Lost Ruins of Xaae [WIP].

[King Semos]

Hey guys, I thought it was time I recruit some testers for my WIP dungeon. Though I haven't worked on it in a good week, I was too busy with other stuff. Mostly golfing in the rain lol.

But anyhow, I'm back and I would like to continue my dungeon. It's a pretty slow pace, I've put a good 40 hours into this dungeon and its only about 30 minutes long so far.
Well, 30 minutes, one and a half levels complete, and about 3 levels worth of party experience. I put a lot of effort into making the dungeon layout feel right, trying to give each room
some character and make it feel unique. And each puzzle to be balanced between difficulty and fun. Lots of erasing and do-overs to tweak it.

I did have some lore with notes and a cinematic, but I had a change of heart and decided to remove it for the testing, just because I know I'm going to change it. Though I did leave
the cinematic image with the intro music just because I spent a lot of time picking a decent picture, as well as sounds to mix a good intro song, so don't skip it and hear the 25 seconds of it.
It takes place in the Jungles of Xaae, which is a lore friendly place in the Grimrock world as per the grimrock world map.

The dungeon itself is more towards the challenging side, I might make things a bit easier depending on feedback, well see. The feedback will set the tone for the difficulty of the initial levels.
Though I plan for further progressed levels to be quite difficult. I suggest running a simple mage in the group for combat balance reasons.

It's up on steam currently, and I'll get it up on the Grimrock nexus if anyone requests it.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... =103284346

I hope a lot of you give it a test, it won't take you too much time at all, and for it's short length it has a lot of work put into it.
Give me honest feedback, cheers.

Here is a Grimrock lore friendly map that I made. It's of the jungles that this dungeon is located in.

[King Semos]

I thought I would add some screenshots maybe to give some people more interest to test.




...............................



...............................



...............................



...............................

[Merethif]

I've started a jungle temple dungeon once (one of my numerous unfinished test dugeons ) and I've made a custom light for it, which looks like a sun filtered by jungle foliage (at least I wanted it looks like that). I've used script provided by Montis (viewtopic.php?p=32993#p32993) with below light colour:

Code: Select all

    cloneObject{
       name = "jungle_ceiling_light",
       baseObject = "temple_ceiling_lamp",
       particleSystem = false,
       lightColor = vec(.8,.9,.5),
    }

You can tweak it one way or the other but I think it looks quite natural and may suit your dungeon.

[King Semos]

I've started a jungle temple dungeon once (one of my numerous unfinished test dugeons ) and I've made a custom light for it, which looks like a sun filtered by jungle foliage (at least I wanted it looks like that). I've used script provided by Montis (viewtopic.php?p=32993#p32993) with

Code: Select all

    cloneObject{
       name = "jungle_ceiling_light",
       baseObject = "temple_ceiling_lamp",
       particleSystem = false,
       lightColor = vec(.8,.9,.5),
    }

You can tweak it one way or the other but I think it looks quite natural and may suit your dungeon.

Cool, I'll definitely check that out thanks.

One thing I was hoping to do, was to make it look like there was some rain coming through the cave-ins, because in my opening cinematic there is a big storm and the first level of the dungeon has only damp torches that don't last long and most of the light comes from the cave ins. And then mix some feint rain / thunder background noise to the ambient dungeon music for level 1 of the dungeon. To give that feel that there is still a storm going on outside.

[Merethif]

Rain coming through the cave-ins would be definitely awesome.

[King Semos]

Anyone given it a quick test run?

I'm really interested to hear what anyone thinks about it.

[King Semos]

Bump, still looking for feedback.

[Komag]

About two hours of gameplay, very fun and enjoyable, I found myself saying "I like this, it's fun!"
- should get rid of "first timeplaying grimrock?" text at start
- nice entryway
- nice timing puzzle in start room
- I really don't like the short life torches
- not sure how I fee about narrative text been written for the wall text, but maybe it's okay
- nice puzzle with the two daemons and what they eat
- moving walls room was pretty well done I think
- I didn't like the awkward non-consistent pit puzzle (also, stepping off and on the plate seems to reset the timer but not the pits, is that the intended behavior?)
I managed to make it eventually
- There is a goromorg statue stuck in the wall in the room under the pits, the sides are clashing with the walls
- The cave-ins are well done
- In the room with three herders stepping off plates, one of the plates doesn't respond to party
- The healer of the soul doorway pillar overlaps the hallway pillar, looks odd
- It would be nice if you added some secrets, such as when destroying the barrel/crate and opening the secret door and finding the small room with the knoffer
- the dagger-poison cloud altar fires poison on both activate and deactivate - on purpose?
- in that same room on the south side, near the group of 4 skeletons, you have a "locked door" with a pullchain (perhaps should be a regular door)
- Had fun with the crab pits - managed to leave two to kill myself, got my characters to level 4!

Overall I loved it - great atmosphere and design, well done!

[King Semos]

About two hours of gameplay, very fun and enjoyable, I found myself saying "I like this, it's fun!"
- should get rid of "first timeplaying grimrock?" text at start
- nice entryway
- nice timing puzzle in start room
- I really don't like the short life torches
- not sure how I fee about narrative text been written for the wall text, but maybe it's okay
- nice puzzle with the two daemons and what they eat
- moving walls room was pretty well done I think
- I didn't like the awkward non-consistent pit puzzle (also, stepping off and on the plate seems to reset the timer but not the pits, is that the intended behavior?)
I managed to make it eventually
- There is a goromorg statue stuck in the wall in the room under the pits, the sides are clashing with the walls
- The cave-ins are well done
- In the room with three herders stepping off plates, one of the plates doesn't respond to party
- The healer of the soul doorway pillar overlaps the hallway pillar, looks odd
- It would be nice if you added some secrets, such as when destroying the barrel/crate and opening the secret door and finding the small room with the knoffer
- the dagger-poison cloud altar fires poison on both activate and deactivate - on purpose?
- in that same room on the south side, near the group of 4 skeletons, you have a "locked door" with a pullchain (perhaps should be a regular door)
- Had fun with the crab pits - managed to leave two to kill myself, got my characters to level 4!

Overall I loved it - great atmosphere and design, well done!

Awesome, I'm really glad you tried it and enjoyed it.

The "first time playing" message will be sure to go. I'm glad you liked the very first timed puzzle, I was a bit worried it was going to be too unforgiving because failing it was death and that would have gotten people too annoyed.

The short life torches, yeah. I wasn't 100% sure if people would like this. Initially it had to do with two things, the atmosphere I found it to be more interesting without the torch light, and just the
cave-ins "natural" light instead. Also I made a lot of lit torches on torch holders mostly unattainable for this same reason. The other part, was that it kind of fit into the original story. With a massive storm outside, finding some dry torches was going to be one of the first motives.

The narrated wall text, same deal with fitting into the original story. If it really fits into my finalized story I might keep it. But you might be right, I might just simplify it.

The pit puzzle was a bit tricky for me to make. It does get inconsistent as time goes on I think I might have to add some decimals to the timer variations to equalize the change to a more unnoticeable amount. I also couldn't figure out a simple way for the plate to reset the pits. I did all the puzzles without any lua script, its all using just the dungeon editor logic. I'll see if I can learn how to fix that.

I completely forgot the "found secret" function. Thanks for pointing that out. You did find the one secret though.

The dagger alter with the poison clouds, yeah activation and deactivation both set it off. I wasn't sure how to script it so just when the dagger itself is removed it would trigger a spawner.

The locked door with the pull chain eventually won't have a pull chain. That main room is going to have 1 iron key in it, and the 3 locked doors. You will be able to choose which room to unlock at which time, and each room will lead you to a different area with a puzzle, and another iron key reward to go back and unlock the others. Once you have done all 3 doors you will have an excess iron key, that will be used later.

I'm glad you liked the crab pits, and nice job on killing 2.

As for the rest of the little fixes like the gormog and the floor plate in the 3x herder room, I'll fix those strait away.

Thanks so much for trying it, much appreciated.