We finally released Depths of Peril this week. Depths of Peril is a single player action role-playing game (rpg) with strong strategy elements. You play as a faction leader protecting the barbarian city, Jorvik, by destroying threatening monsters and completing quests. At the same time, you compete with rival factions to see who will rule the city. Barbarians choose their leaders by fighting to the death! As a faction leader, you must deal with rival factions through diplomacy, trade, and in time, war. Between battles and raids against other barbarian factions, you build the most powerful faction possible, to withstand your enemies. Building the power of a faction involves exploring a fantasy world, slaying dangerous monsters, solving quests for the city, avoiding deadly traps, and plundering loot to share within your faction. But in this world, actions actually have consequences, so take care. Annoying the powerful and aggressive Legion of Fear faction will cause them to declare war and destroy you. Ignored Orc uprisings in the Black Forest will cause even more trouble. Protect ally covenants that are being raided, because friends are hard to come by. Here's a link to one of the screenshots to show in general what the game looks like: screenshot. (Dan MacDonald Edit: this looked purdy enough it needed to e in the thread) There are a few more screenshots and much more information on our website, you can download the demo here, and you can buy the game here. Feedback is always welcome.
The shot is beautiful! It's 3D, but it doesn't look 3D, and that's what makes it really superb! I'm not an RPG fan, but perhaps I'll just try it because of the looks
Impressive screenshots! may I ask what tools you used to make it (torque, irrlicht, ogre, etc) ? Best of luck!
Yeah, it seems that they didn't use vertex lighting , which gives the appearence of drawing to the screenshots. very original.
Not played the demo yet - but it looks really nice and has that initial eye candy factor to draw you in.
I agree. Little bit better website design could make more visitors try your demo & even purchase. And edit Contact page little bit more. It's too... difficult to understand, to send my question to where. - Customer Service. - Press Contact. - Business Contact. This will be better.
Yeah, the website could probably be improved. But don't let that stop any of you from trying the demo or buying the game. Most of my energy has been focused on the game and not on things like the website and that shows.
Tried demo around 30 min - 1 hour. Could be fun and good hack & slash game with MMO style twist, but... - This game is NOT easy to read. There are many messages / sentences / quest informations in this game, and all of them are NOT easy to read, including MAP. You think player will not read them, of course. But if there are some messages / sentences / quest informations, they must be easy to read, whether players read them or not. Your game is fun. That's why I played around 30 min - 1 hour. But everything is hard to read. That's very bad thing for a good game. And the most annoying thing was 'Help' message, when player could meet at the start of the game. '?' mark glows all the time, and when I open it, they are very hard to read. So I erased all of them, after tried 5 '?' marks. Consider more readible design. That will make your game sold much better. And try [Fate] by Wildtangent. That's another [Diablo] style Hack & Slash game, and everything is easy to read, at least for me.
What specifically do you mean by hard to read? Bad wording, font not good enough, etc? Also what resolution were you running the game at?
Well. It's not easy to explain, because there were too many things regarding to hard-to-read situation. In fact, almost everything in the game (and outside the game) are hard-to-read. Anyway, I think you are not very sensitive to easy-to-read design. For example, your 'Contact Info' in homepage is very hard-to-read. I'd pick some other examples, to compare. Your Contact Info http://www.soldak.com/content/blogcategory/19/52/ Indygamer.blogspot.com Contact Info http://indygamer.blogspot.com/2005/06/staff.html Wadjeteye Games Contact Info http://wadjeteyegames.com/contact.html Popcap Press Room (w/ Contact Info) http://popcap.com/press/ Not sure this comparision could explain about 'hard-to-read' & 'easy-to-read' things, however hope it works. As I told you with earlier reply, your game is fun. But everything is hard-to-read, in game & even homepage. I'm kinda core-to-the-Indie-Game, so endured it to play around 30 minutes - 1 hour. But how about others? I think you'd stick to make them more easy-to-read design, really.
Attempt to run the demo crashed repeatedly. Try to launch - screen goes black, resolution switches down, then 'has encountered a problem' window pops up. Details of error report mentioned AppName: depthsofperildemo.exe AppVer: 0.0.0.0 ModName: nvopenal.dll ModVer: 5.10.2917.0 Offset: 000090ca
umm... my sound stuff says NVIDIA nForce on it? Where do I look for the specs you need? < occasionally clueless with hardware
Ok, that's what I thought. It seems that there have been driver issues with the nForce cards in the past with OpenAL. Can you update your sound drivers and try the demo again?
Okay, with updated drivers, it runs. Unfortunately it has the typical RPG problem - even for an RPG fan. Being suddenly confronted with a huge new confusing interface is exactly that - confusing. What am I doing? How do I do it? What's going on? Possibly because my graphics card is old, possibly because the resolution is so low, everything looks a bit fuzzy, and some of the text is hard to read. There are tons of '?' hints, but not an easy or unobtrusive way to go through them all looking for information. They seemed to be almost endless for a while - there'd be three showing down there, and I'd click on one and there would STILL be three showing... I felt a bit confused about what I was supposed to do and why. I stumbled around, found a lantern that said left click to use, but clicking on it didn't seem to do anything. There are lots of NPCs around but none of them seem compellingly interesting in any way, and talking seems to produce lines at random. I did feel a lot like I'd fallen into an MMORPG newbie zone without any other players around. Unfortunately I'm not a big fan of MMORPGs, which tend to feel bland and unrewarding to me. So my initial impression - Work on the first five minutes! Give me a hook, make me excited about playing! Get me DOING something and present the critical information about the game in an interesting way while I'm doing it.
Tried this out and I thought it was really engaging through the tutorial, but once it dumps me off on my own I felt completely lost regarding the greater strategy of what I should be doing. Really nice RPG basics with a really confusing meta-strategy. (it would be nice it I got a lot more strategy hints and tutorial after the first few basic missions, basically help me through my entire first game). The player should really never start out losing on the very first level.