Game News Tomes of Mephistopheles - ARPG Alpha Sale

That has to be the worst trend to come out of MineCraft; Indies convincing themselves that their product will increase exponentially in value.

At least it has hopping skeletons.

I kinda like the way it looks, but I'm only going to pay for it when it's fully done, sorry.

(Tim Schafer's project is a different thing entirely. It's an established quality dev.)

The idiots has nothing more innovative than skellies? For fuck's sake, a chinese hopping zombie, or nature's wolves, tigers, elephants... any of them could do.

Or you can go frogman and set the environ underwater, and set your enemies as bigtitties mermaids, sharks, etc..

It's an alpha. And I'm guessing that skeletons are real easy to animate. Bigtitty sharks will be added later. Quit bitching.

It looks alright so far, really, although the hacky combat is a bit of a Daggerfall relic. I am most intrigued by the magic system. Judging from the text in the lower left corner of the screen, it looks like combining "fire" and "throw" magic runes/words makes you throw fireballs, an obvious nod to Arx Fatalis, the game with the best magic system ever.

Still not going to give him any money until it's waaay more developed, but am cautiously interested.

I'll give them credit for the fairly reasonable $10 price -- that said, God knows when this thing will actually be released in it's finished state. I noticed they're the same developers that made Steel Storm which was okay but honestly didn't hold my attention for more than thirty minutes. Decent amount of polish on it, though. I'm not a fan of playing alpha or betas but I'll definitely keep it on my radar so thanks for bringing it to my attention.

Honestly the combat mechanic is very shallow.

I get a Doom vibe from this game. I think Doom would still be more fun to replay, though.

Will it make us cry?

I like the concept... but why does our hero keep heavily bleeding from the hairline?

Especially as he seems to be a skeleton himself?


(I guess skeletons are the only completed model so far)

Looks interesting. It could have a lot of potential, but I'm not going to give devs my monies right now yet.

Looks promising, but I laughed at some of the features such as the "breakable walls" which really just spawn blocks that go flying everywhere and change the texture of the wall.

Well, the sound is really horrible and it looks a bit dull, but since it's still in alpha fase things might change.

I remember seeing another video of this game, and it really had breakable walls. As in, he carved a tunnel with bombs from one room to another.

Edit. Here it is:

GOD DAMN DEVS STOP TRYING TO SELL ME YOUR UNFINISHED GAMES

edit: also, PC is a skeleton with bags of blood attached to forehead?

Don't know if the creator is reading the Codex/this topic - if you are:

Keep up the good work, hopefully you'll see it through to the end.

If I may be so bold some hints regarding Youtube:

Features (regarding the wall breaking in particular): Even though the video is titled as Alpha you should only demonstrate working as intended features or add a big note on screen that states clearly the feature beeing shown is not fully implemented at this moment. Elsewise you get reactions as in this Thread and might even loose potential customers who think you are incompetent at what you are doing.

I'd also add a basic description and rundown of to be expected super awesome features in the Video description, you already did it on your website and copy, pasting and editing will only take a couple minutes of your time but might net you a sale or two. Talking about the website: A link to the website added in the video description would also be nice, I guarantee you some people are really lazy and can't even be arsed to utilize Google for finding your website after viewing the video, even if they might have enjoyed it.

Yeah, this looks promising, I'll likely buy it when I get the chance.

They've an initial goal to get to 3,000 sales in a month or so it seems to spur the fulltime development pace forward, so it is nice to see that kind of openness.

A feature like fully destructible environment always goes very heavy on the performance.
Each wall has to be a dynamic entity (as opposed to static geometry, which it usually is, making it far less performance heavy) in order to be able to change not only its looks but also its physics.
I really hope the dev has considered this and found a good solution, or else this game will start a lagfest on bigger levels. And I'm sure everybody wants bigger levels

I imagine the walls are pre-honey-combed with paths. The only destructible part is the geometry around their openings?

Enough money to live comfortably for a year would inspire me, too.

Hold on, let me open Torque, take a few screen shots, and put up a charming 90s-esque Flash site. (This migraine has turned me into Prosper, hasn't it . . . )

Calling Daggerfall's combat hacky when every single action RPG since has been way hackier and pretty much without any RP (ie. stat-driven) value to it outside how much damage you do... just blows my mind. If every game followed and improved on Daggerfall's "hacky" (yawn) example, we would be licing a RP renaissance right now.

The man calls Daggerfall's combat "hacky". Unfuckingbelievable.

Arx Fatalis is not the first game to do that. But anyway, as long it doesn't implement the same retarded gimmicky mouse-gesture bullshit...

It also looks more like a nod to Quake/Hexen 2 than anything else. Fast movement (thank god for once!) and pure hacky game. I only hope the enemies will also attack more rapidly and faster. I could enjoy a grinder game where everything is really fast paced compared to the modern snailing bullshit we've been getting.

And, I know that sword design from somewhere. Something very specific. Does anyone find it familiar?

No idea about their particular approach but the one you're describing is kind of ancient history, now. Well, not completely, of course but the point is, as long as you don't create long trees of dependencies (for stuff like collapsing structures) and expect real-life physics representation, you can have remarkable amounts of destruction of level geometry now. Things have become far easier in the last 5 or so years towards this.

Looks pretty impressive from a programming standpoint. I can't see much difference between that and any AAA ARPG, except for the art assets.

Fairly sure they are using the DarkPlaces engine as that has been their go-to thus far along with the schtick of making stuff using Blender + GIMP and other comparable tools. That said, I'd imagine some hefty tinkering has been done, and given their previous games are big on modding support, knowledgeable folks could probably start to piece together the technical hurdles they've go to clear. Not that is isn't insurmountable in general, as that's the whole schtick essentially for the upcoming Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox----whom KoT could probably do well to take some notes on in terms of building hype and such up for an early, comparable project.

As to 3,000 sales at $10 a pop being a year's good living---eh, not so much. Remember, they've got assorted expenses, transaction fees, are a company of like 2-3 people and I think they are based out of Texas here in the states. When all is said and done, it is a bit of cash but they'll need sales to steadily climb well past 3,000 in order to really get somewhere comfortable, let alone functional in a sense to improve their craft via hardware upgrades, better workstation, etc.

The solution is to make your game 2d turnbased.