PawleyScape Releases FastCrawl, A Dungeon Adventure in 30 Minutes

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PawleyScape Releases FastCrawl, A Dungeon Adventure in 30 Minutes


October 12th 2006, PawleyScape, www.pawleyscape.com, is proud to announce release of its new independent game FastCrawl. FastCrawl is a quick and highly replayable, fantasy role-playing game. You control a party of heroes exploring a dungeon on an epic quest. To succeed you must engage in exciting combat against many foes, find powerful items to help you on your quest, avoid fiendish traps, save another champion or two, specialize your characters abilities as they level, and carefully explore your surroundings... all in as little as thirty minutes.

Every time you play FastCrawl you will have a new game experience as you explore a different dungeon, lead a different party of heroes, face different monsters, and find different treasure. An intelligent game generation system will make sure that no two games are the same.

Play at the level of difficulty and duration of game that you wish; enjoy a leisurely thirty minute break in the game's pleasant environments, or face insurmountable odds in an hour of nail-biting dungeon crawling action. The game is entirely turn based, so you can easily play it in the background while doing something else.

Download the free FastCrawl Demo from www.pawleyscape.com and join the online forum to discuss your successes, failures, and make suggestions for future changes to the FastCrawl landscape.

Screenshots:
http://www.pawleyscape.com/fastcrawl/screenshots/small3.jpg
http://www.pawleyscape.com/fastcrawl/screenshots/small6.jpg
http://www.pawleyscape.com/fastcrawl/screenshots/small1.jpg

[GrahamGoring]

Oooh, this looks very interesting to me. I like the idea of bite-size dungeoneering. I hope it doesn't give away everything in the first 30 minutes, though.

[svero]

I like it a lot. I've been thinking of making something along these lines for some time now. I think it's a little tutorial heavy but yeah... nice. Sorta like SAIIS dungeon edition.

[stiill]

Sorta like SAIIS dungeon edition.

Exactly what I was thinking. Downloading now!

[StormcloudCreations]

Enjoyed the game (and bought it already)! Always love to see "bite-sized" randomized games like this one. Would like to see more "mini-events" where you make decisions rather than just encounters or traps though.

Nice work!

[DadTimesTwo]

Would like a full-screen option. Or did I miss it?

[Glen Pawley]

Hi guys. Thanks for the response. SAIIS was indeed something of an inspiration for this game, so your feel is correct :)

Would like a full-screen option. Or did I miss it?

We decided to stick with a windowed mode for simplicity - the game is meant to coexist peacefully with your applications and what you're doing at the same time. The turn-based gameplay let's you multitask as much as you want and play it in the background, so we kept it windowed but added multiple window size options.

[whisperstorm]

If I had one bit of feedback it would be that it is often hard to tell the difference between a highlighted character and one who is.... not highlighted. It's too subtle... And during battle it's hard to tell who's turn it is - related to the highlight issue. Other than that it's awesome!

[Rainer Deyke]

I downloaded the demo and played one game until I died by running out of supplies. Normally I like RPGs, but this one didn't do it for me.

Normally I don't play rpgs for the gameplay, but for the context. I enjoy the feeling of going through a story, exploring strange lands, saving dragons in distress, defeating evil princesses, making important decisions, and growing in power of a long period of time. This game has none of these. In most rpgs, the gameplay is essentially work that you have to do in order to get rewarded by the story. Only in very few rpgs does the gameplay really stand on its own. This game isn't one of those few.

Without the context, FastCrawl is basically a game about resource management. Combat is won through attrition - both sides pound on each other until one croaks. There are some tactical decisions, like "which piece of armor do I wear" or "which opponent do I attack first", but they all come down to min-maxing decision that are either trivial or irrelevant to the outcome of the game. There is no room for actual cleverness on the part of the player - it's all just a straightforward matter of optimizing probablities. And then you die, not because of a bad decision, but just because you got unlucky.

[Jack Norton]

Downloaded it, saw the loading screen but then a blank screen - not sure if I have .NET installed. But was a bad decision to use that, not many users have it installed (I play quite lot of games)

[Glen Pawley]

Downloaded it, saw the loading screen but then a blank screen - not sure if I have .NET installed. But was a bad decision to use that, not many users have it installed (I play quite lot of games)

The problem you describe has been fixed with a patch (http://www.pawleyscape.com/fastcrawl/download.html) and it is not an issue about having the .NET framework installed.

I realize that opting for .NET as our platform is somewhat contentious. We decided that the small amount of clients we may lose are made up by the lower development costs of the game (especially given that this is our debut game). However, from the feedback we've had so far, I've been surprised that having the .NET framework has been less of an issue than we expected.