Monday 19 March 2012

7DRL Review Roundup! The Adventurer's Guild

The Adventurer's Guild by Nolithius

Available here




This roguelike is written in flash and I have to say, it's one of my favourites of the 2012 7drl. At first I was worried that I wouldn't be able to save the game into my super secret special "rogue vault" and play it forever, disconnected from the net, but it turned out to be easy to use firefox to view the info of the page, view the media and save the .swf file to my hard drive, so panic over!

There are several innovative features in this game: Firstly you control a whole party of 4, not just one character, which has shades of old infinity engine games and new Spiderweb software games. Killing monsters nets you money, which you actually need to pay the four characters at the end of each day. A day is a certain number of turns, and if you don't have enough to pay people at the end of it, they leave, although they will come back next day if you make enough money.

The four characters are not all the same. Each one has a different hp and mp (or energy or something). The first character, Oslo is basically a tank. He has no special moves but is strong has lots of hp; Rayn has a javelin attack that kills monsters in a row; Kohn is a healer with aoe heal; Remi has a whirlwind attack which attacks in a circle around him. You can switch characters at will by pressing 1-4.

Since you need money and the lower level monsters give more money (I think), the key is to descend quickly rather than try to clear a level. If you try to clear up then you'll waste time and you won't have enough money and people will leave.

This is really a fantastic game. I love it. Unfortunately it does have some bugs. Sometimes people get stuck and end up separated from the party (they normally follow the character you're controlling automatically). This isn't a big deal though because they re-join-up when you descend to the next level. Sometimes the stars that are used for the aoe healing spell persist on the screen, but again this isn't much of a problem unless they block your way (I can't remember if you can walk through them).

The last bug I encountered though is serious. Basically, sometimes when you descend you will just see either a blank screen or one square, and not be able to see your characters. I think it only happened to me when I had one character left but I can't be sure. One time it happened I did manage to move out of whatever I must have been stuck on and continue normally. The last time it happened though, pictured below, there was nothing I could do to continue.

I'm not sure if there is an end to the dungeons going down and down but it's a marvellously fun and well-done game and with the bugs fixed I'm sure people will be playing and talking about this game for years to come.


2 comments:

  1. Hey graspee, thanks for the support and gracious review.

    I have updated the game with the bugs you mention fixed, except for the poor pathfinding, which is not so much a bug as a lack of A*/Djistra. ;)

    I'll post some technical details today of what was causing the bugs for the interested grognards, but in the meantime, the updated version is up at: http://www.nolithius.com/guild (be sure to update your local SWF :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for your thanks and for bug fixes! I shall hop on over and snag the new version for my secret mountain hideaway doomsday lock up rogue vault. I'll keep it between the baked beans and the kevlar helmets.

    ReplyDelete