Author Topic: Son of a Witch: Devlog and general discussion  (Read 218199 times)

Jubal

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Re: My Mom's a Witch: Castle Crashers meets Isaac
« Reply #150 on: January 25, 2017, 12:07:26 PM »
A few actual bug reports!

In runs where the bear is present (I think it's only when the bear is present), boxes and barrels sometimes break randomly and spontaneously regardless of whether the bear is near them or indeed whether you have the bear as a pet at all. Had that happen on a few occasions.

The executioner gets very upset and gets stuck in one place if you try to burn him (it may also be when he tries to do a specific attack after being burned, it's quite a hard one for me to test thoroughly). His legs disappear and he goes a bit glitchy.

I recently had a run where, after picking up the guard captain's sword on the battlements (as wizard), I got text saying "press d for quick attack" which turned up next to me every time I wielded the sword and wouldn't go away.
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Glaurung

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Re: My Mom's a Witch: Castle Crashers meets Isaac
« Reply #151 on: January 25, 2017, 12:25:52 PM »
The executioner gets very upset and gets stuck in one place if you try to burn him .... His legs disappear and he goes a bit glitchy.
I'm not familiar with the game, but in general this sounds like quite reasonable behaviour if you try to burn someone. I think I too would get very upset and go a bit glitchy; depending on the level of damage I might well get stuck in one place, especially if I had no legs left.

Jubal

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Re: My Mom's a Witch: Castle Crashers meets Isaac
« Reply #152 on: January 25, 2017, 12:59:14 PM »
Reasonable perhaps, but it's a bit out of character given that blowing him up, poisoning him, etc, don't invoke similar reactions. It makes him rather easy to finish off, as on account of the lack of legs one can just hit him repeatedly with any regular attack. And oddly enough using any sort of special/rage attack on him seems to make his legs reappear, which is not very medically reasonable by any standards!
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bigosaur

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Re: My Mom's a Witch: Castle Crashers meets Isaac
« Reply #153 on: January 25, 2017, 02:51:38 PM »
In runs where the bear is present (I think it's only when the bear is present), boxes and barrels sometimes break randomly and spontaneously regardless of whether the bear is near them or indeed whether you have the bear as a pet at all. Had that happen on a few occasions.

That's really strange. Could you activate the auto-recording in the Settings menu and confirm that on a replay when it happens the next time?

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The executioner gets very upset and gets stuck in one place if you try to burn him (it may also be when he tries to do a specific attack after being burned, it's quite a hard one for me to test thoroughly). His legs disappear and he goes a bit glitchy.

I have seen this one two days ago and I'm trying to hunt it down, but cannot reproduce it. It happened twice to me, but I didn't connect it with fire. He seems to get stuck in the "laser" animation and legs just start blinking. I just had a run where I burned him with arrows fired from the Brimstone bow, and he didn't glitch, so something really strange is happening there.

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I recently had a run where, after picking up the guard captain's sword on the battlements (as wizard), I got text saying "press d for quick attack" which turned up next to me every time I wielded the sword and wouldn't go away.

I added that notice because I noticed some players would only use the strong attack all the time. But, there's a bug that doesn't remove the message when you finally use the D attack. I fixed it yesterday, it will be in the next version.


Jubal

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Re: My Mom's a Witch: Castle Crashers meets Isaac
« Reply #154 on: January 25, 2017, 03:06:04 PM »
OK, I've turned on auto-record, I'll let you know if the exploding barrels thing happens again.
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bigosaur

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Re: My Mom's a Witch: Castle Crashers meets Isaac
« Reply #155 on: January 25, 2017, 03:08:58 PM »
Quote
The executioner gets very upset and gets stuck in one place if you try to burn him (it may also be when he tries to do a specific attack after being burned, it's quite a hard one for me to test thoroughly). His legs disappear and he goes a bit glitchy.

GOT IT! It was the fire afterall, thanks for reporting. It didn't happen to me because I never allowed him to shoot the laser after he was burned. The thing is that the burning animation uses the identifier "fire" in the game, but I completely forgot that, so when I added animations for the Executioner I named his laser-fire animation "fire" as well. Once you burn him, the laser fire animation would get mixed up with burning animation and the glitching would start.

Fix coming ASAP.

bigosaur

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Re: My Mom's a Witch: Castle Crashers meets Isaac
« Reply #156 on: January 25, 2017, 09:15:40 PM »
A new version is up with the bugfixes and the Troll Bridge. There's about 10% chance you might get it. Here's a video how I played through the game with the Glacier + Icicle:


The troll is at 1:30:

https://youtu.be/gU5bxCPfVmo?t=1m30s


Jubal

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Re: My Mom's a Witch: Castle Crashers meets Isaac
« Reply #157 on: January 27, 2017, 11:19:25 PM »
I like the troll bridge, more one-offs like that would be great :) And the new furniture in the third level is good too!

I saw someone got like 100,000 on a recent daily challenge, btw (Jan 26) - do you have any idea how? Also, it would be good to somewhere have a list of what actually gains how many points in the daily challenge, as I'm still not quite clear...
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bigosaur

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Re: My Mom's a Witch: Castle Crashers meets Isaac
« Reply #158 on: January 29, 2017, 09:20:58 PM »
do you have any idea how?

No idea. Either cheating or found some exploit. I plan to track some hidden variables in the submitted hiscores so I can track it down and see whether the player is tempering with the score (in game's RAM) or has found some bug/glitch to make points.

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Also, it would be good to somewhere have a list of what actually gains how many points in the daily challenge, as I'm still not quite clear...

I plan to add that. Until then, here are the things that count: seen rooms, completed levels, collected coins (magic chest counts too), potions used, bombs exploded, scrolls used, gold chests unlocked, pets acquired. This means that you can use some bad potions/scrolls to get a higher score.

If two players are playing, it counts only for actions that the first player does.

Jubal

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Re: My Mom's a Witch: Castle Crashers meets Isaac
« Reply #159 on: January 29, 2017, 09:23:43 PM »
OK, that was the list I had worked out as well, good :)
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bigosaur

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Re: My Mom's a Witch: Castle Crashers meets Isaac
« Reply #160 on: February 04, 2017, 06:37:28 PM »
A new batch of weapons is coming soon in the game. Here's the Rogue Sword's special effect that hides you from the enemies:



This update will bring 2 new axes and 4 new swords with special effects. There are some other changes: thrown weapon damage now scales with Melee skill and I changed some items to make more sense: eating a Mushroom removes Hunger, drinking a Beer removes Hunger instead of removing Poison.

I also added a hidden score counter to the posted hiscores, so we can catch if some players try to cheat using CheatEngine or other program that manipulates score in RAM.

P.S. The game is featured in IndiePrize 2017 in Berlin next week (7-9 February). If you're coming make sure you drop by and play a demo. There will be some new stuff in it as well.


Jubal

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Re: My Mom's a Witch: Castle Crashers meets Isaac
« Reply #161 on: February 08, 2017, 03:38:30 PM »
OK, a question - is there a good tactic for rooms with sky-wizards (esp if there are 2), several guards, and no goblins? That's one of my biggest current issues; especially if there are two of them, the speed boost becomes quite OP if there aren't any goblins around to fight back, unless I'm missing something.
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bigosaur

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Re: My Mom's a Witch: Castle Crashers meets Isaac
« Reply #162 on: February 12, 2017, 08:28:51 PM »
OK, a question - is there a good tactic for rooms with sky-wizards (esp if there are 2), several guards, and no goblins? That's one of my biggest current issues; especially if there are two of them, the speed boost becomes quite OP if there aren't any goblins around to fight back, unless I'm missing something.

I tend to save scrolls like Gamble, Barellize and Peace for those kind of rooms. I often dump some other weapons/items on previous levels just to be able to bring in such scrolls into the castle. Having a turtle pet and/or ice hammer (+icicle if possible) also helps a lot to kill the wizards quickly. If you're out of all of those, then bombs can help if you saved a couple - because the mages stop moving while they're casting spells. Of course, depending on the room layout and enemy positions it can be really hard to pull that off.

If there are a lot of traps in the room, you can trick the guards to get hurt that way. Also, if you have a lightning based weapon you can shoot+stun many of them at the same time, so saving mana for Supercharger or improving rage buildup for Thunderstriker is really important. Here's an example of a run I had recently where I cleared such rooms multiple times (1 mage only though) with Supercharger:

https://youtu.be/wIrMkQu1xEg?t=22m45s

If you only have basic weapons, it's really hard, so using Escape scroll or bombing one of the doors and getting out might be the best option. Not all enemies have to be defeated.
« Last Edit: February 12, 2017, 08:37:54 PM by bigosaur »

Jubal

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Re: My Mom's a Witch: Castle Crashers meets Isaac
« Reply #163 on: February 15, 2017, 12:02:32 PM »
OK, that's basically how my strategy already goes - it just feels a bit too common that I literally *have* to go through rooms like that and often don't have the scrolls/kit I need to do it successfully. I've started picking up and using the speed-boost magic thingy a bit more which is helping, but nonetheless; sometimes it's just so fast/so many enemies that I don't have time to cross a room, bomb a door, and escape; I've been caught already by that point!
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bigosaur

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Re: My Mom's a Witch: Castle Crashers meets Isaac
« Reply #164 on: February 19, 2017, 07:31:47 PM »
sometimes it's just so fast/so many enemies

Agreed. However, it's as-designed.  >:D

You do literally have to go through at least one of those rooms. The rooms are not completely random, there's a 10% probability of guards-only room, and the room before the boss room is always guards only (unless it's a shop). Since the game will probably have 5 levels on the first playthrough (you unlock levels 6 and 7 when you complete the 5th level for the first time and unlock the "hard mode") you're already deep in the game and the difficulty has to ramp up.

I don't have time to cross a room, bomb a door, and escape

Use Ice Hammer to buy some time, or Rogue Sword and just sneak through. ;)

I watched some video a couple of days ago and read some player comments on Enter the Gungeon vs The Binding of Isaac and this made me think about the game a little bit. I feel like the game should be hard, but you should be powerful. So, I think I will revert some stuff I nerfed recently. For example, I'm changing back the Ice Hammer to be rage based. Since Infinite Rage potion is removed, you can never have too much freezing  ;D I'll probably just shorten the default freeze time a little bit, but it should make it more fun to play.

I'm also considering to rework the rune system, have the Damage Rune (melee,archery,magic) and Range Rune (magic,ranged) combined and use the extra runes to power up some other aspects of the weapon (elemental damage, special effect duration, etc.). Not still sure how would that work, but I'd like to reduce number of useless items you might find.

Also, adding more potions with positive effects (currently it's around 55% good, 45% bad ratio) would make it less risky to drink potions and the players would be able to power up before they get into tough areas.

Still, I'm beating the game about 50% of the time with a mage, and around 30% of the time with Archer and a Knight which I feel is a good difficulty range I want to have. Currently I want the game to be more like Spelunky in that regard.