General information:

category: adventure/arena
players: 1-4
map size: 96x128
map tileset: twilight



Description:

In this map, each player controls a hero. You must explore the dungeons, collect magical items, fight or flee from monsters, evade traps, and battle other players with the goal to obtain ten eight artifacts before your opponents do so.

The map includes lots of randomizations. Monsters and items are constantly spawning at random pace at random areas. You will also find that the locations of different obstacles vary each time you play the game. Since items are a crucial part of the game, and nothing can spawn directly near your hero, you are encouraged to be constantly on the move in order to achieve victory.

In combat, you can either use your hero's bare force or eight different spells castable with the items you find. However, your health and mana are both considerably limited, therefore, you are not supposed to fight every enemy, but run when it is necessary. Also, using traps to your advantage is one of the most effective ways to survive.

When you die, you become a ghost, with which you can explore, and revive after a short cooldown has elapsed. Although you have unlimited lives, death is still to be avoided, as it results in losing all of your items and one of your artifacts dropping one of your artifacts allowing other players to take it. Thus, killing others is recommended at every opportunity to prevent their victory.



Additional information:

This game is extremely challenging. At first it may even seem impossible, but after getting some experience and skill, it should get much better.

Despite being an arena, the game is possible to play alone. Nonetheless, player-encounters are the most interesting part of the game, and multiplayer is advised.



Screenshots:

Traps and boulders are randomly generated every game.



Traps are your friends. :]



Ghost meeting



Revival



Trapped between traps



Freeze



Levitation



Mana burn



Annihilation >:}




Features:

lots of randomizations
eight unique spells, each useful and has its own role
five different types of traps
monsters with abilities
custom music (made by me :])



Download latest version (0.9.1):

Dungeon Raiders



Any feedback is highly appreciated.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jul 21 2009, 12:22 am by Psionic_Storm.

..
Looks really cool
And I am already in love with your choice of terrain.

I'll play it tonight once I get back ...

Looks like a good map, I can't wait to try it!
A map like this generally has low Re playability, but it looks like you've fixed that with all your randomizing stuff. Looks pretty good and should have high replayablility.

I'll let you know how I like it when im done.

Edit: Why don't you just add an attachment of the map. That way you can see how many people did it, and it makes it not such a hassel to dl it.

Edit 2: Um...First of all, no color in the title of the game is a big turn off. Makes it less professional looking and people are more prone to leave right away. Also, I suggest you take out a lot of your custom music, I can't even get a game in because every one keeps leaving because it takes too long to dl!

Edit 3: Ok so I just finished playing a game. And to tell you the truth, it really didn't live up to the expectations that I had for it. I thought that while the game was kind of fun and was brilliantly made, it was just too dull, and not fun ENOUGH to make me stay for the whole game. Just some things your should fix in my oppinion to make it more fun, and so that the game doesn't last ALL DAY, because that's how long it seems like it would go on for.

-Make us stronger, even if only by 25 health points or by adding 5 attack/or just make it so we aren't dying every minute and loosing all of our spells etc. that we worked so hard to earn!
-Make more artifacts. I just played for a good 30 minutes, and I did not ONCE see an artifact...I don't even know what the hell they look like! Make many more spawn!
-Maybe, just maybe, make another really rare spell that allows you to kill boulders, because they get pretty annoying

Anyways, that's just my 2 cents. It's a good map with a good concept. But honestly, if you don't make some of these changes, (to make the game go faster and more fun) especially the more artifacts one, I won't be playing this game again, which is a shame, because it has such promise.

Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on Jul 7 2009, 3:01 am by m.0.n.3.y.

This map has a nice concept and is well made, but in my opinion there are way too many NPCs. The NPC-Limit of 24 doesn't really help either, in fact 2 NPCs can kill you.
There are nice new trap-ideas like the "Alarm-Trap" which sends a minimap-ping to every player on that trap when a player is near it, means: you can see where an enemy is.
Or that NPCs dies because they are frozen is a nice idea, too, also that almost every NPC got a spell makes this map more attractive.

So, here are my two improvement ideas:
-> less NPCs or make us stronger
-> Artifacts should be spawned more often.

I agree with devourer. There are too many NPCs that kill you all the time. Either weaken them, lessen the amount or make the spells weaker. Artifacts are hard to find too, it takes a long time for a person to get 10 artifacts considering you lose one when you die. My friends and I gave up after finding that we die every few minutes.

holy crap i love how the rooms fade into the fog of war like that, reminds me of d2

Thank you very much for your replies.
I have taken your comments into account and I am going to make some changes in the difficulty.

Although I do not approve of strengthening heroes or weakening monsters – the game is meant to be difficult, and in my opinion, either of these changes would ruin the atmosphere – I agree that more artifacts would make the game more fun.

Anyway, here is some advice to winning the map for people who did not play it yet or who are planning to play it when the new version is out (I know they are rather obvious, but not many people seem to be following them):

– Do not rush blindly. Your sight range is higher than those of the monsters, which gives you a great advantage in avoiding them.
– Use traps to save yourself from enemies, either by escaping or making them die. Frost and teleport traps are the most efficient for this purpose.
– When you meet a single monster (and have enough health), lure it into a trap or kill it yourself as soon as possible in order to prevent fighting multiple enemies.
– When you are low on health and mana, hide somewhere and regenerate.
– Before reviving, check how many items there are in the surrounding areas. If there are none, it is usually wiser to search for another location to revive at.
– When you are using the telepathy spell, you should always look around for useful items. This way, many artifacts can be taken before other players reach them.
– If you are surrounded by lots of monsters (which should not happen, unless you have done something wrong or you are really unlucky), use one of your offensive spells you had saved up for such cases (because you had saved some, right?).

Thanks once again for trying my map.

Lol, just played it with you. The NPCs were kinda hard, artifacts were really far and between but the music was nice. I did like the frost trap though. Some of the spells were cool too, the teleport spell moved me like two spaces once though, not very good for escaping. xD

I still have to play this.
But I hope you are not making the same mistake as Dungeon Escape, which you seem to be doing.

Judging from the previous map... I would agree with all previous comments that NPC number should decrease....
I understand your wish to maintain the atmosphere, but I'd have to say that this choice is most definately debilitating your map.

The Atmosphere will have already been created once you have a player set foot in your map. The sheer strength and numbers of NPC actually takes away this atmosphere, as most people would feel that it is often impossible to avoid NPC's. Rather, meeting NPC's rather seem like a never-ending chore in your map, and the places without NPCS (usually puzzle areas) stand out. Why? because people would actually stand a chance.

If you want to create the atmosphere where one would die if too many NPC's are chasing them, and that it is a huge mistake to run into them blindy... decrease the NPC number, but make them stronger.

Also, you can definately increase the number of NPC's LATER in the game. Or, you can have special rooms where NPC number is high and the players need to plan ahead. If they are met with high numbers of NPC everywhere, then the atmosphere has been changed...

I suggest you to play Tainted Factory or The House of the Haunted. (I can give you both.. u'd have to find me tho) to better understand how to provide and maintain the right atmosphere.

Thanks for your reply, I see your point and I agree with you.

I know/love/have beaten House of the Haunted, however, I have never heard about Tainted Factory, but it sounds interesting. If you could upload it or send it to me via pm, I would be really grateful.

EDIT: Actually, I was focusing on gameplay much rather than atmosphere for this map, I just meant that if the players were too strong compared to monsters, it would feel like Diablo, where you can single-handedly kill thousands of them. I instead tried to maintain something like the gameplay aspect of the games NetHack or Dungeon Crawl regarding monsters. Nonetheless, I am going to make the map easier, since this is a realtime multiplayer game after all, which is supposed to be fun rather than frustrating.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jul 10 2009, 10:11 pm by Psionic_Storm.

Tainted Factory has never been released ...
I'll give it to you if u find me

this is a totally outstanding map - you used a great concept, it looks very polished and i have very few issues with it.

find me (azala @ east) if you need a tester.

ACTUAL/POTENTIAL ISSUES:

1) it is "hard" in the sense of gameplay being tedious, waiting around for HP/mana regen - but i think you knew that already, and this is easily fixable by increasing the scroll drop rate, for example, or increasing HP max or mana regen rate. basically, you have several options to mitigate this, without re-engineering the entire map.

2) although i have never been that far, an obvious red flag in the gameplay is that the only win condition is 10 artifacts, yet the net artifact-gaining rate (picking them up vs. losing them) in the current build is very low with many players, so i suspect that the 10-artifact goal will take forever to reach in mulitplayer. Possible alternative goals:

- 3-5 artifacts
- obtain N player-kills (after a player-death, dead body drops a "soul", and you could pick up N souls to win).

the second one has the added benefit of encouraging PvP aggression. if you think about it, all things being equal, currently the expected value of a PvP encounter is at best minus 0.5 artifacts - if you win, you get nothing, if you lose, you lose 1 artifact and all your stuff. add to that the gang-up-on-the-leader effect and you have yourself a very boring, equilibrium-seeking game.

FINAL NOTE:
i can't help but notice, that on an abstract level, the gameplay could possibly be described as a "micro- and strategy-heavy PvP pac-man". very cool, indeed.

- az

Version 0.9.1 is now out.

Changes:
- corpse-system*
- more balanced spawn rates (between different player-numbers)
- victory goal decreased from ten to eight
- small fixes

*Upon death, the artifact that disappeared in the previous version is now dropped to the ground, allowing any player to take it.