be really awful at placing things, but that's just me.

I believe someone already mentioned this, but you can carry items by holding "F" while looking at them. You can then push them away and pull them towards you with the mousewheel.

I think the game as it currently stands has a major flaw in terms of difficulty. In fact, I'm a bit confused as to what your goal with this first level is. Is it really supposed to be the introductory level ?

Belric's Watch is a later level. The tutorial boxes are only there for the alpha.

The first major issue is with keys. Keys allow you to open up various areas of the level, but there is currently no way to figure out if you've opened everything or if you've missed something. The lysdandria key is a good example. Without spoiling too much, it's standing on a small bench with candles in an alcove on a wall, and I literrally ran past this area a dozen times without seeing that there was a key here.

Lysandrian keys are basically "generic" keys that aren't necessary for progression. They are "consumables" and just offer an alternative to lockpicks or destroying a door. Those keys have a chance to break.

The second major issue is combat and the stamina meter. So far, combat seems to be the most buggy part of the game. Some undeads seem to get stuck, stop reacting / attacking and it even happened to myself a couple times too. In one occasion I was unable to attack, defend or move at all and had to stand here in front of a frozen undead. I forgot how I unstuck myself, but something was definitely bugged.

That's a fairly interesting one. Can you remember what enemy it was you were fighting?

The third major issue is the save system. I had to double check to be sure I didn't dream it, but no: the enemies reset on saving at altars. This is not cool, at all. I could somehow understand resetting enemies when dying, but that's not even what I'm talking about here: I kill an enemy, go back to an altar to save, and when I come back, that same enemy is back. I'm also losing experience points, and when respawning, it's not a real "reload", so the consumable items I had in my inventory ( and used previously ) remain lost. The consequence of all of this is that you cannot really game the system ( for example by killing enemies one at a time, saving, so that you can ensure minimum progression even if it's too difficult for you ), but in fact that as you keep saving / dying and losing consumables, your chances lower and the difficulty keeps increasing. I'm hoping that in the future you'll implement a true quick save / reload system instead of the current one, which reminds me of Ultima Ascendant ( and which was despised and criticized by almost everybody, if you recall.. ).

Enemies do not always respawn. What's currently happening is a KF4-like "enemy nest" system, where enemies respawn until you clear them out - this works pretty well when your enemy spawns are very clearly bound to a single room, but once encounters spread out (e.g. by patrolling) it becomes confusing. I'll try out something different in the coming patch.

For some reason one of the keys I found went into my inventory, and just on a whim I tried it on a nearby door and it unlocked it (Wasn't consumed). It seemed to have been established that there was a keyring system with a previous key, and it would automatically be used if it could be. How come this key needed to be used manually?

See above. Lysandrian keys are consumables.

The world state seems to not being fully saved/loaded -- at least enemies respawn and certain objects, such as doors, return to closed/locked state, while items seem do not respawn, which requires beating the alpha in one sitting to avoid progression issues.

There were actually a couple bugged doors that wouldn't persist their lock-state. Should be addressed once the hotfix is out.

The enemy health is revealed when you lock onto them, which feels off and kinda kills the mysterious atmosphere -- maybe you could hide that until a certain stat is way up there or something?

This might be worth thinking about. Perhaps this could be integrated with the "First Aid" skill.

So here is a little list of things that need to be addressed according to all this feedback. I hope I didn't forget anything. A couple of these will be in a hotfix, a couple will be in a patch and a couple hopefully in future versions. I have my own list of roughly 100 open issues. A few are overlapping with these things.

Some things for hotfixes & patches:
- balance arrow traps
- debug output for player position
- better item distribution (torches along the way / fill empty containers / rewards / more arrows)
- torch light radius
- torch light position
- stronger awareness decrease for enemy search state
- ESC to quit menus
- minimum damage on low stamina attacks
- lockpicking notes on doors
- torch tutorial
- AI rework for more randomized reactions (breakout attacks instead of just blocking)
- faster rotation for archers
- more 1v1 enounters
- turn off collision for dead slimes
- doors need to save their locked state correctly
- dousing torches / removing beneficial status effects
- stagger rebalance (perhaps increase movement speed penality)
- Fix mouse capture on documents
- UI element to close documents
- gamma slider
- make named keys more visible
- hint at interactive puzzle items
- fix stamina lock (no more exaggerated lockdown times)
- no more full respawn of enemies (!)
- proper linebreaks in dialogue texts / answers (fix text overflows)
- reposition mantling tutorial
- more generous mantling checks
- double click for trading
- lower camera roll on strafe


Some things for future versions:
- transform small static items into dynamic ones
- proper graphics settings, including resolution support
- rebinding keys
- spitting slimes
- non-intercepting mouse focus on alt-tab
- drag & drop menu + right click context menu in inventory
- ranged enemies switching to melee
- proper screenspace reflection (or remove)
- improve AI positioning to prevent deadlocks (integrate EQS queries)

Other issues (possibly up for balancing):
- Penalizing stamina drain on blocking
- Weight system
- atmospheric sfx variety
- UI size and/or make health easier to see
- Binding enemy health visibility to skill (perhaps first aid)
- archery affecting draw speed

I'll try to fix at least a good portion of the patch issues before sending out the next batch of alpha keys.

Rat Tower

 

[Nyast]

Belric's Watch is a later level. The tutorial boxes are only there for the alpha.

Oh, interesting. That obviously invalidates most of my comments regarding the difficulity being too high for an introductory level. How far into the game is this level ? What are you going to do with the caverns ( they seem to be tailored to being the tutorial area at the moment.. ) ? Move them to the "real" first level, or create a different tutorial in the first level ?

That's a fairly interesting one. Can you remember what enemy it was you were fighting?

I think it was an undead archer. The interesting part is that both him and I were standing on stairs, not sure if that could've caused a collision issue. It was near the lysandria key.

Enemies do not always respawn. What's currently happening is a KF4-like "enemy nest" system, where enemies respawn until you clear them out - this works pretty well when your enemy spawns are very clearly bound to a single room, but once encounters spread out (e.g. by patrolling) it becomes confusing. I'll try out something different in the coming patch.

Allright, but that doesn't explain why enemies reappear when you're saving the game.

I'm not sure if I made myself clear in my original description so I recorded a video of it happening (twice, actually, so that you can see it wasn't a random occurance):



It is 100% replicable ad nauseam. I my original play 2 days ago, I repeated it at least 6 times in this exact spot.

 

[V_K]

Shit, watching this feels so much like Arx Fatalis that I can't help but

 

[Child of Malkav]

From what I see it looks and plays so well. Damn. Dude, what a great job. Even this 2 min 44 sec footage is impressive. Please don't rush this. Take all the time you need.

 

[RatTower]

Oh yeah right, that guy.

So basically here is how the spawn system works in full:

Spoiler

Technically speaking a spawn point is nothing more than a really simple state machine with a list of NPCs assigned to each state. Whenever the spawn point is activated it spawns exactly the NPCs of its current state. Once those NPCs are cleared, the spawn point switches into a target state. However, this target state can still have NPCs attached. Also, the target state is currently final. So you clear out one wave of enemies and the guys on the target state will respawn indefinitely. Why such a weird mechanic you might wonder. The idea was to provide one main encounter per spawn point and then - if it adds anything to backtracking and further exploration - a small minor encounter that can surprise you when you re-visit areas.

I'd now change two things:
1) Target states must not be final. So instead of a target state I'd add a mapping of target states, meaning you can also switch away from a target state into a different one. Actually I wonder why I haven't thought of that before, because it makes the whole mechanism significantly more useful.
2) Add a switch for every NPC. The switch is persisted alongside the spawn point state. When an NPC is killed the switch is set and once the spawn is reactivated that NPC is no longer spawned.

Saving is only tangentially related, because resting at a shrine (which coincidentially also saves) resets all resetable entities within the world (e.g. spawn points).

Concerning the caverns: They will actually be expanded and connect to a few other areas.

 

[Nyast]

Anybody interested in me doing a small stream tonight ( in a few hours ) ?

 

[Nyast]

Allright, I'm gonna stream the beginning of the game - stream live here. No talking, just casual exploration of the game. I'm not planning on streaming the entire alpha, just maybe the first hour.

https://www.twitch.tv/Nyast

I'll upload the VOD on youtube later on if I can.

 

[Paper]

maybe I don't play enough new games or first person games but the 3D sound strikes me as incredibly luxurious and high tech

 

[DJOGamer PT]

That would be true if we still lived in the early 2000's...

 

[Nyast]

Video has been uploaded to youtube. High quality is being processed.



RatTower The intro music has a digital copyright claim from youtube which prevents the video from being monetized. I don't care as I don't monetize my video, but if you keep that music and promote the game to professional streamers later on, they might have to remove the intro. Just a FYI.

Also of interest in this video:
- I got attacked in my back when talking to Gashra at around 48'. Seems like you take no damage in that case, but it's very distracting.
- a few seconds later, as I run ayway, that NPC gets stuck / frozen until I attack him, see around 48'30
- as this is my second playthrough it's much easier / less confusing than the first time, especially as I have a better grasp of combat. So this isn't representative of a "new player" experience.
- the video seems a bit darker than it is in reality when playing it, not sure why

 

[RatTower]

Hey Nyast, thanks a lot for the video!
I'll go through the entire thing later.

As for the music: I actually purchased a license for its usage (which was a very cheap, quick solution for the alpha), but that probably doesn't stop youtube from picking it up in its copyright algorithms.
In the end I want to use original music for Monomyth (and similar music for the intro), but for the time being I'll have to make due and see whether anything can be done about this.
Thanks for letting me know!


As for the first patch: It's coming along nicely. I'm currently fixing the item distribution and some balancing stuff. Perhaps I can still tackle that spawn system today.
I hope I can upload the patch in the first half of the coming week (though that will also depend on the workload of my dayjob) and then send the next batch of alpha keys soon after that.

 

[JDR13]

Sorry if this has already been asked (I didn't read through the whole thread), but is everything hand-placed or is there a degree of procedural generation involved?

Looks great btw.

 

[Nyast]

Everything I've seen so far in this alpha is hand crafted.

 

[RatTower]

Sorry if this has already been asked (I didn't read through the whole thread), but is everything hand-placed or is there a degree of procedural generation involved?

Looks great btw.

Thanks! It's all hand-made (with the exception of some details like small rocks and bits of grass - those are procedurally placed by a script i wrote).

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

RatTower Is blocking just holding down RMB? Why not do timed blocking? I understand if you don't want to do super-tight timed blocking, because this game isn't for Counter-Strike reflex players, but there are plenty of games out there with generous timed blocking windows (e.g. Dishonored, Ass Creed Odyssey, KCD, etc). In 2020, constant block is just not a good approach to arpg combat, imho. Bethesda was the last one to do it with Skyrim in 2011, and almost every popular combat mod adds timed block, so ...

 

[HoboForEternity]

i watched snippets of the 1 hour video. looks alot better than i expected graphically.

it does alot of things right so far.

-weapon hitting feedback looks great. it isn't floaty like bethesda game. either hitting walls or enemies it feels like you are hitting solid matter
-great atmosphere
-dialogue system looks great. basically more refined version of morrowind by separating the initial questions and the "you mentioned" keywords are great.
-environment interaction are always good things.

basically what i watched exceeded expectations

 

[DJOGamer PT]

In 2020, constant block is just not a good approach to arpg combat, imho.

It is, if it's meant for shields.
Also if you put timed blocking but make the timing piss-easy like for those games, then you've just contradicted the mechanic's point.

 

[Curratum]

I won't be comparing the gameplay to UA as UA doesn't have gameplay, I'd just like to point out that a one-man studio produced something that looks infinitely better visually than what "industry veterans" P. Neurath and Tim Stellmach managed to clobber together. Even the alpha UI is a lot better than UA's release UI and menus.

 

[luj1]

RatTower What are your core goals and design pillars? Not sure how I feel about this Oblivion in Grimrock's clothing.

 

[Nyast]

RatTower Thinking about it, I think you could make the shortcuts system a bit more obvious - I played my entire first playthrough and a good part of this second one, without using it - despite knowing its existence. It kind of bite me back in that video above, I forgot which timestamp, when I got poisonned by a green mushroom. I knew one of the plants had an antidote but forgot which one, and by the time I opened the inventory and read the descriptions, I died.

I'd suggest a few simple changes to it:
- rename it in the inventory; atm its called "ready", which I think is a bit confusing ( not sure if others would agree ). Why not just call it "shortcuts" ?
- add a flag to item classes, like "createShortcutOnFirstPickup", which as the name says, automatically puts that item into the first free shortcut slot the first time you pick an item of this class. Ex.: you take the sword -> it puts it into a shurtcut. Same for the bow, for medecinal plants, for anti-poison plants or for mana mushrooms, lockpits, torches..
- as the shortcut slots bar at the screen bottom would no longer be empty, it'd constantly remind the player of its usage until he gets used to using it
- 4 slots isn't enough, 6 would be better but I think 8 would be ideal.

 

[RatTower]

RatTower Is blocking just holding down RMB? Why not do timed blocking? I understand if you don't want to do super-tight timed blocking, because this game isn't for Counter-Strike reflex players, but there are plenty of games out there with generous timed blocking windows (e.g. Dishonored, Ass Creed Odyssey, KCD, etc). In 2020, constant block is just not a good approach to arpg combat, imho.

Blocking consumes stamina. Getting hit with low stamina breaks your defense and makes you stagger.
Staggering leaves you open for an attack that will almost certainly land.
I'm not sure right now whether a broken defense still counts as a successful block (it probably shouldn't - i have to test that), but even then, if your enemy recovers from a blocked attack faster than you he'll probably get you.

So in other words: Even without timed blocking, there is no indefinite blocking, because you will earn yourself a stamina lock and stagger.
It all needs fine-tuning of course. There is a situation someone called the "black hole" earlier in the thread, where both the player and the enemy are caught in a low-stamina/stagger loop until one of them concedes (which the enemy currently of course never does - break out attacks might be interesting there).

RatTower What are your core goals and design pillars? Not sure how I feel about this Oblivion in Grimrock's clothing.

Player agency is one of the the core design principles so far. I'm not sure how that compares to Oblivion. I always have an easier time identifying what I do with what's been done in Ultima 5-7 + Underworld. Or Gothic even, which I see much closer to Ultima than Elder Scrolls. But it's still tough really articulating the comparison between those two worlds. Elder Scrolls has a more precise and repeatable gameplay loop. It's difficult to really identify the same sort of pattern in those other games. I believe one of the reasons is that the amount of additional components that make up the complete game adds a lot of variety to a base architecture that may be comparable to TES.

For example, it always bothered me that in Skyrim (to my knowledge) there is no way of "breaking" doors with a different build than a thief. Despite the fact that a warrior theoretically has some very legit possibilities of doing so. Ultima Underworld lets you do this, because it is not so concerned with having the player go down a very specific route.
Ultima 6 lets you experiment with interactive items, which - at first glance - seem like parts of the environment and unrelated to, for example, combat. Spells like telekinesis seem like they have little effect on the world, but let you shortcut through whole chunks of a game.

All this adds player agency, but also chaos. And if there is one thing a lot of game designers hate then it's chaos. Chaos confuses and/or frustrates players. Chaos may prevent a certain pre-planned "cinematic" pacing to play out. Chaos potentially builds a player experience that is so different from what was tested by the developer, that it even becomes hard to analyse that experience and react accordingly (with patches for example).

And that is were I radically deviate from modern design sentiments.

I believe you need to be confident about chaos, because what I think makes Ultima so interesting (and very different from Elder Scrolls) is that it really openly invites experimentation beyond the character sheet. And the rest of the core design really grows from that. If you design your game in a way where you can't really rely on your player going down a certain route, you tend to design quests, locations and encounters in a more modular way, so things don't conflict with each other or cause bugs.

So, to cut it short:
Morrowind had this whole "thread of prophecy" thing going on, because its core mechanics allowed you to mess with NPCs you shouldn't mess with.
The goal in Monomyth is to give people the same sort of agency, but without the limitation of a "thread of prophecy".

That became the goal after two or so years. Originally the goal was "make a King's Field clone" (and core principles of that - especially with regards to exploration - are still in it), but Monomyth's a growing beast. I hope I can scale it right and realize the vision explained above.

- add a flag to item classes, like "createShortcutOnFirstPickup", which as the name says, automatically puts that item into the first free shortcut slot the first time you pick an item of this class. Ex.: you take the sword -> it puts it into a shurtcut. Same for the bow, for medecinal plants, for anti-poison plants or for mana mushrooms, lockpits, torches..

Torn on the amount of quickslots/beltitems/shortcuts but that's a solid idea. That would basically be all consumables that do not yet have a stack in the inventory yet. Weapons however go into a different quickslot (that one definitely still needs some extra explanation).

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

RatTower Is blocking just holding down RMB? Why not do timed blocking? I understand if you don't want to do super-tight timed blocking, because this game isn't for Counter-Strike reflex players, but there are plenty of games out there with generous timed blocking windows (e.g. Dishonored, Ass Creed Odyssey, KCD, etc). In 2020, constant block is just not a good approach to arpg combat, imho.

Blocking consumes stamina. Getting hit with low stamina breaks your defense and makes you stagger.
Staggering leaves you open for an attack that will almost certainly land.
I'm not sure right now whether a broken defense still counts as a successful block (it probably shouldn't - i have to test that), but even then, if your enemy recovers from a blocked attack faster than you he'll probably get you.

So in other words: Even without timed blocking, there is no indefinite blocking, because you will earn yourself a stamina lock and stagger.
It all needs fine-tuning of course. There is a situation someone called the "black hole" earlier in the thread, where both the player and the enemy are caught in a low-stamina/stagger loop until one of them concedes (which the enemy currently of course never does - break out attacks might be interesting there).

Yeah, I understand, but again, in my experience, these kinds of systems tend to not work that well in aRPGs. What aRPGs have used a constant block system in the last 10 years or so? Skyrim is the most famous one, and it's widely panned for its terrible combat. You could constant block with a shield in ELEX, and it was sleep inducingly boring, so I switched to dodging and timed parries. Certain builds can constant block in Dark Souls, but again, these are the cheap, boring builds, the fun ones are with timed parrying or dodging. The good combat systems in aRPGs are all timed in a way, that is dependent on timely player reactions (Mount & Blade, parry/dodge system in Dark Souls, Sekiro, BotW, KCD).

You might very well have resource management aspects to it, like stamina management, etc, but action combat in aRPGs is a different animal from tactical combat. It's not enough to just be managing things in it, it has to have a certain visceral, urgent feel to be enjoyable, and timely, reactive aspects help a lot more with that than just statically managing stamina (although in a well implemented system, stamina management can be a great thing complimenting the other stuff).

Anyways, just my two cents, you seem to be doing a great job with the game overall, good luck, I loved UUW and Arx Fatalis, so I hope you kill it. I just always wondered when I see static combat like in Skyrim/Oblivion why devs would do it that way when as early as 2001, Gothic 1 showed how much more fun timely reactive combat is, and the only thing I could think of is them not wanting to lose sales because timed stuff requires great reflexes/is too hardcore, but I think it can be fairly lenient, as I mentioned above. Maybe even a slider for how tight the timing needs to be, to please everyone.

In 2020, constant block is just not a good approach to arpg combat, imho.

It is, if it's meant for shields.
Also if you put timed blocking but make the timing piss-easy like for those games, then you've just contradicted the mechanic's point.

Constant blocking is boring and unrealistic, whether for weapons or shields. Actual shield blocking in history was very reactive, you can't just hold the shield up and have the other guy hit into it, it's pretty easy to swing around it. And from a gameplay perspective, what's the point in a gameplay element that requires no significant player input?

As far as it being piss-easy, there's a balance there to be had, something between Odyssey, where it was too generous, and Dark Souls 2, where you have like 3 frames. As mentioned above, I would even love some sort of reflex slider, so everybody could select how tight it needs to be.

There might be legitimate pitfalls with timed blocking in other games, but these can be addressed with clever design, because fundamentally, it is an interesting mechanic, while constant blocking is not.

 

[V_K]

I just always wondered when I see static combat like in Skyrim/Oblivion why devs would do it that way when as early as 2001, Gothic 1 showed how much more fun timely reactive combat

Because real-time RPGs do not equal action-RPGs? And people who play the former do not necessarily enjoy action combat?

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

I would disagree. Action combat is by definition real-time, so it's a natural pairing. If you absolutely hate action combat, you might be better off playing iso games anyway, tactical combat works much better in those. The pseudo-tactical pseudo-action combat is generally the worst of both worlds.

 

[V_K]

I would disagree. Action combat is by definition real-time, so it's a natural pairing. If you absolutely hate action combat, you might be better off playing iso games anyway, tactical combat works much better in those.

I generally don't play RPGs for combat. I play them for exploration and emergent interactions, both of which are shit in iso RPGs but really good in DM/UUW lineage of games. Unfortunately real-time comes with the territory because otherwise simulation aspects wouldn't work. But while I can stomach the combat of DM, UUW, Arx or Morrowind, twitchy stuff like Dark Souls can die in fire for all I care.

The pseudo-tactical pseudo-action combat is generally the worst of both worlds.

If by that you mean RTwP, I absolutely agree.